“I’ll be egotistical and say we invented the term 'software-defined vehicle',” says Sonatus boss Jeffrey Chou with a laugh.
It’s not entirely true – you can find versions of the phrase going back to the 1970s – but the software engineer and founder of multiple tech start-ups was well placed to be among the first to see the ongoing shift.
As the car industry is transformed by the development of software-defined vehicles – cars designed around their computer systems, allowing for over-the-air updates and upgrades, in-car payments and advanced artificial-intelligence (AI) systems – so the technology world has started to expand into the automotive arena.
At this year’s CES tech show in Las Vegas, there were big automotive presences from the likes of Amazon, LG, Sony and more, while Nvidia had a bespoke set-up at a nearby hotel.
There were also plenty of firms that have launched into the automotive space but come with staff and an approach from the tech world. Sonatus is one of those, and Chou says there’s a major opportunity for new players in the market.
“Software-defined technologies came out of data centres in the IT world,” he says. “It’s the same value proposition for automotive as it has been for media, finance, retail and every other sector it has transformed. I mean, it’s inevitable, right? Software-defined technologies will disrupt every industry.”
That’s something Chou knows from his career, in which he has founded or worked for a number of tech start-ups that were eventually acquired by industry giants such as Cisco. And spotting that the automotive industry was ripe for software-driven disruption is why he and business partner Yu Feng founded Sonatus in 2018.
“When I was at Cisco, we built the first software-defined networking switch,” says Chou. “So a lot of what we offer is that we’ve seen in the playbook before.
"One of the key enabling technologies that inspired software-defined services is connectivity. So it started with connectivity in vehicles, just like it did in data centres. That happened in the late 1990s and sparked orchestration platforms and networks. If you look at the evolution, it’s all there in automotive. It’s the latest domino to fall.”
California-based Sonatus has developed a suite of automotive software that cover a broad range of services and areas, from developing in-car functions and systems to cloud-based and security services, all of which can be tailored to the needs of clients. It currently employs nearly 250 people.
At CES, it highlighted a number of software solutions that it was working on with a Ford Bronco electromod prototype that, among other things, could use facial recognition technology to adjust seat settings and drive modes for individual family members. It even demonstrated an ‘if this, then that’ style app, allowing different settings to be applied when different people enter the car.
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