Motivation
Since the 1990s, automobiles have been increasingly dominated by electronics and associated software. Now, automotive innovations without modern electronics are barely conceivable. The breakneck development of software-based systems in nearly all areas of life continues to drive this trend, presenting the automobile industry with a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, customers expect new, innovative and directly accessible functions as well as safe and environment-friendly vehicles. On the other hand, every additional component increases development, production and warranty costs.
This comes at a time when the global automobile market is already under considerable pressure. While rapid increase in demand for individual mobility in countries such as Russia, India or China creates huge potential for the industry, it also brings many new providers to the market, many of which are able to achieve their sales with lower prices. In this environment, the ability to implement innovations cheaply and quickly can represent a decisive competitive advantage.
Technical background
Including and networking electronic components presented the automobile industry with new challenges. System complexity increased with the number of devices. The development process became more complicated, installation space became increasingly restricted and the wiring harness grew into one of the heaviest and most difficult components. Not least, the entire system became increasingly difficult to manage and after-sales service had to deal with problems arising from the electronics and the software.
Another problem during this phase arose from the way automobile manufacturers organized development and development processes, where every new function also meant a new control device that then had to be developed by one of the manufacturer's component suppliers. This process created a wide range of manufacturer-specific and vehicle-specific solutions and almost all the development expertise stayed in the component supply industry.
The AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open Software ARchitecture) development partnership was founded in order to change this situation. It has dealt with the standardisation of the automobile software platform and the associated processes and tools since 2002 and now specifies the standard for next-generation vehicles. Despite AUTOSAR's successes, a few important problems remain unresolved. The standards can be applied to typical vehicle functions, but in the areas of infotainment and connectivity they exclude precisely those areas which are most driven by the entertainment and telecommunications industries and in which customers experience innovations most directly and immediately. The data connectivity achieved in these areas could also be extremely useful in many different ways when applied to vehicle functions, whether in after-sales service for diagnostics or software updates or in driver assistance systems that could function more effectively with data from the navigation system or even from the Internet.
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