Automotive Engineering - September 2023 - 35

Q&A
Sony Afeela is intended
to help usher a new age
of passenger-vehicle
development direction.
Why is that? Is it a time savings? Is it a money savings?
Is it both?
It's all of those. Because right now, this is part of the problem
with this 'spaghetti code.' Of course, there's complexity
and of course there's safety and everything. But the OEMs
have been doing development, 'This is the hardware, this is
how it works.'
With every SOP, with every new product line, they start to
Cabin of the Sony Afeela concept, a passenger vehicle developed from
the beginning to be 'software-defined.'
operating system like Linux, the things like this. When Daimler
or Mercedes-Benz talks about the 'MBOS,' for them it's also a
vertical stack.
When an automaker refers to OS, they
are talking about something that would
be everything from software that governs
the body controller or the enginemanagement
system, all the way to the
screen in the cabin?
Yeah, without the hardware, exactly.
When I became the CEO of Elektrobit
in January 2021, I was thinking, 'Shall I use
the same [OS] terminology?' I had a torn
heart - it's not true if you're a computer
scientist, it's very confusing, but if your
customers are using that terminology...
what we believe is that there must be a
lot of standardization for the non-differentiating
pieces that are repeatable that
everyone needs, and we must work across
the ecosystem to have more and more
people reuse these pieces.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
develop from scratch every time, and this is why cost is going
up; it takes more time, then the quality is low. If we start
building software like for the phones - I have an older
Samsung phone and I still can upgrade it, the hardware is decoupled
from the software.
'Software-defined' has quickly become a catchphrase - everyone
in almost every corner of the industry uses the term.
Where do you begin to really define software-defined?
For me, the Sony [Afeela] car is one of the very first true software-defined
cars; what Tesla is doing is a software-defined car.
" We estimate that
approximately 60 percent
of the software that is in
the car is something that
you're not seeing -
you as an end user. "
You view Teslas, then, as software-defined
vehicles?
Tesla started as a software company;
Tesla is a software company that happens
to produce cars. They do EVs, but
differentiate with the software. When
Sony did the Afeela car, they started with
a software, software-defined. We worked
together to define a concept for user and
experience, everything user-experience
from the use case, how you will [interact]
with the displays for the cockpit. We
know how to do software in the car, Sony
knows how to do behavioral studies, how
to do user-experience with the gadgets.
From there, we define the requirements
for the hardware, we define the requirements
for the platform, for the architecture
- we implement this.
September 2023 35
BOTH IMAGES: SONY AFEELA
Automotive Engineering - September 2023

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