When we asked those who said their primary market was automotive which trends and technologies they thought would most impact the industry in the next five years, two clear themes emerged.
Interestingly, 61% said the evolving functional safety standards and requirements would have the greatest impact. C-suite and developers were largely agreed on this point.
Two-thirds of developers said the move toward the software defined vehicle would have the biggest impact on the industry – though only 44% of respondents in executive roles shared this view.
Dipti Vachani, Senior VP & General Manager, Automotive Line of Business
While executive and developer opinions seem generally aligned across the automotive technology industry, there’s a significant difference in how the management of design and verification challenges through digital twins is perceived to impact the automotive industry.
Fully self-driving cars may be a little way off but increased levels of assistance coupled with applications that have restricted operational design domains see us making real progress. To enable this new range of capabilities, vehicle electric architecture will undergo challenging evolutions as disparate ECUs are merged into domain controllers.
A digital twin is a “live” digital recreation of these domain controllers within an individual car on the road. This enables developers to test out ADAS, autonomous, and other future software workloads.
The importance of this to the industry really seems to be a question of differing mindsets. To a hardware or a software developer right now it’s a tool to help them get their job done and perhaps identify flaws and bugs.
To an executive, though, it’s the pathway to new revenue streams: real-time and continuous diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and so on.
Two-thirds of software developers recognize the profound impact that the software defined vehicle (SDV) will have on their work and the industry as a whole. What’s perhaps less evident at this stage is how important digital twins will be in enabling developers to deploy solutions faster.
