Many new terms have entered the automotive lexicon over the past few years with the rise of electrification, some easier to define and understand than others.
Software-defined vehicles (SDVs) sits towards the jargon end of the scale, yet it’s a term that almost all major car manufacturers are using to describe their cars of the future and their capabilities.
“In the simplest terms, it's a vehicle that can be updated and refreshed over the course of the lifetime of the actual hardware of the car, which in turn allows the vehicle to grow and adapt to the identity of the driver,” explained Derek de Bono, vice president of SDVs at Valeo, the French tier-one supplier that’s transitioning more from hardware into software-defined vehicles, including major SDV projects with Renault and BMW.
“So what you buy when it rolls off the assembly plants really is the first level. Then year after year, as your life changes or as your budget changes, you can add different subscriptions, features or functions.”
De Bono explained that SDVs aren’t a new concept; that they were invented by Tesla before being adopted by many Chinese car companies; and now we’re about “12-24 months away from having the big wave of SDVs” in Europe.
There are major technical changes that enable SDVs to become a reality, and to understand this is to understand their appeal, significance and relevance.
“When we talk about an architecture [today], we call it a distributed architecture,” says de Bono. “You have a wiring harness and many different ECUs in the vehicle. When you add an option, you add an ECU and add a wiring harness, all connected to each other. In the future, we will go to a centralised architecture. We will have just a big central computer. We [will] add functions to the vehicle by adding software into the central computer.”
Gone, then, will be the days of scores of different ECUs and many kilometres of heavy wiring harnesses linking them. This will save cost and weight and make over-the-air updates far simpler to distribute in a safer and more secure way.
SDVs are a welcome response to the software problems that have plagued many recent cars and vehicle architectures, which in part has been caused by their complexity and their number of separate yet interlinked ECUs.
“Distributed architectures have more and more software and control by more and more separate computer units, so the interaction between them becomes trickier. When you're going through the testing validation process to launch the vehicle, it started getting too complex on the distributed architecture, which was pushing us a bit more towards a centralised one," said de Bono.
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