How would you feel if you were told your car came with an extra 100bhp but you couldn’t access it? Replace horsepower with computing power and that’s become reality with many new models about to hit the market.
These cars are being designed to do amazing things via the latest software and hardware, including sensors. But owners won’t be able to access their full potential when new, and may never if they replace their car often.
“We’re doing a lot of prebinding,” Ned Curic, chief technology officer for Stellantis, told Autocar, using his preferred word for over-specification.
"We‘re binding in more capability in the hardware so we can use the software to enable features in the future, an example being two cameras inside the vehicle when you may not have a good use for it at the moment.” Curic dislikes the phrase overspecification, by the way. “There’s no such concept,” he said. He prefers “future-proofing”.
Car makers are doing this because they see enormous value in updating models over the course of their life and selling new features to owners, whether they’re coming to the car new or buying used. Consultant firm CapGemini has predicted that revenue stemming from software will grow from around 8% of total car maker revenue now to 22% by 2031, a figure of some $640 billion.
The updates, of course, are coming over the air, which means there’s no scramble to include the latest application in the new launch. Instead, you push it out when it's ready.
The problem with that plan is you have to ensure that the computing hardware is powerful enough to accept innovations which might still just be a gleam in the software developers’ eye.
“We are always planning more capability than the vehicle will need,” Nakul Duggal, head of automotive for chipmaker Qualcomm Technologies, said.
Qualcomm has inked a number of deals with car makers, including Stellantis and BMW, to feature its Snapdragon chipsets in vehicles, enabling their cars to act more like the Android smartphones that Qualcomm also powers.
Smartphones, however, have a much shorter shelf life than cars, and such is the pace of tech development that older chips quickly become outdated. The same will be true for cars. In 2019, Tesla, a very early adopter of over-the-air updates for cars, said it would need to replace chips in older cars to accept its ‘Full-Self Driving' semi-autonomous suite of software.
Only those who paid for the software would get the chip upgrade for free. Qualcomm promises not to orphan older chips. “As we keep introducing new products they will always be software-compatible to previous generation,” Duggal said.
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I may be completely out of touch, but i cant see many people paying more to have extra features on a car once the thing is already paid for.
And it amazes me that during a supposed chip shortage that car makers would be putting extra ones into cars for features that dont work now, and are unlikely to be used later in a cars life.
If you look at cars as they get older things like air con, heated seats etc fail. Almost no one pays to have them fixed. owners of older cars attitude seems to be, if it will pass an MOT they dont care what still works. They wont pay to fix stuff they already have, so i cant see many paying for something they never had