As such, there is an ever-increasing need to leverage lessons from consumer electronics, along with adjacent industries, including battery management, networking, data storage, semiconductors and software.
Perhaps the biggest accelerant in automotive’s transformation comes from software that empowers greater customization, improved preventive maintenance and faster deployment of new features through over-the-air updates.
Taking another page from the consumer electronics playbook, automotive titans and EV newcomers must understand how software will define and deliver driving experiences.
That’s why visionary automakers are reorganizing their corporate structures and hiring scores of developers to compete as well as collaborate with the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft. Every major automotive company has presence in Silicon Valley and with good reason: Software provides the speed and agility to achieve desired levels of customization, along with fulfilling the promise of assisted and autonomous driving.
Still, it takes more than Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial spirit and software to address tough obstacles. That’s where the no-nonsense pragmatism exhibited by Detroit auto leaders comes into play. Let’s face it: Software can glitch and fail. If your cellphone reboots or drops calls during over-the-air updates, it’s no big deal. But an unscheduled reboot can have catastrophic consequences in a car, and automakers understand this from their unwavering position on safety without compromise.
A critical lesson the automotive industry can impart on its consumer electronics counterparts is that quality and safety go hand in hand, and therefore must be addressed together. That doesn’t mean there isn’t significant room to improve the time and cost of quality testing. It’s good news that more automotive companies are exploring accelerated life testing, which is used throughout the electronics industry. This testing and analysis speeds up time to determine the likelihood of failures by subjecting electronics to stress, strain and other conditions that can diminish durability and robustness.
The emergence of tools, such as digital twins, also reduces testing burdens.
Digital twins — virtual representations of people, places and things — enable companies to discover, develop and deploy products in the virtual world before venturing into the physical one. Used in aerospace, consumer electronics, health care and semiconductor manufacturing, digital twins are being deployed by automotive to prequalify next-gen vehicle architectures while simulating production and assembly line configurations to expedite manufacturing.
