Today Sonatus is launching a comprehensive redesign of how we explain our products and our company and it’s my honor to explain it to you. Sonatus has been around since 2019 and our products are in volume production today, scaling…
As a technology company in the automotive industry, our garage at the back of our building is where the magic happens. It’s where we test our product, collaborate with partners, and see our innovations come to life.
Culture should always be a top priority for any company of any size, and it’s always the hardest thing to get right. We’ve been very fortunate to have started with a great culture at the very beginning of our company’s life and to have kept it over the last 4 years. The most important ingredient is the great people we have here in our Sonatus family. But, as any company continues to grow, it becomes harder and harder to maintain.
All of us have worked at companies with many dysfunctions so the contrast is compelling when you have the right recipe that enables success. We have a good thing going, and we want to keep it that way. So we’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we do that, and the most obvious place to start is looking at how we got here. It came down to four critical elements. These are not invented ideas, nor things we aspire to be, but rather these reflect what we already are doing every day that is helping us succeed:
2022 has brought incredible progress for Sonatus. We’re accelerating vehicle software innovation and seeing the results of that hard work pay off. In this special year-end post I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on 2022 and share…
When I was in high school – a great many years ago! – nearly every morning our diminutive, stern, but also affable principal would tell us about something important that we needed to know and would always finish with his signature phrase “…a word to the wise is sufficient.” It took me some years to fully appreciate his wisdom: his point was that if we listened to what he said, we would only need to be informed one time for us to heed his wise counsel and that the right choice of words have the power to convey their message succinctly.
The collaborative union between the automotive and tech industries is booming. Our digital world is not only rapidly changing how we do business and interact with partners and customers, but it is also re-defining what an automobile needs to be. Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) present an opportunity for these two industries to come together and collaborate for the future, but despite prevailing knowledge of connected mobility, the core definition of the SDV remains undefined. Software-defined technologies rose out of the data center space, and the Sonatus teams’ long term and diverse experience, having built a lot of this technology, helps to inform our holistic perspective on the SDV.
Software-defined vehicles are defined by having a dynamic infrastructure that allows automakers to embrace data-driven innovation by enabling them to monitor, analyze, control, and automate them in real-time. This is key to realizing the promises of SDVs, from reduced product recalls to enabling new business models, to features and functionality that evolve over a vehicle’s lifetime. We have a powerful narrative to add to the industry’s story here at Sonatus, and it’s time for us to share.
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Auto Tech Week 2021 brought together industry leaders and pioneers in the automotive tech space to discuss the transformation and disruption shaping the industry today. Luca De Ambroggi, Senior Principal Analyst of the Automotive Electronics Ecosystem with Wards Intelligence, sat down with Sonatus CEO, Jeff Chou, in the first Software-Defined Vehicle track at Auto Tech Week to delve deeper into the importance of unlocking the dynamic potential of software-defined vehicles.
The two had an insightful conversation, discussing everything from the foundation of a software-defined vehicle, to the battles of OTA updates, to codependencies between hardware and software, and the shifts in community alliances as the mobility industry pivots to a new era of technological innovation. In case you were not able to stream or attend the panel in person, here are the highlights from Jeff and Luca during their session on “Architecting Software-Defined Vehicles to Unlock Their Full Dynamic Potential.”
STEPPING BACK: THE SOFTWARE-DEFINED VEHICLE AND ITS ORIGIN
“What is a software-defined vehicle?” – Luca
“SDVs are more than just OTA software updates or products running hundreds of millions of lines of code.” – Jeff
With software-defined vehicles quickly becoming the buzz of the automotive industry, individuals are hiring more resources to develop software-integrated products powered by hundreds of millions of lines of code. Some believe that the software will define the hardware architecture of the vehicle, while others base their idea of software-defined in OTA updates. All of these definitions are valid to some extent, but we believe we can be more precise and ambitious with the core definition of software-defined vehicles.
The term software-defined rose out of the data center in the early 2000s. It is a different product in a different industry, but the forces that drove this innovation are the same in automotive.
“I need to go faster, and it needs to be done cheaper.” – Jeff
These forces are in both the data center and automotive, and they are growing in necessity. But now, companies are realizing that data should not simply get faster, it needs to be in real-time. It’s crucial for businesses to invest in real-time data analytics and updates in order to remove human error and lagging reactivity. By doing so , they can help to combat one of the biggest relevant challenges as the world transitions to a digital framework.
TRANSFORMING DATA ANALYTICS TO REAL-TIME INNOVATION
In order to maximize real-time analytics, we must take into consideration the four key stages of successful in-vehicle software. Firstly, the device has to be visible, meaning there must be seamless methods to collect data from its sources. After collecting the data, companies must be able to critically analyze key takeaways, allowing them to learn from what they are monitoring, and what the driver and vehicle experiences. Without this insight, it’s difficult to derive areas for improvement, and the model becomes outdated and potentially dangerous to passengers inside and outside of the vehicle. Next, businesses must take action; Real-time analytics empower automakers and tech innovators to make instantaneous decisions such as adding a new feature to the vehicle to fix a bug or enhance the driving experience. And lastly, businesses come full circle to automating these responses to help improve the software and drive the feedback loop of successful in-vehicle software integrations.
This has nothing to do with autonomous driving, but rather automated data collection systems, which help reduce the time it takes to make adjustments and remove lagging human intervention. For example, your home can be automated, but it is not autonomous. A software-defined infrastructure in the cloud is automated, but not autonomous. Autonomous vehicles just focus on one element, driving. Software-defined vehicles interact with automation in areas like recall prevention, security analysis and data protection, as well as new features with a push of a button without needing to introduce new software via OTA updates.
OTA is a small piece of the puzzle, one of the four components highlighted above. It does not have the capability to monitor, collect, or analyze data. Additionally, there is no automation since human intervention is required to push these software updates over-the-air. It is a great first step, but it is like rebooting your laptop. This has been here for the last 20 years, it is not a software-defined laptop. Our perspective is that a software-defined vehicle is something you can monitor, analyze, control, and automate in real-time without human intervention.
FROM HARDWARE-DEFINED TO SOFTWARE-DEFINED:
“How do you see the need for an infrastructure for storage, data, and software? And do you think the software-defined vehicle will have a dependency on hardware?” – Luca
“Software and hardware architectures should be decoupled.” – Jeff
It all starts with infrastructure; infrastructure is the foundation of your house, and In the data center world, “the network is the computer.” This means everything is based on communication, protocols, services, how functions talk to one another and how data is moved from one place to another. Once you have this foundation, it is everywhere, and you can build the services on top of this flexible vehicle software architecture. OEMs need to put effective infrastructure in place in order to activate the effectiveness of highly concentrated real-time analytics.
Everyone is looking at next generation hardware architectures. Hardware specialists take a strategic approach and divide the vehicle into zones – but a software-defined vehicle cannot be broken down to wires, but rather actuators. The software infrastructure that sits on top of these hardware systems should be orthogonal. There is a physical plane that represents zones, ECUs, and functional controls. Then there is a control plane, which is synonymous to a government or laws of the road. The roadmap for hardware innovation is long with lots of opportunities, and so is software, and these entities should be decoupled to best maximize their individual advancements.
TAKE A PAGE FROM HISTORY: DISRUPTION AND FRICTION
“Is there a common vision and API in this industry? Or is there friction?” – Luca
“Whenever you have industry disruption, there will be friction because every partner and OEM wants to build it themselves.” – Jeff
As the technology and its industry matures, and you have solutions proven to work, then things will bleed into standards and open service-oriented architecture over time. Standards need more movement, and time to develop to a point where they flourish. At the end of the day, software will be standardized in the industry and will level off to standardization, as we have seen in prior moments in the industry.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
There are many alliances and companies forming factions across the industry looking to define new standards and solutions. These will come together because of economics and time to market, and to be able to leverage best practices and holistic learning. This process will take many years, but it will prove to be beneficial for technological advancements and the industry as a whole because once you start settling on a few standards, then you can leverage new innovations instead of reinventing the wheel.
Sonatus continues to go from strength to strength. Fresh off the heels of our Hyundai Motor Group partnership and $35 million Series A funding round, I’m pleased to report that Sonatus has recently earned several important industry accolades.