Our team was thrilled to attend CES this year and be among other vehicle tech leaders as part of the focus on future transportation showcased in the West Hall. CES 2023 hosted over 115,000 attendees and 3,200 exhibitors from 140 countries. The brand new West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center was overflowing with incredible vehicle technologies of (literally) all shapes and sizes. From private vehicle companies, ranging from the industry leaders like Stellantis, BMW, Volvo, and others to newer OEMs such as VinFast from Vietnam, Togg from Turkey, and more. Also exhibiting were Tier-1 suppliers including Hyundai-Mobis (our next-door neighbor at the show!), CARIAD, and others who were complemented by diverse suppliers of automotive silicon, systems, and sensors. Especially notable were the numerous LiDAR companies, as solid state LiDAR continues to evolve and cost-reduce. Not to be outdone, there were demonstrations of commercial vehicles such as future autonomous shuttle system concepts, agricultural vehicles including a precision agricultural weed sprayer from John Deere with arms over 100 feet wide, and construction vehicles including a monstrous dump truck from Caterpillar with tires taller than me (I’m still not quite sure how they got the dump truck inside the building, that must be a heck of a door!). There was almost no category or part of the supply chain that was not represented at the show.
Software-defined vehicles are more than just talk, they’re on the road
The concept of software-defined vehicles (or SDVs for short) was discussed throughout the show this year, with nearly every booth showing a vision for how software can impact the experience and capabilities of future vehicles in one way or another. The industry is in agreement that the potential impact of SDVs and the capabilities that they can enable are at the forefront of automotive innovation and there is no doubt that this is where the industry is headed.
What was less clear was how this will be achieved by many of the vendors. Many of the references to software were only concepts or talking points but fewer were demonstrations of real, operating software, let alone any of these solutions in production.
We set out to demonstrate how Sonatus is making SDVs real, today, and accelerating the path to delivering this software innovation into more and more vehicles. We gave a live demonstration of a production Genesis GV60 driving near our office in California, which contains Sonatus’ Vehicle Data Collector, and was streaming data live to our booth in Las Vegas. If that weren’t enough, attendees watched as we reconfigured the data collection of the car in seconds, in real-time, while it was in motion on the road, causing it to send fine grained diagnostic data. Fun fact: our demo drivers logged over 1000 km of driving during CES. This solution gives OEMs and their customers and downstream partners incredibly impactful, upgradable, and adaptable solutions. In fact, many attendees shared that it was the most advanced data collection platform that they had ever seen. We were thrilled to hear the many use cases our visitors shared for how they envisioned using this technology for their immediate benefit.
We also showed upcoming technology, including our Vehicle Automation Manager (VAM) which was dynamically configuring a vehicle in the booth. VAM demonstrated how OEMs can take the capabilities of today and automate them for rapid prototyping, creating new features at any point in the vehicle’s life, carrying out automated vehicle testing and more- all without complex software development or costly OTA updates. We also showed early previews of our Vehicle Security Platform and the critical infrastructure of our Zonal Architecture Solution, which will help enable automakers to accelerate their shift to this cost-saving future vehicle design.
Expanding ecosystems, innovation and growth in 2023
Our network continues to expand and at CES this year, we were pleased to meet with a wide range of complementary industry leaders in both the hardware and software ecosystems. In the hardware ecosystem, we showed how we are able to deploy our software solutions across a wide range of silicon platforms, operating systems, and a range of hardware platforms. We jointly exhibited at CES with the global leader in cloud-optimized solutions for data infrastructure, Marvell, we also demonstrated a zonal architecture solution with leading semiconductor manufacturer NXP, and showed our recently announced reference design collaboration with Tier-1 provider, HL Klemove. Read more about how we are working with partners to enable next generation E/E architecture for software-defined vehicle applications.
On the software side, we showed how our solutions work across a wide range of automotive and cloud platforms. We showed how we offer edge and cloud-agnostic capabilities for both public and private clouds, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, depending on the needs and interests of our customers. In our conversations with attendees across these industries, there was great enthusiasm for the work we are doing to make software-defined vehicles practical and deployable.
Many people at CES were excited to learn of our $75 million dollar fundraising round led by the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, Foxconn. Combined with our earlier Series A round, we have now raised over $110M USD from venture capital, strategic partners and customers. These investments will be the key to further deploying our platform to enable growth and innovation in the coming year.
We’ve talked before about Sonatus’ mission to accelerate vehicle software innovation: these four words both describe what we are striving to achieve and who we are. We aim to accelerate the deployment of software-defined vehicles and augment and support the efforts of OEMs and tier-1s to achieve their mission of delivering compelling services to their customers efficiently.
It was so exciting to see so many of you at CES and we look forward to an exciting year ahead. If you met with us at the show, we look forward to continuing the conversation about how we can work together in 2023.
For those of you that weren’t able to meet with us – get in touch! We would love to share the highlights of our showcase in Las Vegas and some of the technologies we have in store for the road ahead. Here are a few examples of snippets from the show that we’d love to share with you, please reach out!
By the way, don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to hear about our latest updates!
John
Dr. John Heinlein
Chief Marketing Officer
Sonatus
contact@sonatus.com