How software is redesigning your next car

Being at the cutting edge, F1 is hugely reliant on software, as explained by Red Bull’s Daniel Watkins: “Software is absolutely central to everything we at Red Bull do as an F1 team. We use it in the design of the car, we use it to predict what will happen in a race, and we use it to help us decide when to make pitstops – and we do this all in real time.”

The team does this in partnership with Siemens, which provides the software that keeps it competitive. Watkins added: “We rely on software tools provided by Siemens to help us gain a competitive edge. More and more we see that our car is as much a rolling software platform as it is a mechanical machine.”

For Siemens’ Senapati, the transition of the automotive world has been a long time coming, although it is rapidly gathering pace. He said: “The first electronic control unit appeared in cars in the 1970s, but now 50 years on we’re in a world where you define and design the software, then build the car around it.

“At Siemens we touch the end-to-end journey of the car, from concept, through the design process, getting it through building and testing in a digital environment. Through this involvement, we cut development times by up to 30%.”

Virtual and reality

This is something that’s extremely important to Red Bull, which relies on software to help it decide whether or not to make new parts. Watkins explained: “We do a huge amount of virtual simulation before we commit to making something physical. The correlation of those digital tools is really important. In F1, whoever’s doing that best, whoever’s got the best tools, the best software simulation processes, will be at the forefront of the racing on any given weekend.

“It’s a symbiotic relationship between car, driver and software tools.”

This sort of symbiotic interaction between the digital and the human is vitally important to Volvo and its road cars. As Arvidsson said: “It’s critical that they work together. For example, we’ve been gathering crash data since the 1950s, but in addition to that it’s important that you know how your product is used. That information needs to go to the people providing the code and those developing the features, to allow them to bring innovation to their daily work.

“Being a coder for a big automotive brand is really fun, because you end up driving the product you’re actually coding for. It’s fun to deliver a safe and sustainable vehicle.”

Volvo is also using software to develop the daily experience for owners of its cars. “As well as virtualising different parts of the vehicle, we can also virtualise the user experience… including how the car drives on the road.”

Faster, faster development

The need for ever-shorter development times is something that is exceptionally important in the industry, and it will only become more so in the future as companies bid to keep up with the searing development pace set by Chinese car makers. And that’s where the expertise of Siemens is going to be crucial. 

Uday Senapati told the webinar: “Chinese companies have really embraced their technology and really embraced the definition of software-defined vehicles. For them it’s software first, followed by the vehicle, then the customer experience.

“But they start with the question: ‘why are we doing this?’ Customer demands are changing rapidly, as is the world geo-political situation, and the economic situation, so the winner will be a company that can act and react extremely quickly.

“At Siemens, we’ve always worked on creating an end-to-end solution. From gathering raw materials, bundling them into module systems, and then the final product. After that, it’s testing that product; physical testing is not just expensive, it’s also time consuming. We’ve worked for decades to simulate such things in our labs, so we’re accelerating our testing and our learning.”

And now AI is speeding things up further. Senapati added: “We’ve embedded AI in almost all of our toolsets, so it’s not just a human element of learning from the software, it’s the software learning itself as well, and giving better answers every day.”

To put that in context, Senapati said that software advances have reduced product development cycles by over 30%. “Some of our customers are doing an all-new car, including the platform, in 36 months, while a new variant arrives in 12-18 months,” he added.

And while he thinks that software can replace the vast majority of development processes, he also reckons elements where human perception shapes a product cannot be replaced by an entirely virtual process, mainly because it’s these areas that car makers use to define their brand. That said, Siemens is investing in AI to focus on these areas.

Save time and money

Streamlined development saves money, too. As Red Bull’s Watkins said: “We rely on simulation testing, and software underpins our ability to work within the F1 cost cap. Our virtual tools allow us to do more for less.”

Software is vital not only in how we develop cars, but also how the finished vehicles interact with the infrastructure around them.

As Senapati said: “Hardware can’t keep up, so the solution is software, because you can keep updating it to keep up with what’s changing in the infrastructure.”

Volvo’s Arvidsson backed this up, commenting: “We will shortly update all our interface experiences – that will be a massive upgrade. On the EX90, we can upgrade the suspension, deploy new audio features, add autonomous driving features. We have an extensive roadmap of fun features ahead.”

Future proof

However, the sheer pace of change is hard to keep up with, making it hard to anticipate what lies ahead. As Arvidsson said: “It’s hard to say what a Volvo will be like in 10 years because everything is changing so quickly. I believe our cars will be a lot safer than today, and we hope to have delivered on our zero-collisions promise. We also want to deliver an excellent consumer experience. For example, I already use Google Assistant a lot to switch on lights as I near home etc. Enhancing this side of things will definitely happen.

“We are also implementing Gemini in cars, which will improve how people interact with it using voice control. It’s also important for us to get consumer input into this.”

What has become clear throughout our discussion is that software is one of the primary forces driving change in the automotive arena, and while it’s invisible, its effects are abundantly clear; it affects everything, from voice control in a Volvo SUV to whether or not to change the wing angle on an F1 car. If we can be sure of one thing, it’s this – change will only be bigger and faster as software and AI develop at an exponential rate. And companies such as Siemens will be at the vanguard of that transformation.

To hear the whole conversation, watch the recorded webinar on Autocar Business.​