Maitê Alves Bezerra, the latest guest on Future Says season five, comes back to one phrase when talking about the automotive industry’s coming decade: paradigm shift. As a principal analyst for industry research organization Informa Tech Automotive, Bezerra knows how to sort fads from future – and for her, the concept of the software-defined vehicle is the future of the automotive industry. 

An Overview of Software-Defined Vehicles

Bezerra spends most of her time trying to wrap her head around a concept that, despite its novelty, promises to change the foundation of the automotive landscape for automakers and consumers alike. “My job is understanding this paradigm shift – digitalization – that the automotive industry is facing,” she says. “I’m looking at how this transition is affecting OEMs, suppliers, and the whole ecosystem.”

Though that task may seem simple in theory, Bezerra notes one difficulty: the industry hasn’t yet agreed on what exactly constitutes a software-defined vehicle. “The industry hasn’t reached a consensus. In my opinion, this is because we’re talking about a paradigm shift – so many things are changing,” she says. “It’s hard to express in a sentence something that’s going to encompass all the changes we’re going to see.” That said, she does have a working definition that encompasses most of what we’re soon likely to see. To her, a software-defined vehicle is “a car with a digitalized system that provides an OEM with the flexibility to make changes to the software or hardware throughout the life cycle of the vehicle.”

Bezerra says it’s useful to compare this concept to smartphones. For example, two people may have the same iPhone, but because of a unique configuration of apps, customization, and use cases, no two phones are alike. This includes how the phones look, feel, and what they’re used for. This, she believes, is what we’re likely to see in the coming generation of software-enabled vehicles. "This is not an incremental change, it’s a fundamental change.”

The Road to Software-Defined Vehicles for Automakers

Software-defined vehicles are poised to change the way automakers design and develop their vehicles. But more importantly, they’re also poised to introduce new challenges in the form of over-the-air (OTA) updates and other enhancements throughout the vehicle life cycle. Having these capabilities, Bezerra says, goes beyond mere connectivity. “A software-defined vehicle has to be a connected car. Connectivity is a key enabler of software-defined vehicles – you can’t make any changes if you don’t have connectivity – but [software-defined vehicles] go way beyond connectivity,” she says. 

Indeed, Bezerra stresses that companies now need more technology than ever to develop vehicles that can compete in the marketplace. For the first time, automakers need to be proficient in advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), digital twin, and more. Cloud computing, she says, is especially important in an era where companies will need to communicate with fleets and vehicles on a regional and international scale. This need for enhanced connectivity and smart technology will require OEMs to change the way they see their relationships with their supply systems. After all, suppliers have their role to play in the development of software-defined vehicles as well – it can’t all come from the last rung on the ladder.

A host of challenges lie ahead for OEMs and suppliers, Bezerra says. Likely to many automakers’ chagrin, she says that manufacturers will need to collaborate to standardize processes and technology. There are simply too many moving parts involved where oversight or lack of standardization could create serious safety and reliability risks. “I think the main challenge today is simplifying things. We need to create abstraction layers and continue to find ways to reduce complexity as much as possible,” she says. “This is a moment where they [automakers] have to learn that collaboration and standardization have to happen. You can’t have every OEM trying to do its own thing. It’s not going to work.”

This isn’t to say that Bezerra thinks cars can’t be highly differentiated, but rather that they need to be prudent about what areas of differentiation are valuable, and which are negligible. “I’m not saying everyone needs to have the same thing in the car. There’s a lot of customization that you can do on the top [layer]. But you need to have a common base layer to free innovation,” she says.

Watching a Paradigm Shift Unfold

Right now, Bezerra says it’s not reasonable to expect consumers to understand what really makes up a software-defined vehicle if the industry itself can’t agree on a definition. “I don’t think the general customer understands what a software-defined vehicle is – and frankly, I don’t think they have to,” she says. “It’s extremely technical.” That said, she thinks consumers will know them when they see them. She believes that, if you’re a car buyer in 2030, you’ll probably expect your vehicle to be updatable and upgradable the way smartphones are. You’ll expect vehicles to receive improvements and new features over time without needing to go to the dealership. 

And that’s to say nothing of the other adjacent technologies that Bezerra says are already impacting the market. Cloud computing, she says, is already absolutely vital and will only become more important. She stresses that cloud is going to change the way automakers operate. It will increase collaboration and enable OTA updates much quicker than before, and that it will bring automakers much closer to the market’s major cloud providers. And there are other technologies on the engineering and design side that are on the verge of breaking out as well. “I think digital twins are going to transform the whole vehicle life cycle,” she says. “And I think we’re going to see AI everywhere, in all levels of the car.” 

To conclude, she once again turns to the phone industry as an example. “I think where we are today in the automotive industry is where we were, to compare it to the phone industry, when we had the shift from feature phones to smartphones.” It’s no secret what that shift has entailed – now the time is upon where we’ll see what impact software-driven vehicles have on the automotive landscape. 

Click here to listen to the full episode with Informa Tech Automotive’s Maitê Alves Bezerra. To check out the rest of Future Says season five, visit https://altair.com/future-says. And be sure to subscribe to Future Says on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music/Audible, YouTube Music, and Podcast Addict.