Automotive
an Ethernet network. As the amount of data vehicles deal with increases, it’s unlikely that all of this will be directly uploaded to cloud servers - instead, much of it will be processed inside the vehicle, before ‘edited highlights’ are uploaded to the cloud for processing. Tis has important implications for vehicle maintenance and also
poses cost issues. Car manufacturers face challenges when it comes to managing the ever-growing complexity of their systems, while trying to keep annual recurring costs down.
The hacker threat Te need for cyber-secure vehicles is also growing, particularly as we see self-driving vehicles enter the fray. In 2015, two security experts showed off a hack where they were able to ‘switch off’ a Jeep driving at 70mph down an American highway. It marked the dawn of the ‘hackable’ car – although the seeds of this were sown decades earlier when the first ‘connected’ components were unveiled in the 80s and were not built to be resilient to hackers. A 2021 report on global automotive security was damning, saying, “there have been 110 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) that year related to the automotive industry, 33 in 2020 alone compared to 24 in 2019.” Ultimately, the automotive industry faces increasing regulation in
the face of these threats. As governments begin to regulate soſtware within the automotive industry, those designing the products and soſtware will become more accountable.
Safety and open source For car manufacturers, there are also important issues related to functional safety ‒ unsurprising when you are dealing with a device which weighs a ton. Tis directly impacts soſtware development, with additional costs for any system which has an impact on driver or passenger safety. Car manufacturers need to learn from the aviation industry,
hardware and soſtware. Te industry also needs to reconsider how it develops hardware and how this relates to soſtware. Tese challenges will require a new way of thinking for car manufacturers, as they transition to a world where time cycles are critical. I believe that cross-industry collaboration is needed to accelerate development for autonomous vehicles.
Moving parts Complexity is building at an increasingly rapid pace in the car industry - and this shows no sign of slowing down. In a report on the industry, McKinsey notes that the average complexity of individual soſtware projects in the automotive sector has grown by 300% over the last decade. By 2025, the number of lines of code in the average luxury car will have doubled from today’s figure of 100 million lines of code, according to a prediction by Volkswagen ‒ which is already more than a military aircraſt like the F-35. In full- self-driving cars, the figure could potentially reach a billion lines of code, analysts believe. It’s not just the soſtware which is becoming more complex, the
hardware is too. Modern vehicles already have up to 150 Electronic Control Units (ECUs), oſten scattered through the vehicle, close to sensors. Increasingly, manufacturers are moving towards a model where these ECUs are combined and consolidated, connected by
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where systems related to safety are rigidly separated from those that are not, reducing costs due to compliance. It’s oſten difficult to reuse existing soſtware in cars today, as it can require porting to a different configuration. Costs can rise, not in a linear fashion, but exponentially. How much money will it cost to write, implement and test 100 million lines of code ‒ or a billion? Tis is the challenge manufacturers are facing. When it comes to managing these costs, open source will become ever more important, and not only will allow the reuse of existing soſtware, but will enable other manufacturers to contribute to said soſtware.
A truly software-defined car Te future is rushing towards us at speed – and in it, cars are increasingly soſtware-defined. In this future, open source offers OEMs a highly attractive solution to the considerable hurdles ahead, from safety issues to cybersecurity. Open source will unleash the power of the ambitions of the car industry - not just to compete with the tireless innovation of other industries, such as mobile, but to exceed it. For consumers, cars are already the most complex devices they own: and they could be the most innovative. Te flexibility and scalability of open source will allow car-makers to free their imagination and create the innovative, soſtware-driven car of the future.
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