The Software Defined Car: The Death of Freedom

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

John discusses his experiences at two recent presentations on the future of automobility. The first presentation by McKinsey focused on the concept of a 'software-defined vehicle' (SDV) - likening modern vehicles to connected devices similar to smartphones, and outlining six key areas for achieving success in this domain. These areas included hardware simplification, increased collaboration among manufacturers, leveraging cloud infrastructure, and shifting the focus from traditional engineering to software-driven engineering. The second presentation by a company called Aicas emphasized AI's role in achieving interoperability and managing data within the intelligent vehicle edge, highlighting the importance of selectively recording useful data to avoid latency issues. Both presentations indicate an automotive industry pivoting towards making money from data rather than traditional car components and underscore the industry-wide challenge of securing and managing this data.

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Down the road waits misery ... Why cannot death just set me free?

• Amon Amarth - Across the Rainbow Bridge
• A McKinsey presentation on the Software Defined Car
• Dave Freiburger on Route 66 
• Amon Amarth - Cry of the Blackbirds
• Freiburger, graffiti, and an evolving art form
• Aicas presentation on methods of packaging/selling the data streaming off cars
• The McKinsey Presenter
• Defining The Software Defined Car
• BMW Heated Seats Debacle
• “Extending the life of the hardware by making the software updateable on the fly”
• The extended lifetime of the B-52 Nuclear Bomber
• Eating the shit sandwich of OTA (Over The Airwaves) Upgrades
• “How Much Compute Does An Edge of Cloud Device Need?”
• Tesla vs. Chevelle article
• Cradle of Filth - Scorched Earth Erotica
• Hardware Consolidation - brands will merge, powertrain will no longer be the differentiator
• Lidar - doing the work three times not once
• Cradle of Filth - Her Ghost In The Fog
• Parallels with the death of the British Motorcycle Industry
• Venom - Black Metal
• The pivot from engineering led business to sales led, and how tragic that is for car design
• ZF visit and the pivot from cogs to software pod
• The Revenue Model Is Business To Business Data Sales
• “Not about performance, but about the journey that you’re on” (barf)
• Wanting to be the kind of person who owns and Subaru in Commercialand
• The car as a TV, where you buy streaming programs
• Paradise Lost - Widow
• The hardware and software in the car needs headroom to come with the over the airwave upgrades
• The inefficiency of today’s OEMs