Automotive Engineering - February 2025 - 32

Q&
A
Elektrobit sees the future in SMH Afeela software
At CES 2025, we sat down with Moritz Neukirchner, senior
director of strategic product management for software-defined
vehicles for Elektrobit, to talk about his excitement for
SDVs and why the Sony Honda Mobility Afeela is a poster
child for the new era. Elektrobit is SHM's strategic software
partner on the Afeela.
What can you tell me about the Sony Afeela?
When you look at the Afeela, there's a big pillar-to-pillar
screen in there. You can look at it as a content delivery platform,
with installable functions. There's also that screen in
the front grill, right? When you
look at how is a customer going to
interact with the car, they will just
behave very differently. Think
back to the BlackBerry. They did
email, yes, they had contacts, they
had a calendar, but then came the
iPhone that also had these functions,
but the user experience was
very, very different. And I think
this is one of the key differentiating
things that you now see in
cars like the Afeela. The user interaction
is also different. Right now,
for classic vehicles, the customer
interaction with an OEM ends at
the point of sale. You sell the car
and then, well, 'we're gonna see
you in two years,' and that's about
it. When you go for SDVs, you
want to get into a continuous relationship
with your customer. It
changes the lifecycle of the vehicle,
it changes the way that you
interact with your customer and I
think the Afeela is one of these
lighthouse projects that shows
what the customer interaction actually
will be with SDVs.
Some of what you're describing is
broadly applicable across all SDVs.
Is there anything specific about the
work you did on the Afeela?
What is interesting about the Afeela
is the way we collaborate on the
software platform. The interaction
that we have there is, in the best
meaning of it, very agile. We are
quickly iterating through requirements,
iterating through features,
what we want to build. It's very
32 February 2025
much not a waterfall. This is obviously not the part that the
customer sees directly, but it shows very much the mindset
behind the development. And I think the mindset aspect is extremely
important for SDVs, because it's not really a project
that's focused on the SOP, or just the SOP, but actually on
building an experience and enhancing that experience. The updateability
becomes part of the value proposition. You wouldn't
buy a new phone today if it didn't have access to an app store,
because it's an integral part of that value proposition. When I
look the Afeela, that value proposition is there and that's also
reflected in the interaction that we have in these very agile processes
and the collaboration. It really
is where the mentality and development
proposition towards the
customers fits together really nicely.
Elektrobit's Moritz Neukirchner.
" The updateability
becomes part of the value
proposition. "
How are your teams thinking about
presenting these new experiences
to the customers?
Obviously, you have the App Store
kind of thing, but that's fairly easy
and straightforward. What's going
to be extremely interesting is the
OEMs are still trying to differentiate
quite a bit on the screen topology,
screen layout. That's the place for
digital branding. If you want to get
to an open app ecosystem, the
apps need to be able to connect to
the different UX styles of different
vendors. Imagine Tiktok needing to
be rebuilt for every single phone
type, and you can't really accept
that. So the question is, can you
customize the visual appearance of
apps for the different platforms?
With our Theming Engine, we separate
the UX design part from the
actual coding logic of the applications
so you can put a completely
different theme on top of and it
looks completely different, but you
have the same app. You have one
release cycle but you can theme it,
you can customize it for different
brands, you can customize it for
different regions. So, taking these
customization capabilities, separating
them from building the logic of
the applications, this is something
that we look at, and I think it's going
to be extremely interesting.
Sebastian Blanco
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
ELEKTROBIT
Automotive Engineering - February 2025

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Automotive Engineering - February 2025
