The future of personal transportation is built, in part, on a foundation of connectivity, upgradeable software and services.
Shift invited experts to explore these and other topics during a virtual Mobility Forum in January. Below are edited ex- cerpts from those conversations.
"It's all about the quality of service that we can deliver to the users. In the future, cars will be differentiated by the quality of service, and with 5G, we can deliver superior service with lower latencies, faster responsiveness and also enable a wide range of new applications that was not possible before in the space of gaming, entertainment, productivity and other areas."
— Vishnu Sundaram, senior vice president, cockpit and connected services, Stellantis
"Nothing comes without cybersecurity, because there are nice things happening and ugly ones, and we need to protect the car, we need to protect the user, we need to protect our industry against cyberattack. And of course, with that, we need to regularly upgrade the cars, having the latest and greatest future software to make sure that we are always up to date, not only in the security and the safety in the car, but in the connection to the back end."
— Gilles Mabire, chief technology officer, automotive technologies, Continental
"I think the most challenging part of all of this is that we're talking about life-and-death machines. The difference between a car and a cellphone is it's difficult to kill somebody with a cellphone, but you can die in a car. You can kill people in a car. Life-and-death machines, and you cannot hit control-alt-delete while you're driving down the highway. So that's the real tension here is how do you get speed and nimbleness with the robustness you need for safety? And that's why it's so hard."
— Kenny Hawk, CEO, Mojio
"We want to have the same simple, no-learning-curve user experience in everything that we do that touches technology. And we see that's really manifesting itself in our cars today. We want everything to work as a premium service. Be proactive. Notify me of things, and think of things that I, as the end user, wasn't really thinking about."
— Mishka Dehghan, senior vice president, strategy, product and solutions engineering, T-Mobile for Business
"The car — as it goes through its transformation to become much more relevant as an asset that is living and breathing, that can generate new opportunities for monetization, that is part of the ecosystem in terms of generating data, sensing its environment — it has to be software-defined. You can no longer have an architecture where you are designing a very tightly embedded integrated software platform that is designed for one purpose and doesn't evolve."
— Nakul Duggal, general manager, automotive, Qualcomm
"It allows more flexibility. So maybe you want the feature, but not every day, but you want it for the next month because of a road trip, so you can book it. This also widens the potential customer base. You can then look to a second, third, fourth owner. It's also an opportunity for any customer to have things which they might not have bought because they don't need it every day, but they can rent it basically for a certain period of time. And then you're making money over the whole life cycle of the car, over the multiple owners."
— Stefan Buerkle, head of sales, Cross-Domain Computing division, Bosch
"The art of making a great car hasn't changed. There's more to it now, and it all has to be there. A great software package that bumps down the road nobody's going to buy, either. So, if you look at the designs coming out, they're still one of the reasons why [people] purchase. And a big reason."
— Scott Miller, vice president of software-defined vehicles and operating system, General Motors
A previous version of this story story misstated the title of Qualcomm’s Nakul Duggal.
Send us a letter
Have an opinion about this story? Click here to submit a Letter to the Editor, and we may publish it in print.
