They’ve got the process backwards and it’s slowing down development of today’s software-defined vehicles. That’s what leaders at Swedish tech company RemotiveLabs are saying about the way automakers work and it’s what sparked Thursday’s official launch of the RemotiveCloud.
“Software is fast. Hardware is not as fast. So you want to stay away from hardware as long as you can,” said Aleksandar Filipov, founder and CTO at RemotiveLabs in an interview.
To accomplish that the company has launched RemotiveCloud. An extension of RemotiveBroker, the core of its software development platform, RemotiveCloud provides the environment for a vehicle’s entire software and electronics systems to be created collaboratively in, yes, the cloud, ahead of creation of hardware.
“It’s about providing an environment where you actually can test things at an early stage and not find out things that are not working according to spec at the late stage and then that is a lot about virtualization and removing hardware in earlier stages and get it right,” said RemotiveLabs Co-Founder and CEO Per Sigurdson in an interview.
“Because being software-centric to us it means being able to do things fast and iterate fast and and try on things not doing the traditional waterfall thing and ordering older hardware five years in advance and then slowly working towards the end getting deliveries from others,” added Filipov.
How fast? Sigurdson says clients have told him that using Remotive’s tools, software prototyping is about four to five times faster than using traditional tooling.
RemotiveLabs has what Sigurdson calls “three paying customers,” including Volvo Cars, which began working with the company three years ago and will make use of RemotiveCloud.
The automaker has been using current RemotiveLab tools to test its electronic control units-ECUs, and software, along with prototyping of new ECUs, but sees future opportunities to use RemotiveCloud to virtualize its on-board systems, according to Henrik Svensson,Director Platform Software Services, Volvo Cars.
“Future software needs automotive skills, together with skills from software developers and software professionals from other industries,” said Svensson in emailed replies to our questions. “The tooling has to follow this need of building more complex software at scale in a flexible way, where the focus is on the skills and code rather than the need for being expert on the tools. The tools need to be simple and intuitive for software engineers, though powerful enough to solve the problems at hand.”
A key concept surrounding the ability to create a so-called “virtual twin” of a vehicle in the cloud is giving automakers more ownership of software development rather than outsourcing it, said Filipov.
“OEMs own very little of the software developed into vehicles, which means that they have very little control of changing things in a swift or a fast manner,” said Filipov. “If you own things, then you can take responsibility for it. You can update the software. You can add new features, functionality.”
It brings us back to the goal of being able to collaborate in the cloud ahead of waiting for physical models or hardware to be created before adequate software testing and analysis.
It’s a point not lost on Scott Goodson, Director for Android Automotive Operating System at Google who noted in emailed remarks, “Teams from different backgrounds can more efficiently contribute to car development with the RemotiveLabs platform. The new abstractions it creates can lessen dependence on limited-availability vehicle hardware, and enables access to data from issue reports that can be invaluable to engineers. This simplifies both prototyping and debugging stages for modern vehicles utilizing Android Automotive Operating System.”
Aside from Volvo Cars, other automakers the company isn’t yet ready to reveal, are at least giving the RemotiveLabs platform a test drive with proofs-of-concept in progress “from the West Coast to the East Coast to China and Asia and Europe,” said Sigurdson.
Filipov asserts, putting their heads in the cloud is simply imperative for automakers in order to keep up with the pace of change, noting, “that’s their only way to be able to be agile, add functionality quickly. Yeah, I mean, the OEMs don’t have any other options.”
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