» From left: ME’s Solomon Daniels, Audi’s Anupam Malhotra and MERA’s Chris Cook.
map data is still on board, routing data is still on board, but it’s not a big leap to imagine that that could be off board. Pretty soon you could have traffic, street map information, routing algorithms, satellite imagery, photorealistic imagery, everything that you actually need to have a good navigation system come from the cloud with the added advantage that the cloud can offer other things: the traffic guys, the road construction guys… all of that stuff can be combined and give you a personalized level of service, and all you have is a display in the vehicle.
ME: So when you’re sitting down to
develop the 2019 vehicle, five years from now, knowing how the technology is advancing, how do you future-proof that vehicle when you’re designing it now? Malhotra: We’ve had the MOST (Me- dia Oriented Systems Transport) bus since it was invented and we’ve continuously
upgraded it, and there’s still continual evolution there. There probably will be a point at which we start looking at a different topology in the car, but for now the infotainment architecture and the separate bus architecture makes a lot of sense from a systems convergence standpoint. At some point we want to plug into the vehicle data bus as well to be able to exchange informa- tion with the vehicle.
ME: In terms of plugging in, that’s something the aftermar-
ket has been looking to do for years. And that was what was helpful with MOST. Aftermarket companies had to follow the same specification that the OE did. What always got hazy with MOST was that seventh layer where automakers customized that last piece of it, and the aftermarket had no idea of how to penetrate it. And that’s the piece where you look at connectivity in the network, for Audi or anybody at MOST, that needs a rela- tionship between the industries. Do you see carmakers continu- ing to restrict access to the aftermarket? Malhotra: I think we’re not necessarily saying we need to
be out there doing this ourselves. I think, at the end of the day, what the automaker really wants to manage themselves is the user interface, which we control. We want to make sure that how things come up and are experienced by the customer and when they are experienced is under OEM control. The rest of it can be pulled together in a smart way. But we have to develop that standard that gives us the comfort that the systems in the car will be maintained and function the way we want them to function. It’s got to have that level of security built into it and that level of performance built into it that allows enough inno- vation at either end—this end and that end—to plug into that experience.
ME: How can we continue to work toward a standard that
everyone will adopt? Malhotra: There’s two ways we’ve talked about how things happen. A bunch of people get together, create a standard and the innovation happens. Or, a couple of guys get together, build something that is really, really good and improve it to the point to the most performance they can expect out of it. Then, at that point, it eventually opens up and becomes the standard architecture that everybody else follows, and then there’s more innovation. In the connectivity space, I think that second model has to be the driver, because we tried the first model and it hasn’t worked.
ME: How do you see companies integrating into the OEM
experience to meet consumers’ needs for personalization? Malhotra: I would say the aftermarket is moving into soft- ware, not hardware. I think the OEMs can do a pretty good job with flexible hardware into the vehicle, giving you a platform to innovate on. With MOST, you can deliver software modules that could change characteristics in the vehicle, for instance on the fly. If you want it to have certain driving characteristics at certain times, you could do that. You can do it with hard-coded modules in the vehicle today. Perhaps there’s an option there where you can actually open up that space. There’s a whole lot of innovation that can happen in the cloud, and perhaps there’s a marketplace in the cloud where you have different innovators that plug into the marketplace and different OEMs that extract from it. And I think that’s a pretty powerful concept but it’s not hardware, it’s in the software.
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