Software-Defined Vehicles
Allow Upgrades with Ease

Imagine a car that you can customize and upgrade with the same ease as your cell phone. They’re already here — and there are more models on the horizon.  Today’s car buyers are focused on a new set of key features. Considerations like comfort, connectivity and safety are eclipsing horsepower and acceleration. Increased automation is changing the driving experience and advancements in infotainment systems have created new ways for passengers to interact with vehicles.

The seemingly endless capability to customize our electronic devices has seeped into automotive preferences. Already in China, nearly nine in 10 consumers believe connectivity is an important vehicle feature. Elsewhere, major automotive manufacturers are developing customizable apps that allow consumers to subscribe to features they may only use seasonally, like heated seats.

Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) unlock a variety of new features, applications, and capabilities that automakers can offer, some of which nobody has even dreamed of yet. They also offer manufacturers an opportunity to change how they think of automotive platforms.

Historically, vehicle customization has focused on physical parts.  You might buy a base model and add features like fog lights, adaptive cruise control or lane assist. Every potential combination of parts comes at a certain cost to design. Packages of common features reduce that complexity somewhat, but at a tradeoff for consumers. The fog lamps or lane assist may come as part of a premium package that includes a variety of features some people find less useful, ultimately requiring them to make a choice: Pay more for the vehicle, settle for one with fewer features than they might actually want, or look elsewhere for a package that better suits their needs.

Moving to an architecture that uses software to control a car’s features will allow automakers to offer a wider range of customized features. It’s true that the features need to be physically present for the software to enable them, but that actually simplifies certain elements of the design and manufacturing process by reducing the number of variants an automaker has to design and produce. They might produce low, medium, and high-end platforms with different potential feature sets.

Instead of having to sell a premium package on the lot, automakers could offer additional features on a pay-to-play basis later on. They could even offer a free trial period after purchasing the car to give drivers and passengers enough time to see the value of different features.

With a software-driven automotive platform, the complexity that used to reside in the car’s physical design gets transferred to the software that runs the car. In addition to distributing power and data throughout the vehicle, the wiring harness has to be capable of enabling and disabling features intelligently. This capability requires a higher grade of standardized parts in the electrical distribution system, which come at a higher cost. However, that extra cost yields additional benefits.

First, the push toward autonomous driving has begun to change the way carmakers think about electrical systems. To reduce the chances of failure in an autonomous system, carmakers need to provide a redundant power supply. Once you reach that level of investment, it makes sense to replace the fuse boxes that have traditionally managed circuitry in a car’s low-voltage electrical system with electronic components.

Using semiconductors to manage voltage and current offers benefits fuses can’t match. Direct-current circuits that carry up to 60 volts need fewer safeguards because they don’t pose a significant danger to a person who happens to touch a live connection. Because nobody wants a fuse to blow unless it really has to, fuses blow with some reluctancy when the current rises above a specified threshold. To accommodate this feature, automakers have historically standardized on 48-volt systems rather than the 60-volt system frequently used for mid-power circuits in electric vehicles.

Electric vehicle makers have been able to use higher-voltage systems because they use semiconductors to control voltage more precisely than fuses can. This gives designers more flexibility to set up these systems efficiently, since they have either more power on the same circuit or can use a smaller circuit-size requirement to deliver the same amount of power.

Increased efficiency across circuits is only half the battle, however. SDVs require a different assembly process to reduce the time and cost of manufacturing them. To manage that process more efficiently, technology companies like TE Connectivity are beginning to think of electrical assemblies in a more modular way. Instead of distributing power from a slice of the wiring harness to various parts of the car, we’re bundling parts into units and using shorter connections and jumper-type cable assemblies to connect them. This shift means we can use automated technologies to connect the modules to the rest of the vehicle, which helps the automakers simplify assembly.

Standardizing the parts of a car allows component makers to incorporate robotic assembly on the modules themselves, reducing manufacturing costs. With well-engineered and simplified connections among the modules, carmakers can use robot-based methods to assemble the vehicle itself.

The use of robotic assembly may allow us to simplify connections further, since the precision of robotic assembly eliminates the need for lever systems or secondary locks to ensure connectors are properly seated.

Software-defined vehicles will be a radical change for automakers, suppliers, and consumers — unlocking opportunities the industry doesn’t fully understand yet. Embracing this change will require a major shift in thinking and an ongoing commitment from automakers, component manufacturers, and software developers.

Once cars become software-defined, consumers will expect design updates more quickly and more frequently. Carmakers will need to become more agile.

As partners with a broad view of the marketplace, technology companies like TE have a major role to play in developing new ways of designing and manufacturing a reimagined generation of vehicles capable of unprecedented customization, even after they’ve left the showroom floor.