How to Make a Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) with Jeff Chou & Robert Day

MotorTrend

MotorTrend's Ed Loh sits down with Sonatus Co-Founder/CEO Jeff Chou

Transcript

00:00:00 (upbeat music)

00:00:01 - Welcome to The Inevitable, a podcast by Motor Trend.

00:00:04 (upbeat music)

00:00:07 - Hi there and welcome to another episode

00:00:18 of The Inevitable.

00:00:19 This is Motor Trend's podcast about the future of the car.

00:00:22 I missed the bell, ding.

00:00:24 The Inevitable Vodcast is brought to you

00:00:27 by the all-electric Nissan Ariya, inspired by the future,

00:00:30 designed for the now.

00:00:32 And you'll notice that I am solo this episode.

00:00:36 We had a little bit of a scheduling error.

00:00:37 Johnny is on PTO.

00:00:40 He's supposed to be on a trip right now,

00:00:41 but something happened.

00:00:42 He's not here.

00:00:43 It's a bummer.

00:00:44 I'm sad because we have two great guests today.

00:00:48 We're gonna talk about software-defined vehicles

00:00:50 with a gentleman from Sonatus and another guy from Arm,

00:00:53 which is a chip manufacturer.

00:00:56 It's gonna be great.

00:00:58 And Johnny's not here,

00:00:59 so we'll have to catch him up later

00:01:01 when we see him for the next episode.

00:01:03 But for now, let's jump into our question of the episode.

00:01:08 And this one is also a huge bummer that Johnny's not here

00:01:11 because it's deep.

00:01:14 In fact, I probably will only attempt to answer half of this

00:01:17 and then have Johnny come help me finish the job.

00:01:21 It comes via Instagram DM from a guy named DoddMac,

00:01:26 D-O-D-M-A-C, who says, "Hey, I love the pod."

00:01:30 Thank you so much.

00:01:30 Here's a question.

00:01:31 We know that the similarities between MEB and PPE

00:01:35 permit component sharing between brands

00:01:38 and SSP even more so.

00:01:41 As the differences between segments

00:01:42 become more and more superficial,

00:01:43 do you think VW Group will write code to prevent me

00:01:47 from ripping the battery and motors out of a Porsche Taycan

00:01:51 and dropping them into the new VW ID.7

00:01:54 if they ever bring the touring version to the US?

00:01:58 Oh boy, that's a lot to unpack.

00:02:01 So let me just catch you all up on the acronyms.

00:02:04 MEB, PPE, and SSP,

00:02:08 these are all names of Volkswagen vehicle platforms, okay?

00:02:13 And they're also mostly in German.

00:02:15 Although in this case, they are, I will translate for you

00:02:19 in English, okay?

00:02:21 So the first one you might've heard of is called MEB,

00:02:26 and that's the current state of Volkswagen electric vehicles.

00:02:30 They used to have MQB, they had MSB,

00:02:35 they've all M-M-M-B-B-B-B-B,

00:02:38 changed the second word in the acronym.

00:02:43 MEB stands for Modular Electric Drive Matrix.

00:02:49 So B, a Bauerkasten or something in German.

00:02:52 MEB is the platform upon which

00:02:55 current VW electric cars are made, okay?

00:02:58 There's another one that this guy, Dodd-Mac, brings up,

00:03:00 and it's called PPE, and that's Premium Platform Electric.

00:03:05 And then the future is supposed to be this one called SSP,

00:03:08 Scalable Systems Platform, okay?

00:03:11 Again, this is a lot.

00:03:12 There's a ton here, a ton more to get into,

00:03:15 but the question is, VW, a big car company,

00:03:19 really tried to bring itself into this world

00:03:21 of software-defined vehicles and electrification.

00:03:24 They build these architectures, these platforms,

00:03:27 to be modular and flexible.

00:03:31 It's fundamentally a battery somewhere,

00:03:33 usually in the floor, and then motors somewhere else,

00:03:36 usually outside, usually inboard if it's two-motor

00:03:39 or single-motor at the back.

00:03:40 Anyway, super flexible.

00:03:42 His question is, as these platforms continue to evolve,

00:03:47 will VW somehow write software code

00:03:51 to prevent him from hot-rodding a future VW,

00:03:55 this ID.7, which is a cool, larger version

00:03:59 of the ID.4 that we have here,

00:04:02 a touring version like a hot wagon,

00:04:04 by putting in the motors and batteries

00:04:08 from a faster vehicle, in this case, a Porsche Taycan?

00:04:12 I love it, thank you.

00:04:13 Hilarious question, also very technical and super nerdy.

00:04:16 I'll say, I don't think the software's gonna be the issue,

00:04:19 to be quite frankly.

00:04:20 I got multiple schools of thought here.

00:04:22 I'm gonna try to answer this briefly,

00:04:23 then have Johnny's take on this next episode.

00:04:26 But really, I think the problem, well, first the solution,

00:04:30 why not just buy a Taycan, right?

00:04:32 Taycans are plummeting in cost right now.

00:04:35 Like I don't know if you've checked,

00:04:36 you should go on and look at the prices

00:04:40 for the first-gen Taycan,

00:04:42 the year, first year they came out.

00:04:44 They're not like cheap, cheap yet,

00:04:46 but they are dramatically coming down in price.

00:04:50 And even the Porsche dealers are taking money

00:04:53 off the top of the new ones,

00:04:57 because sales have slowed a little bit.

00:04:59 And also, those first-gen ones, the range, not so great.

00:05:02 Technology has moved on.

00:05:05 So suggestion one, just go buy a Taycan

00:05:08 and enjoy the Porsche experience in an electric car.

00:05:12 Two, to your question, actually ripping out the motors

00:05:17 and the battery and putting it into,

00:05:21 I think it's just the motors.

00:05:22 No, you said motors and batteries.

00:05:24 I don't know why you would wanna rip out the battery, per se.

00:05:27 The motor, I understand.

00:05:28 I think we'll expect that the ID.7 won't be as

00:05:31 high performance from a acceleration perspective.

00:05:36 And I think, but battery chemistry

00:05:38 probably is more advanced than what's in the Taycan.

00:05:41 At least an old one that you're harvesting from.

00:05:44 So I think the hardware question you need to answer first.

00:05:46 And then software, that I don't know.

00:05:50 I'm not an electrical engineer.

00:05:51 I'm not any kind of CS degree.

00:05:54 What I've seen from folks who are doing EV hot-rodding,

00:05:57 usually they're supplying the controller themselves

00:06:01 or bootlegging it based on what's available

00:06:05 in the growing EV aftermarket.

00:06:07 Like AEM is doing a lot of these controllers.

00:06:10 But it's been mostly based on Tesla technology,

00:06:14 Tesla batteries, Tesla motors.

00:06:16 And I think that would probably be the easiest solution

00:06:19 is don't try to keep it within the group,

00:06:22 within the VW group.

00:06:23 The quickest way to success with any kind of EV restomod

00:06:27 these days or EV tuning has been to go to Tesla stuff.

00:06:30 Just 'cause it's been around the longest,

00:06:31 it's the most widely available.

00:06:33 So great question.

00:06:36 But let's see what Johnny says,

00:06:38 'cause he's kind of a VW platform nerd.

00:06:41 And we'll tackle this one again next episode.

00:06:44 But for now, let's focus quickly and introduce our guests.

00:06:47 So again, we have Jeff Chow,

00:06:49 who's the co-founder and CEO of Sonatus,

00:06:52 which is a automotive software company that started in 2018.

00:06:56 He's gonna be on here today with Robert Day,

00:07:00 who is the director of automotive go-to-market vehicles

00:07:06 at Arm.

00:07:08 And Arm is a silicon or a, you can call them,

00:07:11 consider a microchip or a computer chip manufacturer

00:07:16 that's fundamentally English,

00:07:17 but he's out of there, British, sorry.

00:07:20 They're based in Cambridge, UK.

00:07:23 But Robert's out of there, California,

00:07:25 their Silicon Valley office up in San Jose.

00:07:28 And what these guys do is together,

00:07:32 they're not the same company,

00:07:33 they work together in partnership.

00:07:35 Sonatus fundamentally supplies advanced software

00:07:40 for the vehicle and for the cloud to the vehicle.

00:07:44 And Arm, who has been in personal computing

00:07:48 for a very long time, since the '80s, '90s, '70s, '80s, '90s,

00:07:51 and in mobile phones,

00:07:53 Arm supplies all of the processing power.

00:07:56 They provide the chips,

00:07:58 they provide that level of technology.

00:08:00 And we're gonna have these guys on today

00:08:02 to talk about the future of software-defined vehicles,

00:08:06 talk about where this is all going.

00:08:09 These guys are really smart.

00:08:11 I should mention that Jeff Chow

00:08:14 was one of our recently awarded

00:08:17 software-defined vehicle innovator award winners.

00:08:21 We gave him, celebrated him at a party in Las Vegas at CES.

00:08:26 His company, Sonatus, is kicking butt,

00:08:29 taking names in the space with several large OEMs,

00:08:32 including Hyundai, Genesis, Kia,

00:08:36 and a few more that he might not be able to talk about.

00:08:39 And then Arm, of course, has been a big leader in chips,

00:08:43 as I said, in PCs, mobile phones, and now cars.

00:08:45 And Robert is also interesting

00:08:47 because he doesn't just lead their automotive side.

00:08:51 He's also a huge proponent

00:08:53 of this group consortium called SOFI,

00:08:56 which is an acronym, it's a long acronym,

00:08:59 for Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge,

00:09:03 meaning edge computing.

00:09:04 And we talk a little bit about SOFI

00:09:06 near the end of this interview.

00:09:09 But that's it.

00:09:10 Let's jump into it with Sonatus's Jeff Chow

00:09:14 and Arm's Robert Day.

00:09:16 So, Robert, Jeff, thank you so much for coming,

00:09:20 making time out of your schedule,

00:09:22 stopping in here ahead of, well,

00:09:26 we're recording this right before Easter,

00:09:27 so I'm assuming everyone's gonna have a nice break.

00:09:31 But thanks for coming,

00:09:32 and thanks for blowing our minds

00:09:35 regarding software-defined vehicles,

00:09:38 which is kind of where I wanna start.

00:09:40 Actually, that's the second question.

00:09:43 The first question is, in your own words,

00:09:46 and I'll start with Jeff first,

00:09:49 what is Sonatus, what do you guys do,

00:09:53 why are you at Automotive, what's going on?

00:09:57 - Yeah, I think I'd like to start

00:09:59 by making a general statement

00:10:01 that we're in an amazing period of innovation

00:10:05 in automotive, right?

00:10:06 It's not just software, it's hardware.

00:10:08 And if you think about everything that a car does today

00:10:12 and what it could do, it's very, very exciting, right?

00:10:16 We do definitely see that this is a marriage

00:10:19 of a tech industry and automotive industry coming together.

00:10:24 We happen to call it a digital transformation of vehicles,

00:10:29 and software-defined vehicles a big part of that.

00:10:32 If you can imagine a car being able to adjust

00:10:37 to your personal preferences, the way you drive,

00:10:41 how you want the environment to set up,

00:10:44 and maybe it can carry that preference

00:10:48 as you move from car to car to car, for example, right?

00:10:53 What happens if a car can diagnose its own problems

00:10:56 and communicate with the dealer

00:11:01 and make your service experience easier

00:11:04 and more frictionless, right?

00:11:06 Or perhaps solve the problem before it becomes a problem

00:11:10 in your garage or while you're driving.

00:11:12 Another vision, another scenario is what happens

00:11:18 if the car could continue to improve its performance

00:11:21 or efficiency over time as you own the car

00:11:24 or as driving conditions change,

00:11:26 which they do from minute to minute.

00:11:28 What happens if a car could communicate with other cars

00:11:33 nearby and the road infrastructure and signal lights

00:11:37 to minimize traffic jams or increase safety?

00:11:41 There are all of these capabilities that I think

00:11:43 that are possible with vehicles that are coming.

00:11:46 Or imagine that each person, whether it's a fleet manager

00:11:50 or an owner of a car, can introduce new ideas

00:11:54 and new functionality to their vehicles as they own it.

00:11:58 So we consider all of these part

00:12:01 of a software-defined vehicle, right?

00:12:02 We've all heard of EV and autonomous vehicles,

00:12:06 and that's part of some of the innovations

00:12:08 that are happening, but software-defined vehicle

00:12:12 is broader than that.

00:12:13 And Sonatus, we are a software supplier.

00:12:16 We provide pieces of software and software solutions

00:12:21 to enable OEMs and tier ones and tier two suppliers

00:12:25 to realize their vision around software-defined vehicle.

00:12:28 - Okay, that was a lot, but very crisply summarized

00:12:32 at the end in terms of what Sonatus does.

00:12:33 So Robert, same question.

00:12:36 What's Arm's role in all of this?

00:12:41 - Okay, so Arm used to be the best kept secret in a car.

00:12:45 So we are a technology provider.

00:12:47 So we provide technology for producing silicon

00:12:52 that goes into vehicles and other things.

00:12:57 - So microchips. - Yeah.

00:12:58 - Semiconductors. - Yeah, system on chips,

00:13:00 whatever you wanna call them.

00:13:01 - SoC, system on chip, CPUs.

00:13:04 - Yeah, the things that run the software.

00:13:07 So we're the tech that powers those.

00:13:11 So we're generally kind of invisible,

00:13:15 but we've actually been in the automotive industry

00:13:17 for over 30 years.

00:13:18 So we've been powering cars for a long, long time.

00:13:23 The more technology that's going into the car,

00:13:26 the more Arm is going into the car as well.

00:13:29 And one of the cool things is that we do what we do,

00:13:34 but we rely totally on our partners.

00:13:38 And the partnership we have with Sonatus is fantastic

00:13:40 because pretty much where we sort of stop,

00:13:44 they go all the way up.

00:13:45 And really, I think it's these sort of partnerships

00:13:48 that will make the software-defined vehicle a thing,

00:13:52 a reality, and it's also what will make the connected car,

00:13:56 which will sort of help power

00:13:57 that software-defined vehicle.

00:13:58 And we'll touch on all this stuff in a bit

00:14:00 as to why is that relevant.

00:14:02 - Okay, so again, we have a lay audience.

00:14:06 And actually, you might say some of them,

00:14:08 if they've even made it this far,

00:14:09 are a little resistant to a lot of this concept.

00:14:13 So I'm gonna keep those folks in mind

00:14:15 and politely ask them to keep their minds open.

00:14:18 But is it, in its simplest terms,

00:14:19 is it fair to say you're the hardware,

00:14:23 you're the software, you guys work together,

00:14:25 and to deliver all of this stuff we keep talking about

00:14:30 on this podcast is the future of automotive.

00:14:33 Is that, in its simplest terms, accurate?

00:14:35 - I think that's pretty accurate.

00:14:36 - Yeah, okay.

00:14:38 Great, all right, so that's sort of the foundation.

00:14:40 So that's where we are with you two.

00:14:43 You said something, Jeff.

00:14:46 You were talking a lot about the promise

00:14:49 of everything, really, in a really nice way,

00:14:54 like the car is able to diagnose itself or fix itself,

00:14:59 or do it while it's in its garage,

00:15:02 or maybe while you're driving.

00:15:04 So if we get down to specifics,

00:15:07 where exactly is Sonatus in that future, right?

00:15:12 My understanding is, because I did some research

00:15:16 and I've listened to you talk in a number

00:15:20 of different places, including your own podcast,

00:15:22 about Sonatus's, or your view of the world is,

00:15:27 not that it's the future of the vehicle

00:15:30 is a smartphone on wheels,

00:15:32 but it's like a data center on wheels, right?

00:15:35 Which I think also reflects your background.

00:15:37 My understanding is you come from a tech background,

00:15:39 an IT background, used to work at Cisco,

00:15:42 amongst other places.

00:15:43 It's funny to me because the smartphone wheels analogy

00:15:46 works for a lot of people 'cause they get

00:15:48 what a smartphone is, but I don't think

00:15:49 as many people understand the data center piece,

00:15:54 and this is a long preamble, but really,

00:15:57 I've heard you explain it as there's the in-vehicle portion

00:16:01 that Sonatus works on,

00:16:02 and then there's the cloud component.

00:16:04 Is that accurate?

00:16:07 And then can you expand on that?

00:16:08 - Sure.

00:16:09 I think there are several reasons

00:16:13 why we use the data center analogy,

00:16:16 and why we feel the vehicle is becoming

00:16:19 a data center on wheels more than a cell phone on wheels.

00:16:24 One example is the vehicle has many, many sensors,

00:16:29 cameras, radars, lidars, all sorts of sensors.

00:16:34 So they all have to be connected by a network

00:16:38 in the vehicle, right?

00:16:39 You have many, many ECUs, many processors,

00:16:43 and they have to be connected by an in-vehicle network.

00:16:46 A cell phone doesn't have a network,

00:16:48 but a data center is all built on networks, right?

00:16:51 So that's one example.

00:16:53 Another example is the vehicle generates

00:16:57 and needs to manage and process

00:16:59 orders of magnitude more data than your cell phone

00:17:02 because so much is happening, right?

00:17:06 Cars these days can easily generate a terabyte

00:17:09 of data per hour that they're on the road or more.

00:17:12 So those are the kind of numbers that you're talking about

00:17:17 that a data center would handle, right?

00:17:19 Then there are requirements around security

00:17:23 and resiliency and safety.

00:17:25 All of those are problems that we had to face

00:17:27 in a data center.

00:17:28 They're slightly different than a cell phone, for example.

00:17:31 Speaking about the cloud,

00:17:34 I think where the analogy continues

00:17:38 is that in the data center,

00:17:40 we would always have what we call

00:17:41 an edge cloud architecture,

00:17:44 where the edge would be a smaller version of the cloud,

00:17:46 but closer to the endpoint or the user

00:17:49 or whatever you want to talk about.

00:17:51 And so there's an architecture that you have to have

00:17:54 where the edge needs to communicate, transmit data,

00:17:59 transfer different policies or applications, right?

00:18:03 And that edge cloud architecture

00:18:06 is a data center architecture.

00:18:08 And it just so happens in vehicles

00:18:10 that it happens to be an edge device

00:18:12 where it's rolling around on wheels.

00:18:15 So all of the software that we developed

00:18:18 in the data center is directly applicable to vehicles.

00:18:23 And you can think of the software that we do

00:18:27 as the plumbing, the software plumbing,

00:18:30 which sits on top of hardware, such as from Arm,

00:18:34 and is right below the application.

00:18:37 So we're not the Spotify or the Netflix

00:18:40 or the Google Maps in your car.

00:18:43 We sit right below that.

00:18:44 So we're somewhat invisible like Arm is,

00:18:47 and we take it from there all the way down to the hardware.

00:18:51 So that's what we do.

00:18:52 - Okay, that's great.

00:18:54 That's actually one of the clearest explanations

00:18:57 of that connection, that relationship

00:18:59 between cloud and car or cloud and physical object,

00:19:03 inclusive of edge that I've ever heard, to be quite honest.

00:19:05 Like edge computing, I've heard it gets thrown around a lot.

00:19:09 And for those playing, again, playing at home,

00:19:11 edge computing, and please correct me if I'm wrong,

00:19:16 you want some of your most critical systems

00:19:19 to be on the edge because it's the fastest.

00:19:23 If you imagine the cloud as a cloud, it's huge.

00:19:27 It's the stuff, you can go bury a cloud,

00:19:28 you can put data, you can upload all your pictures

00:19:31 in your Google account up into the cloud,

00:19:34 and it takes a long time to get to, whatever.

00:19:36 Edge is literally at the edge.

00:19:37 It's the closest, it's the fastest.

00:19:38 It's where, to go back to what Jeff was saying,

00:19:41 the car is very different, right?

00:19:44 I don't like the smartphone on wheels analogy

00:19:45 for a number of reasons, but one of them is

00:19:48 when the smartphone breaks, you don't die, right?

00:19:50 Like in a car, if something goes wrong,

00:19:53 something horribly goes wrong with the hardware,

00:19:56 the software, there are some real world implications.

00:19:58 - That's right.

00:20:00 That's exactly right, and the other reason

00:20:02 why you want more at the edge is because

00:20:06 you don't necessarily have universal connectivity

00:20:08 everywhere in the world, and it's not always reliable.

00:20:12 You could be driving up to the mountains

00:20:14 and you lose that connectivity.

00:20:15 What's your car gonna do, right?

00:20:17 So you have to have more function in the vehicle,

00:20:20 which again, which is why hardware in the vehicle

00:20:23 is important as well.

00:20:25 And that's where companies like Arm comes in.

00:20:28 - Okay, so yeah, let's bring Robert back into this.

00:20:30 So, can you expand a little bit on

00:20:34 what Arm is bringing to software-defined vehicles

00:20:38 from playing off a little bit of what Jeff said initially

00:20:42 and that future that will be delivered?

00:20:47 - Yeah, and the future's sort of happening today.

00:20:49 That's the thing.

00:20:50 The amount of processing that goes in a car today

00:20:54 is just increasing exponentially.

00:20:57 So coming back to something Jeff said earlier

00:20:59 about the number of sensors we have in a car now.

00:21:03 So there are very few cars where you don't have

00:21:05 multiple cameras, ultrasonics, radars, and stuff like that.

00:21:08 As you get these higher levels of driver automation

00:21:12 or advanced driver assistance, which is safety functions,

00:21:16 you need a lot of processing because all of these sensors

00:21:19 are trying to tell the compute and the software,

00:21:22 here's what's going on around you, okay?

00:21:25 You then have to make decisions, or the car computer

00:21:28 then has to make a decision in real time.

00:21:30 You can't round trip to the cloud

00:21:32 even if you've got connectivity.

00:21:34 The decision-making is there.

00:21:36 So you need a lot more processing in the car

00:21:38 to make those decisions in real time

00:21:40 and actually do something, either it's brake or turn

00:21:44 or whatever, or decide what you're going to do.

00:21:46 And as we get into autonomy,

00:21:48 which we'll probably talk about a bit later on,

00:21:50 that gets even more extreme.

00:21:52 Okay, where does ARM fit?

00:21:54 So interestingly enough, so ARM is probably best known

00:21:57 for being in cell phones.

00:21:58 So if you make the cell phone on wheels analogy,

00:22:00 it's like, oh yeah, that's okay,

00:22:01 ARM's in cell phones, that makes sense.

00:22:04 ARM's now in data centers.

00:22:06 So there's a lot of data center instances

00:22:08 now running on an ARM architecture.

00:22:10 So AWS, for example, have a Graviton processor

00:22:13 which has got ARM technology in

00:22:15 that's powering data centers.

00:22:17 And the cool thing about it is it's high performance,

00:22:20 but it's really efficient because that's where we come from.

00:22:23 We come from the cell phone or the consumer world

00:22:25 where you need battery life and whatever.

00:22:28 Guess what?

00:22:29 The car needs that too.

00:22:30 Especially if you go into EV land,

00:22:32 you need to have a high performance, high efficiency.

00:22:34 You need to do all this processing,

00:22:36 all the things we want as the driver

00:22:38 to either help us or entertain us.

00:22:40 Okay, that takes a lot of compute power.

00:22:42 And so what we do is we borrow that in automotive

00:22:45 and say, ah, we'll put a data center processor

00:22:49 in an automotive chip.

00:22:50 - Okay.

00:22:52 And again, ARM was actually founded

00:22:55 when you're the initial investor, if I'm correct,

00:22:57 it was Apple, right?

00:22:59 Was it an Apple way back in the day?

00:23:01 - Yeah, there were definitely connections there.

00:23:03 - Yeah.

00:23:04 So, okay.

00:23:05 One thing you guys have both talked about,

00:23:06 which I really want to dive into here

00:23:08 because this blows my mind.

00:23:10 I think one of the foundational,

00:23:15 the key characteristics of a software-defined vehicle,

00:23:18 the first one is OTA, right?

00:23:19 Over-the-air updates, all software-defined vehicles

00:23:22 have to have this, have to have this ability

00:23:24 to be updated after they leave the manufacturer,

00:23:28 after they're sold to you and get better over time.

00:23:31 The second is, and again, please correct me if I'm wrong,

00:23:37 there's this move from domain controller

00:23:42 to zonal to central compute.

00:23:45 Is that accurate?

00:23:46 Are you nodding heads more or less?

00:23:48 - It's certainly a trend that's being discussed right now.

00:23:51 - Okay, but before we get into it,

00:23:53 can we break it down, right?

00:23:54 So here's my understanding.

00:23:55 Cars have been built 125 years of automotive technology,

00:24:01 and at least for the modern car,

00:24:03 it's been very iterative, right?

00:24:04 You used to have, hey, it's an engine, it's a transmission,

00:24:06 you got some headlights, you got windshield wipers.

00:24:09 Headlights, its own loop, right?

00:24:12 You got a controller, you got a light,

00:24:13 you got a switch in the car, windshield wiper.

00:24:16 Different loop, on and on and on.

00:24:20 Add power steering, add ABS, add heated seats,

00:24:24 add all these things.

00:24:25 Everything has its own loop or domain,

00:24:29 and that has created a lot of redundancy

00:24:33 in electronics, in wiring.

00:24:37 The harness now is like miles long and very heavy.

00:24:40 There's a movement to say, hey, you know what?

00:24:44 These domains, this is the old way.

00:24:45 The new way is, let's talk about it

00:24:47 from a zonal perspective.

00:24:48 There's the front of the vehicle,

00:24:49 there's the middle of the vehicle,

00:24:50 there's the back of the vehicle,

00:24:51 there's the inside of the vehicle.

00:24:52 These zones, to your points, there's lots of sensors.

00:24:55 Let's connect some of these together,

00:24:56 let's get them talking.

00:24:57 But then the future state is that maybe from the day

00:25:01 the vehicle is designed and built,

00:25:02 it's one centralized computer, all the sensors

00:25:05 and everything that has any kind of need to process data

00:25:10 is all talking to each other and this one computer.

00:25:15 Is that a fair explanation of it?

00:25:18 - You wanna take this first?

00:25:21 - Yeah, should I take it? - And I'll get the second.

00:25:23 - Yeah, okay.

00:25:24 So it's interesting.

00:25:25 So your explanation of the kind of old domains,

00:25:29 you're right, there's a multitude

00:25:31 of electronic control units

00:25:33 that do a sort of single function, okay?

00:25:36 And they come from different suppliers or tier ones

00:25:38 and the OEMs go, okay, I'll have this engine management

00:25:40 and I'll have this from here,

00:25:41 and kind of plug it all into the vehicle.

00:25:43 What has happened recently is we've gone

00:25:45 to domain controllers, which are bigger computers

00:25:49 that do all of the functions of a particular domain.

00:25:53 So whether that domain is ADAS,

00:25:55 whether that domain is body and chassis,

00:25:57 or whether that domain is infotainment,

00:26:00 you've got these three more powerful computers

00:26:03 that are basically doing that compute.

00:26:07 What's gonna happen in the future

00:26:07 is those three domains will get into one mega computer

00:26:12 and then all of the domain functionality

00:26:14 is just software running on that mega computer.

00:26:17 - Got it. - I think.

00:26:19 - Yeah, I agree with that.

00:26:21 In fact, this is where I'll draw another parallel

00:26:24 to what happened in data centers.

00:26:26 Before, you had a whole bunch of different,

00:26:30 what we used to call silos of functionality

00:26:33 in a data center.

00:26:34 You had your word processor,

00:26:36 you had your telephone communication hardware and system,

00:26:41 you had your analytics, your supercomputer.

00:26:46 What happened over time is you started having consolidation

00:26:50 of hardware into something a little more generic

00:26:53 that began to be connected together with a modern network.

00:26:58 And now a modern data center has fewer pieces of hardware

00:27:04 that are more generic, and so it's economically better

00:27:09 because you can now buy the same piece of hardware

00:27:13 and just scale it, right?

00:27:15 And software would run on different pieces of hardware

00:27:20 and you wouldn't care where it ran, right?

00:27:22 So that's the architecture of the modern data center.

00:27:26 And so that's where cars are going as well.

00:27:29 Just like Robert said,

00:27:31 you will have consolidation of functions

00:27:33 from very small specific silos where maybe,

00:27:39 I believe the statistic now is you can have upwards

00:27:42 of 150 or 200 little bitty microcontrollers in your car.

00:27:47 That's gonna consolidate further and further

00:27:49 until you get to a point where you have generically

00:27:52 a few or one larger computer and it runs all the software.

00:27:57 - Well, this is great 'cause you nailed it.

00:28:01 Doesn't this like a kind of a problem for Arm?

00:28:03 If you're building all of these,

00:28:05 weren't you selling all of these,

00:28:06 I mean, all the little ones,

00:28:08 and now there's gonna be numerically fewer

00:28:11 of these in the car?

00:28:12 Like, I don't know, I was just thinking like,

00:28:14 as the world gets simpler,

00:28:15 I get it from a OEM perspective.

00:28:17 You're like, awesome, fewer SKUs, whatever,

00:28:19 fewer things to track,

00:28:21 but you're supplying a lot of the chips

00:28:23 across the board, right?

00:28:25 - So there are still gonna be a lot of them in there,

00:28:27 but they're gonna be in very specific things.

00:28:29 So your camera will have a microcontroller in there

00:28:32 or maybe even something more oomphy

00:28:34 to actually look at what's coming into the camera

00:28:36 before it sends it into the zonal controller,

00:28:39 which then consolidates multiple cameras as an example,

00:28:42 and then sends it to the main computer.

00:28:43 So there's still gonna be lots of computers,

00:28:45 and they're gonna be more powerful

00:28:47 and probably more expensive.

00:28:50 - Okay, yeah, and I would love to add to that.

00:28:53 I think we have shown that in the data center, for example,

00:28:58 the more we've consolidated hardware,

00:29:00 it hasn't reduced the need for chips.

00:29:03 If anything, what has happened is,

00:29:06 now data centers and vehicles will be able to do more.

00:29:09 So we get more and more functionality,

00:29:12 and so you're gonna need more and more compute.

00:29:13 So it's kind of like your hard drive space.

00:29:16 It keeps growing.

00:29:17 The more hard drive space you have,

00:29:19 the more photos you're gonna take.

00:29:21 So it's gonna be the same way in a vehicle.

00:29:23 - Okay, okay.

00:29:25 All right, so all this is great.

00:29:30 It's still a little bit, I think,

00:29:35 for someone listening, like, this is great.

00:29:37 But how does this affect me today?

00:29:38 What is an example you can give me

00:29:43 of something that you guys are doing

00:29:45 that would impact my life, like right this second?

00:29:47 So Sonatus, a bit of a newcomer,

00:29:51 but has now been installed in,

00:29:54 I don't know, what was the term?

00:29:57 - Over a million vehicles.

00:29:58 - Over a million vehicles, and from some of our favorites,

00:30:01 so here at Motor Trend, like we've,

00:30:03 in recent history, we've selected a few of the vehicles

00:30:07 from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis as our SUV of the year,

00:30:12 or our car of the year.

00:30:13 And my understanding is, 'cause I've seen, again,

00:30:15 the podcast, you guys do one called,

00:30:17 Sonatus does one called In the Garage,

00:30:18 and In the Garage is usually a Genesis GV60.

00:30:22 So there's some of the Sonatus R magic in that vehicle?

00:30:29 - Yes, that is correct.

00:30:31 - And in what, is there something you could point to,

00:30:34 you're able to point to and say,

00:30:36 we help enable this particular feature, or?

00:30:40 - Well, I mean, I think we gotta be careful

00:30:44 about what we say, what we do with our customers' vehicles,

00:30:49 but I can certainly speak generically,

00:30:51 because we are working with many other OEMs

00:30:55 as well as tier one, so I can speak generically.

00:30:57 And I'll give you an example use case

00:31:01 that is happening today,

00:31:03 or that will be imminently happening.

00:31:06 So imagine you're driving around in your car,

00:31:10 and something feels funny about it, right?

00:31:13 Your brakes are a little mushy,

00:31:15 you hear a knocking and pinging, whatever.

00:31:17 What's the first thing you do?

00:31:19 Well, I usually call my dealer and go,

00:31:21 hey, there's a problem.

00:31:23 And they go, okay, bring your car in.

00:31:26 And then you have to take a day off from work,

00:31:28 you bring your car in, what's the first thing that happens?

00:31:31 They try to reproduce the problem.

00:31:33 They go, okay, we'll put a tech inside the car,

00:31:35 you drive around, and if your like is like my luck,

00:31:38 it doesn't happen.

00:31:40 And then what do they say?

00:31:41 They go, oh, well, it seems fine.

00:31:44 Take it back home, drive it around,

00:31:46 when it happens again, then come back.

00:31:49 Well, now, let's see, let's imagine something different.

00:31:52 Let's say you call the dealer,

00:31:54 and the dealer over the phone goes,

00:31:56 why don't you describe to me what the problem is?

00:31:59 And you do, and they go, okay, wait a minute,

00:32:00 they type something in their computer,

00:32:02 and they go, all right, we've put this thing in your car,

00:32:06 keep driving it around.

00:32:08 When it happens, I'll get notified,

00:32:10 and I'll get all of the data

00:32:12 and all the diagnostic information,

00:32:13 I'll know exactly what to do.

00:32:15 Maybe if it's a hardware part,

00:32:18 I will order it and get it ready for you,

00:32:19 so when you come in, we don't have to do any diagnosis,

00:32:22 it's just a quick in and out.

00:32:24 Or maybe there's something we can do to fix the car,

00:32:28 and you don't have to bring it in.

00:32:30 So that's part of what is possible today.

00:32:34 That's some things that our software does

00:32:37 around how do you do remote diagnosis,

00:32:41 how does the dealer communicate with their customers,

00:32:46 how do you manage and process that data.

00:32:49 All of those things are possible

00:32:51 with the software that we have in production today.

00:32:54 And that runs on ARM computers, by the way.

00:32:57 - Right.

00:32:58 And in that specific generic, I should say, example,

00:33:03 this is a product or a service

00:33:05 that Synonys can provide to any of its customers?

00:33:08 - That is correct.

00:33:09 - Okay, sort of like a white label,

00:33:11 they could take it and deploy it

00:33:13 and call it something else?

00:33:14 - Absolutely, absolutely.

00:33:16 So again, we build the plumbing,

00:33:18 so they can take our software, put it in their vehicles,

00:33:22 and either enable this particular solution or function,

00:33:27 or build on top of it and do more for their fleet managers

00:33:31 or their dealer networks, or even their customers.

00:33:35 - Okay, okay.

00:33:37 So how big of a shift is all of this, would you say?

00:33:45 So Jeff, you founded Synonys--

00:33:48 - Since 2018.

00:33:51 - 2018, okay.

00:33:53 Relative newcomer, again, I checked your background,

00:33:57 and this is the first automotive company

00:34:01 that you founded, right?

00:34:03 ARM has a much longer history.

00:34:06 How do you guys see all of this software,

00:34:12 all of this hardware coming into the car?

00:34:15 How big of a sea change is it from where you sit?

00:34:19 And I'll go to Robert first.

00:34:21 - So to get to the total software-defined vehicle

00:34:24 is an enormous shift.

00:34:26 It's an enormous shift in the software,

00:34:28 into the hardware architecture,

00:34:30 the development methodologies that you need,

00:34:33 because you're developing a lot more software.

00:34:35 That's a long way away, or as far as the amount of work,

00:34:40 it's a lot of work, okay?

00:34:41 You can do step change.

00:34:43 The beauty of this is you can take one function

00:34:45 in the vehicle and make it software-defined.

00:34:47 And what people have been doing mostly

00:34:49 is things like infotainment systems,

00:34:51 where you can update an app on an infotainment

00:34:53 like you do on your smartphone.

00:34:56 So you can do software-defined functions

00:34:58 in these kind of domain controller worlds.

00:35:01 And that's a lot easier,

00:35:03 because there's already software running on these things.

00:35:05 You just have to bring some of the new methodologies

00:35:08 and ways of communicating with it,

00:35:10 the ways of updating it.

00:35:11 And that kind of gets people used to it.

00:35:14 So we do these step changes,

00:35:16 but the reality is the goal at the end

00:35:19 is to try and have everything

00:35:20 in these new architectures with software.

00:35:22 Now, that's certainly for traditional OEMs,

00:35:26 because they've got a bunch of these ECUs

00:35:28 and systems in there already.

00:35:29 So there's quite a lot.

00:35:31 If you're a new vehicle player,

00:35:32 who's basically building a car from scratch,

00:35:35 like an EV car, you've got a lot more flexibility.

00:35:38 You can go, "Hey, I think this is

00:35:40 "what's gonna come in the future,

00:35:41 "so I'm gonna design my car

00:35:43 "with what we think will come in the future

00:35:45 "with an architecture which will be defined by software."

00:35:47 So it's how big a change it is

00:35:50 depend on what sort of company you are.

00:35:52 - Legacy versus startup.

00:35:54 And I think within that,

00:35:56 you're probably including China, right?

00:35:58 'Cause China's got a lot of these EV startups,

00:36:02 have no history or credibility in internal combustion space,

00:36:05 but are wicked fast in developing EVs

00:36:09 because they have a lot of this core technology,

00:36:10 battery technology, mobile phone, et cetera.

00:36:13 All right, so Jeff, how about you?

00:36:15 Again, 2018, newcomer to automotive.

00:36:19 Looking around, like, "Whoa."

00:36:21 Are you impressed with what's going on,

00:36:25 or are you like, "Man, these guys,

00:36:27 "they can't figure this thing out."

00:36:28 (Jeff laughs)

00:36:29 How do you see it?

00:36:30 - Automotive is tough, I will say that.

00:36:33 I've heard stories about it before I started this company,

00:36:35 but I definitely have viscerally experienced it now

00:36:39 and have the scars on my back and continue to get scars.

00:36:43 So--

00:36:44 - Tough how?

00:36:45 - It's tough because you're talking about an industry

00:36:48 that's deeply rooted in its success, right?

00:36:53 It's been very, very successful.

00:36:54 It has transformed our lives.

00:36:57 And it's going through another transformation now.

00:37:02 And that's always difficult

00:37:04 when an industry goes through a transformation.

00:37:06 It has to almost reinvent itself.

00:37:08 And there will be a lot of resistance

00:37:11 because change is change, it's uncertain, right?

00:37:14 But again, if you look at all of the other industries

00:37:19 that have gone through a similar transformation,

00:37:21 and they all have,

00:37:23 and they're all driven by the same forces,

00:37:25 economic forces, competitive forces, technology forces,

00:37:29 it's inevitable.

00:37:31 (bell dings)

00:37:32 - Thank you, thank you.

00:37:33 - You know, basically finance has gone through it,

00:37:39 the finance industry, the retail industry, right?

00:37:42 The media industry.

00:37:43 - Tell me about it.

00:37:44 - Right?

00:37:45 All of this has changed.

00:37:46 It's coming to automotive.

00:37:48 And so basically,

00:37:51 anytime you have this kind of paradigm shift,

00:37:55 it's gonna take time.

00:37:56 And I think one of the things that is driving it

00:37:59 is the new generation, right?

00:38:01 It may not be old fogies like me,

00:38:03 I still love my car the way it is,

00:38:05 I drive a stick shift, right?

00:38:08 And a combustion engine.

00:38:10 And that experience of driving a car is what matters to me.

00:38:14 But my kids, it's different.

00:38:16 They have, you know, what we call a digital life, right?

00:38:20 Their music, their media,

00:38:22 how they communicate with their friends,

00:38:24 all their applications,

00:38:25 their life is online, it's digital.

00:38:28 And really, when you look at what we call,

00:38:31 you know, what are your gateways to your digital life?

00:38:34 Well, your phone is one of them,

00:38:36 your laptop is one of them,

00:38:37 your car will be one, right?

00:38:40 Your home is becoming one,

00:38:42 and your car will be one.

00:38:44 So how does the vehicle serve as the gateway

00:38:48 to the next generation's digital life?

00:38:50 That is gonna drive a lot of this too.

00:38:52 - Okay.

00:38:53 That's great.

00:38:55 The context is great.

00:38:56 So you called it a paradigm shift.

00:38:58 So it is that big.

00:38:59 You see this as massive as,

00:39:02 I've been describing this as a massive sea change.

00:39:04 I've been talking to a lot of folks.

00:39:05 The struggle is real, right?

00:39:07 They talk about how,

00:39:08 I talked to Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford,

00:39:11 and he had to split his company into three different parts

00:39:12 because the old guard wasn't super high

00:39:17 on building these new EVs.

00:39:19 So we had to find people that could adopt this mindset.

00:39:22 Are we,

00:39:27 he's also used the term,

00:39:29 we're in the baseball game

00:39:30 and we're only in the first inning or the second inning.

00:39:32 Are these accurate analogies?

00:39:37 I look at the claims by some of these OEMs.

00:39:40 Jaguar Land Rover is supposed to be,

00:39:43 I think, fully electric by,

00:39:46 I think it's 2030, if it's not 2025.

00:39:48 It's one year away now.

00:39:49 It's supposed to be 2030.

00:39:51 And the statement by GM

00:39:54 is 2036 all electric, carbon neutral by 2040.

00:39:59 Is this, are we tracking?

00:40:05 Would you guys say this is on pace

00:40:08 for at least the electrification bit?

00:40:11 - I mean, the technology is on pace.

00:40:13 It's just how quickly people can shift.

00:40:15 And it's not just the people that are building cars.

00:40:18 It's their entire supply chain is gonna change.

00:40:21 If your car becomes a software defined vehicle,

00:40:24 well, doesn't that mean that most of your suppliers

00:40:26 are gonna be software suppliers?

00:40:28 And then how did they all work together?

00:40:31 And what we're realizing,

00:40:33 and I've just come from a two day conference

00:40:36 talking about software defined vehicles.

00:40:38 And one of the things is,

00:40:39 we kind of need to collaborate,

00:40:41 not just in the kind of hierarchical way we do now,

00:40:45 but software companies and OEMs and tier ones

00:40:48 and hardware companies and even IP companies like us.

00:40:52 Everybody has to kind of work together

00:40:54 'cause this is such a big challenge to solve.

00:40:57 And it needs the industry to kind of come together

00:41:00 in order to do it.

00:41:01 And that's interesting.

00:41:03 The other part is, I'm intrigued by something that Jeff said

00:41:06 about how this next generation of drivers,

00:41:11 will they really be drivers?

00:41:14 Another concept is that

00:41:17 they're gonna want the car to drive themselves

00:41:20 or drive itself,

00:41:21 which then goes to these higher parts of autonomy.

00:41:24 They don't see driving as fun.

00:41:27 And that's why the world of Lyft and Ubers kind of worked

00:41:30 because even though the car is not driving itself,

00:41:33 you're not driving the car

00:41:34 and it gets you from point A to point B

00:41:36 using your digital life, your smartphone.

00:41:40 That's another driving factor for software defined

00:41:43 and the shift in how the car is gonna operate.

00:41:45 - Right, ultimately I feel like autonomy is always this,

00:41:49 we were fairly thoughtful in choosing

00:41:54 to go with SDV, software defined vehicle.

00:41:56 There was others out there.

00:41:58 One of them was this, I think McKinsey or BCG

00:42:00 came up with the term CASE, right?

00:42:02 A connected autonomous shared electric.

00:42:05 It's a terrible word if you try to do Google search

00:42:07 'cause it's like, well, let's look up CASE.

00:42:08 - Oh, some people use ACES.

00:42:09 - ACES is the other one, right?

00:42:10 Which is also like, what do you do?

00:42:12 SDV is fine.

00:42:14 But autonomy is always that one in there.

00:42:17 But if you believe the news, the headlines,

00:42:20 autonomy's hit a bit of a rough patch lately.

00:42:22 The goal is always a little further out.

00:42:25 But when that arrives, it's gonna unlock so many things.

00:42:29 When there's full autonomy, right?

00:42:30 I think this digital life that Jeff explained

00:42:32 will really come to pass when you can tell your car

00:42:37 to drive you to San Francisco

00:42:38 and then just put the seat back and go to sleep, right?

00:42:40 Like all of that.

00:42:43 The car runs around while you're at work,

00:42:45 it makes you money.

00:42:47 Or the parking lot and the parking structure disappears

00:42:50 because you just don't, why do you park your car?

00:42:53 You just send it out to go make money.

00:42:54 I wanna key in on something you said, though.

00:43:00 Like for you, personally, you're still a mechanical

00:43:03 internal combustion guy.

00:43:05 For the people who are also listening and saying,

00:43:08 that's me, like I don't want any of this.

00:43:10 And I'm also horrified by the amount of data

00:43:14 that's being collected, that's being generated by the car.

00:43:17 The sensors, all the stuff you talked about.

00:43:19 I don't want any of that.

00:43:21 I don't want any piece of that.

00:43:23 I'm getting phishing emails on my phone twice a day.

00:43:27 I'm gonna start getting in my car.

00:43:29 What do you, how do you balance that?

00:43:31 And what do you tell the end user

00:43:34 of your data center on wheels?

00:43:36 It's gonna be okay.

00:43:38 What do you tell them?

00:43:40 Yeah, it's really, there's definitely two parts

00:43:45 of my personality, right?

00:43:48 I definitely like the tactile feel of a vehicle,

00:43:53 of feeling that engine.

00:43:56 I don't really care for a lot of electronics.

00:44:00 I don't use paddle shifters or anything like that.

00:44:03 I don't like my data being collected by anybody.

00:44:06 I totally get that.

00:44:08 I still use, I still wear mechanical watches, right?

00:44:11 I don't have a digital watch.

00:44:13 That's kind of the nostalgic art side of myself

00:44:17 that I don't think will ever go away

00:44:18 because I have a relationship with my car.

00:44:20 I love it.

00:44:21 It's my baby.

00:44:22 The other side of me is more of a tech guy, right?

00:44:27 And I recognize that there's value in that side as well.

00:44:32 And when you're talking about, for example,

00:44:37 the next generation, I don't think we can discount them

00:44:41 because they're gonna drive purchases,

00:44:44 which companies will survive,

00:44:48 and how we live our life going forward.

00:44:51 So I think we still need to pay attention to that

00:44:55 and learn from it and prepare for that.

00:44:58 And I think software and technology and hardware

00:45:02 has to go into our vehicle experience at some point.

00:45:06 So there's a tech side of me

00:45:08 that's interested in that kind of stuff,

00:45:11 and I see value in it, of course,

00:45:13 but then there's the other side that still enjoys

00:45:16 driving my car.

00:45:18 To go back to your ride share

00:45:22 and auto driving discussion before,

00:45:27 we call it transportation as a service, actually.

00:45:30 So again, my kids,

00:45:34 they don't really care about driving my car.

00:45:37 They just wanna get from point A to point B

00:45:40 when they want it,

00:45:41 and interact with their digital life while they're doing it,

00:45:44 and that's transportation as a service.

00:45:47 So that could be a model for vehicles going forward

00:45:52 that we have to all prepare for.

00:45:54 - Okay.

00:45:55 Well, two follow-ups, and one addressed

00:45:56 to each of the Jeffs that's in front of me.

00:45:58 So let me talk to the analog guy first and say,

00:46:02 you're a serial entrepreneur, you're a founder.

00:46:07 So I got a billion-dollar idea

00:46:08 I'm gonna pitch you on right now.

00:46:09 So it's called, and you're welcome to join us,

00:46:11 'cause I think we do need some silicon in there.

00:46:14 It's called Dumb Car, all right?

00:46:16 So it's not a smart car, it's not connected,

00:46:18 it doesn't record anything about you,

00:46:20 you buy it once, there's no subscriptions to it,

00:46:25 we can run it on gas or electric,

00:46:28 we can put manual transmissions in it.

00:46:30 I think it's a billion-dollar idea.

00:46:31 Dumb Car, what do you think?

00:46:33 - I totally buy that.

00:46:34 - Okay, great.

00:46:35 - Okay, you know what?

00:46:37 You know the digital transformation

00:46:39 that happened in cameras?

00:46:41 - Oh yeah.

00:46:42 - I've gone out now, I now shoot film.

00:46:45 I shoot film, I dug up my dad's camera,

00:46:48 it's a Nikon F3, whatever you wanna call it,

00:46:50 and I'm shooting film again, right?

00:46:52 I think--

00:46:55 - This is my brother right here, I'm a huge camera nerd.

00:46:57 So I have tons of cameras, I have an F3, I got an FM2--

00:47:00 - Right, right, I've got digital too.

00:47:02 And they're different for different use cases

00:47:05 and how I feel, right?

00:47:07 I'll use my digital camera when I want to

00:47:09 and I'll use my film camera when I want to.

00:47:11 - I'll put a layer on top of that, which is,

00:47:13 I think, and I think I'm seeing it in real time,

00:47:15 that this rapid move to AI has made analog,

00:47:20 shooting analog film and vinyl,

00:47:23 it's brought it all the way back.

00:47:25 Because AI is scary in that

00:47:29 you can't believe anything you see digitally,

00:47:31 in terms of a digital image.

00:47:34 Hey, analog, I got the negative, I can show you,

00:47:36 this is it, right?

00:47:38 This is the truth.

00:47:39 But maybe a conversation for a different day.

00:47:43 To the other guy, to the tech founder, Jeff,

00:47:47 safety though, all this, the data center on wheels analogy,

00:47:51 you've mentioned it in another podcast,

00:47:53 there's a safety, security component there.

00:47:58 And you can tell me that Buzz Office is not synonymous,

00:48:00 we supply this and the manufacturer

00:48:02 has to deal with the safety piece.

00:48:03 But is there, in your mind, given the amount of,

00:48:06 my sister works in cybersecurity and there's,

00:48:10 the theme is what the vectors

00:48:13 or the different planes of attack,

00:48:16 the more you collect, the more technology you put in,

00:48:20 the more vulnerability you conceivably you introduce.

00:48:24 Is that, that's a fair, you're nodding, so.

00:48:27 - Yeah. - It's a fair assessment.

00:48:29 Is there any security blanket you can throw on our listeners

00:48:34 and say, hey, this is true, there's more stuff out there,

00:48:36 but.

00:48:37 - I mean, that's the way technology has always been.

00:48:42 The more tech that you introduce,

00:48:44 the more vulnerabilities you have.

00:48:46 Of course, the more moving parts you have,

00:48:48 even in a vehicle, even if it's mechanical.

00:48:51 - More points of failure. - More points of failure.

00:48:53 Right, but as technology continues to evolve

00:48:56 and there's new innovations, then you'll plug those up.

00:49:00 Security, resiliency, and I think we've shown

00:49:03 across other industries that technology can keep up

00:49:07 in terms of being resilient and being safe

00:49:10 and being secure as functionality continues to add.

00:49:15 And so that will always be a balance, right?

00:49:19 And I think that's part of this journey

00:49:21 with vehicles as well.

00:49:23 - Okay.

00:49:26 Robert, anything to add to this?

00:49:29 - Yeah, you know, safety is a key part of automotive.

00:49:34 It always has been, it always will be.

00:49:38 And so as we bring these new technologies in,

00:49:42 the industry is looking at, well,

00:49:44 how can we make sure they're safe?

00:49:46 Okay, I'm gonna flip it the other way now.

00:49:48 The technology in our cars today is making the car safer.

00:49:53 The computers are looking at what's going on

00:49:55 in front of you and deciding that you're not braking in time,

00:49:58 I'm gonna do it for you.

00:50:00 And so I think it was Subaru introduced,

00:50:02 when they introduced their EyeSight,

00:50:04 they did a survey and it saved some enormous percentage

00:50:08 of the front rear collisions.

00:50:11 And that's just one feature, that's just AEB,

00:50:13 emergency braking. - Auto, yes.

00:50:17 - You know, once you start putting other things in

00:50:20 where the car's doing more of the intelligence, okay?

00:50:24 And again, this is not an all or nothing,

00:50:28 it's not a full autonomy or nothing,

00:50:29 it's introducing different features

00:50:31 that will either make you safer

00:50:33 or make you more comfortable when you're driving.

00:50:35 So, you know, adaptive cruise control,

00:50:37 another good example, much better

00:50:39 than regular cruise control,

00:50:40 'cause you really had to be paying attention all the time

00:50:42 when you had cruise on.

00:50:43 Now it kind of does a lot of that stuff for you.

00:50:47 All of these functions coming in still need to be safe, okay?

00:50:51 - Yeah.

00:50:51 - The, you know, a traditional car assumes we as a driver,

00:50:56 are fundamentally safe in how we drive, how we react,

00:51:01 we're not distracted, et cetera, et cetera,

00:51:03 which isn't always the case these days, okay?

00:51:06 So if a computer's gonna start replacing bits of us,

00:51:10 that has to be fundamentally safe

00:51:12 and do it in a consistently safe way.

00:51:16 So all of the people now looking

00:51:17 at these new software functions,

00:51:19 these new features coming into the car,

00:51:21 have got an eye on safety.

00:51:23 They are still the same people

00:51:25 that were building cars that didn't have it,

00:51:27 and they're now saying,

00:51:28 "Okay, if I'm gonna put this function in,

00:51:29 I have to make sure it's as safe as you,

00:51:31 or safer than you as a driver."

00:51:33 - You said it right at the end,

00:51:35 which is safer than you as a driver,

00:51:37 'cause I do feel like a lot of the systems

00:51:39 that are being added, they are very good,

00:51:41 and they are dramatically improving

00:51:44 the safety within the vehicle.

00:51:47 They also may be making the drivers worse, right?

00:51:49 Like if you don't have to,

00:51:51 I got a light in my mirror,

00:51:53 it tells me if somebody's my blind spot,

00:51:54 I'm not looking anymore.

00:51:55 If I can look at my phone,

00:51:57 and there are cars now that tell you,

00:51:59 they give you, Subaru's actually one of them,

00:52:00 that gives you a beep,

00:52:02 because it tells you the traffic has moved up ahead,

00:52:04 'cause it knows you're not looking, right?

00:52:06 And this is the argument around advanced data systems

00:52:11 onward to autonomy,

00:52:12 that I think there's at least two sides to this argument,

00:52:17 which is you don't want a human in the loop,

00:52:20 because these humans are just sitting there,

00:52:22 with their hands supposedly poised at the wheel,

00:52:25 while the car is running in autonomous mode,

00:52:28 ready to take over.

00:52:29 But if the system gets really, really, really good,

00:52:32 the chance that they actually will have to take over

00:52:34 is like, goes to zero,

00:52:35 and the person actually probably won't be available,

00:52:37 'cause they've fallen asleep,

00:52:38 or they're doing something else, right?

00:52:40 So you actually need to deliver a system

00:52:42 that is always gonna be like, 200% better than any human,

00:52:47 so they can, and that's the moment when

00:52:49 full autonomy arrives.

00:52:51 - So that's another, there's another piece of technology

00:52:53 that's coming into cars now,

00:52:54 that's actually tied with those ADAS functions,

00:52:57 and that's driver monitoring systems.

00:52:59 So the DMS is looking at you,

00:53:02 'cause you're supposed to be paying attention,

00:53:03 even though the car is doing some of this stuff.

00:53:06 - Super annoying, Blue Cruise, Ford Blue Cruise.

00:53:09 So when you're driving, the problem is,

00:53:11 it works great, but the minute you drink out of,

00:53:14 'cause I've done it, I drink with my LaCroix can,

00:53:17 I do it like this, and the computer freaks out.

00:53:19 Eyes back on the road!

00:53:20 I'm like, I'm just taking a sip,

00:53:21 'cause it's seeing the bottom of the can.

00:53:23 But sorry, carry on.

00:53:25 - So they probably have to get better,

00:53:27 and I think they will the more

00:53:28 they're introduced to vehicles.

00:53:30 But that's gonna be one of the key things,

00:53:31 is the ADAS system's gonna go, no, I'm not turning on,

00:53:35 you need to have your hands on the steering wheel,

00:53:37 as an example.

00:53:39 So it's another interesting bit of tech

00:53:42 that does have a lot of AI in it

00:53:44 to figure out what it is you're doing.

00:53:47 I heard an example once of one of the DMSs,

00:53:50 that if your elbow's on the window,

00:53:54 you're kind of like this,

00:53:56 and you're in an accident, it won't deploy a front back,

00:54:00 it won't deploy that air back,

00:54:01 'cause it might break your arm.

00:54:03 - Interesting.

00:54:03 - So it's like, there's some real nuances

00:54:06 to this tech right now,

00:54:07 which are fascinating for tech people like us.

00:54:10 - Speaking of nuances,

00:54:11 we recently had Daylight Savings Time

00:54:15 switch over here, right?

00:54:16 And I remember, I have a Lightning,

00:54:19 a Ford Lightning right now,

00:54:20 which is Ford's first inning attempt

00:54:23 at a software-defined vehicle.

00:54:25 It's pretty good, I like it.

00:54:28 It rides well, it's super fast for a giant pickup truck.

00:54:31 But I noted when I got into it that morning,

00:54:34 at the day after, the morning after Daylight Savings Time,

00:54:37 that the time had not switched.

00:54:40 And I was like, I kind of feel like this is something,

00:54:44 this is one of those little tiny time-saving things

00:54:47 that it should do.

00:54:48 So I actually texted one of our staff members that has,

00:54:51 we have a long-term, we bought a Model Y.

00:54:54 I was like, "Hey, did your time change?"

00:54:56 Went to the guy, it did.

00:54:58 Rivian, also time changed.

00:55:01 Now the curious thing would, if I could call the guy,

00:55:03 we don't have a guy in Arizona or Florida

00:55:05 where they don't follow Daylight Savings Time,

00:55:08 but I'd be curious, right,

00:55:10 if the cars there would not change.

00:55:14 Is it a global change?

00:55:15 Is it a change based on the position of the car,

00:55:18 like what state you're in, or what country you're in,

00:55:20 'cause there's some several countries

00:55:21 that don't follow this practice at all.

00:55:23 And then it's, I don't know where this is going.

00:55:28 I'm just telling, I'm just kind of venting about,

00:55:30 software-defined vehicles have been around,

00:55:34 really, in mass production since the Tesla Model S.

00:55:37 I think we all agree that's the very first

00:55:39 wide-scale production software-defined vehicle.

00:55:46 And they got OTA.

00:55:47 I mean, there were some hiccups early on,

00:55:49 but it's basically locked down.

00:55:51 And there's still major OEMs that can't figure out OTA

00:55:55 for their vehicles, for the vehicles that are on sale,

00:56:00 like right now and coming soon.

00:56:02 Why is that?

00:56:06 - I think this is where new OEMs, upstart OEMs,

00:56:11 have the advantage,

00:56:12 because they don't have that legacy architecture, right?

00:56:16 The challenge that incumbent OEMs have

00:56:19 is that they have this legacy architecture,

00:56:22 and all of these components

00:56:24 that have been in their previous generations of vehicles

00:56:27 that they're carrying forward.

00:56:29 And it's a complex problem to be able to OTA

00:56:32 and update all of these,

00:56:35 what I call a heterogeneous collection of ECUs

00:56:39 and hardware and software.

00:56:41 It's a very difficult problem, right?

00:56:43 Whereas when you're an upstart EV company, for example,

00:56:48 you're designing from the ground up,

00:56:50 you can make a more homogeneous system.

00:56:53 And it's a lot easier to update a simpler vehicle

00:56:58 when all the components are more or less the same.

00:57:03 So I think that's the struggle

00:57:05 that a lot of traditional OEMs have,

00:57:08 and they will overcome that over time.

00:57:11 And as some of these new architectures

00:57:13 that we've been talking about advance,

00:57:16 whether it's zonal or central compute,

00:57:18 then the OTA problem won't be an N squared problem, right?

00:57:23 It'll be a linear problem,

00:57:24 and it'll be much easier to solve.

00:57:27 And what's interesting is the OTA function itself,

00:57:31 getting something from here into the vehicle,

00:57:34 that's not something the OEM should be building themselves.

00:57:37 That should be a piece of non-differentiating technology.

00:57:40 There should be a standard, big companies that do OTA.

00:57:43 And then the OEM has to worry about,

00:57:45 when making the software and making sure

00:57:47 that the other end can receive the software and update it.

00:57:50 But the OTA bit is something that should be done

00:57:52 by companies like Sonata's.

00:57:56 And then just basically license it to the OEMs.

00:58:01 - Now I know you're kind of a big standards guy,

00:58:06 because you've also, you came from Sophie.

00:58:10 Sophie's like way over the skis of the listener,

00:58:16 but let's try.

00:58:16 - All right, let's do it.

00:58:17 - Let's give them a little bit of a, what is Sophie?

00:58:21 - Okay, so Sophie is, I'm gonna come back

00:58:24 to my collaboration.

00:58:25 It's actually a collaboration of people in the industry

00:58:28 that are trying to figure out the best ways

00:58:31 to develop and deploy software

00:58:35 in the software-defined vehicle.

00:58:37 So this is actually, yeah, we're maybe a little over

00:58:40 the skis, but it's basically, how does this mountain

00:58:43 of software get delivered and get deployed?

00:58:47 Okay, and what technologies are we going to need

00:58:51 to provide that software developers are already used to?

00:58:55 So what we've come up with is we can take some

00:58:58 of the technologies that come from the cloud developers,

00:59:02 'cause they're really good at writing something

00:59:04 and deploying it everywhere, okay,

00:59:07 take some of those methodologies and those technologies

00:59:09 and use it for software that's gonna go in the car.

00:59:12 And that's what Sophie's really looking at,

00:59:14 except the car is not a data center,

00:59:17 as in it has to worry about safety functions,

00:59:21 it has to worry about real-time functions,

00:59:23 it has to worry about multiple different types

00:59:25 of compute right now to deploy the software on.

00:59:29 So that's sort of where Sophie's going.

00:59:30 And what's brilliant about it is we really do have people

00:59:33 from across the automotive industry, OEMs, tier ones,

00:59:38 software providers, hardware providers,

00:59:42 but we've also got people from the software world.

00:59:44 So we have cloud providers that understand

00:59:47 how you do cloud development.

00:59:49 And we've got operating system people

00:59:52 that understand how you write an operating system,

00:59:55 how you deploy to it.

00:59:56 So we've brought multiple industries together

00:59:59 to actually try and solve this problem.

01:00:01 How do you develop and deploy software,

01:00:04 two-way software-defined vehicle?

01:00:06 - And this is, it's a consortium, essentially,

01:00:08 of close to 100?

01:00:10 - 115, I think.

01:00:11 - 115 different companies,

01:00:13 including major car manufacturers,

01:00:15 all the way to tier one, tier two,

01:00:16 software suppliers, hardware suppliers,

01:00:18 all trying to figure out how to do this.

01:00:20 - Basically establish standards and practices, essentially.

01:00:24 - Yeah, and we've got, I mean, GM just joined, for example.

01:00:28 So we've got traditional OEMs that are looking at this

01:00:31 because they are going, okay,

01:00:33 how am I going to do this software-defined vehicle?

01:00:36 You know, what do I need to do?

01:00:37 How do I arm my company to be a load of software people?

01:00:42 How do I work with other companies, like starters,

01:00:44 who are software people?

01:00:46 There's gotta be a way of doing it.

01:00:48 - Okay.

01:00:49 - And I would like to say consortiums like Sofi

01:00:52 are so important to the industry

01:00:55 because this is a huge problem.

01:00:56 Not one company or organization can do everything.

01:01:00 So we all bring a small piece of what we can do

01:01:03 to an ecosystem where we can all provide

01:01:09 best-in-class solutions to OEMs and their suppliers

01:01:13 and the people who buy cars.

01:01:15 So I think it's very difficult, if not impossible,

01:01:19 for one company to assume that they can deliver everything,

01:01:22 either in hardware or software or both.

01:01:25 And this is where they do need to rely upon suppliers

01:01:28 and ecosystem players to help deliver their end product.

01:01:32 - Okay.

01:01:33 I'm just gonna go one level over my,

01:01:35 I'm just gonna jump out there

01:01:36 'cause this is way over my skis, personally.

01:01:39 Is GM just joining, which you just said,

01:01:43 they're also partnering with Red Hat to do open-source.

01:01:47 They're trying to figure out the open-source side

01:01:49 of automotive software.

01:01:50 Isn't that somehow, is that an opposition or no?

01:01:53 - No.

01:01:54 So there are different technologies

01:01:57 that the automotive folks are gonna have to use.

01:02:01 So there's gonna be hundreds of millions of lines of code

01:02:03 in a car for the software-defined vehicle.

01:02:06 So you've gotta have methodologies and technologies.

01:02:09 There's also gonna be components of that

01:02:11 where using stuff from open-source is actually okay.

01:02:14 I mean, traditionally in a vehicle,

01:02:15 it hasn't been because there's all the safety stuff,

01:02:18 but there are certainly parts of that software

01:02:21 that could be open-source software,

01:02:23 or at least based on open-source software, okay?

01:02:25 Because it's just too much otherwise.

01:02:28 - Is there a concrete example we could,

01:02:29 we would be able to understand that something,

01:02:31 is it like in an app store environment or something?

01:02:34 - Well, it could be.

01:02:36 Well, so here's a good example is your infotainment

01:02:39 is typically running something like Android,

01:02:41 which is based on Linux, which is open-source, okay?

01:02:44 So that's an example of a foundational technology

01:02:47 that comes from the open-source community,

01:02:50 but is targeted at automotive.

01:02:52 - Okay.

01:02:53 - So that's the best example.

01:02:55 - Okay.

01:02:56 No, that's great.

01:02:57 All right, so we went wild.

01:02:58 We kind of went way out there.

01:03:00 Let's bring it back.

01:03:01 We're running out of time.

01:03:02 What do you see in the future?

01:03:06 Is there anything that we can point to?

01:03:10 We've talked a lot about, I think,

01:03:12 really bigger picture stuff.

01:03:14 Jeff, you opened it with some fantastic examples

01:03:18 of where the world might be,

01:03:20 but in something a little nearer term,

01:03:23 is there anything you guys can hint at

01:03:25 or talk about that a driver can expect very soon?

01:03:30 - I think the example I gave with the relationship

01:03:36 between the dealer and the driver will happen very soon.

01:03:40 And the other things that will happen,

01:03:43 especially that are happening today, is in fleets.

01:03:47 So commercial vehicles, every day that they aren't having

01:03:52 a particular truck on the road,

01:03:57 they could be losing $10,000 a day, right?

01:03:59 So a lot of the software advancements

01:04:03 are going into commercial trucks first

01:04:06 because it's all about saving dollars.

01:04:09 It's all about ROI.

01:04:10 And they're already taking advantage

01:04:13 of understanding driver patterns and driver behaviors

01:04:15 in order to improve and make more efficient fuel usage,

01:04:20 safety, and all of those things.

01:04:22 That'll slowly come, and it will come,

01:04:25 to passenger vehicles.

01:04:27 So these are some very near-term examples

01:04:30 of what is happening today and what is coming tomorrow.

01:04:34 And there's many more.

01:04:35 We can go into a whole slew of them,

01:04:37 but these are the first two.

01:04:40 - I'm gonna say, it sounds,

01:04:41 what you just talked about from the diagnostics and fleet,

01:04:44 it sounds very similar to when, again,

01:04:46 Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, was here telling me

01:04:48 about their ProLogistics system,

01:04:53 which is predictive, oh, I'm butchering the name,

01:04:59 predictive diagnostics.

01:05:01 Basically, they can model out what's coming,

01:05:06 what part's gonna fail,

01:05:08 and set up the entire service appointment ahead of time

01:05:11 in expectation of this thing happening

01:05:13 because they got one little signal from the car.

01:05:16 - That's right.

01:05:17 - So this sounds like you're not the only one

01:05:21 dreaming or working this up.

01:05:24 This is one of these competitive areas within automotive

01:05:26 that different companies are trying to address.

01:05:28 - I think every automotive player

01:05:30 is looking at different pieces of value

01:05:33 they can offer to their customers.

01:05:35 And that's the beauty of software-defined vehicle

01:05:38 is it doesn't mean only one thing.

01:05:42 It means a million things to a million people.

01:05:45 And the promise that software-defined vehicle has

01:05:50 is that it unlocks people's imagination

01:05:53 to come up with different value propositions

01:05:55 and different features rapidly, quickly, cheaply.

01:06:00 That's the whole point of software in general.

01:06:03 And as it moves to vehicles,

01:06:05 I think you'll have a lot of smart people

01:06:07 come up with new ideas,

01:06:09 and they will get to market quicker.

01:06:11 - Two last questions

01:06:11 'cause they're a little bit bigger picture,

01:06:13 and they've been on my mind lately.

01:06:16 We get a lot of heat about this podcast.

01:06:20 On the channel, when you watch it on YouTube,

01:06:23 I guarantee you the first three to five comments

01:06:25 will be like, "Get this stuff out of here.

01:06:26 "Give me my roadkill.

01:06:27 "Where's the, give me my Camaro or my Mustang."

01:06:31 Or, "This EV stuff is not happening.

01:06:34 "Don't you read the news."

01:06:35 Software-defined vehicles are powertrain agnostic.

01:06:42 We're talking about the hardware,

01:06:45 the software in the vehicle.

01:06:46 Again, what powers the car is somewhat irrelevant,

01:06:49 but the future is pointing towards electrification.

01:06:52 Or not.

01:06:54 Do you guys have a,

01:06:56 do you have a perspective on the inevitability

01:07:00 of this all?

01:07:01 Do you think, 'cause I keep,

01:07:03 the comments drive me nuts,

01:07:04 and you'll see them, and I apologize,

01:07:06 especially on the social media posts on Instagram.

01:07:07 They're gonna be like, "This stuff's all garbage."

01:07:09 But my argument to anybody who will engage me is,

01:07:14 there are so many smart people in the industry

01:07:19 working on all aspects of SDV,

01:07:23 except the internal combustion side of it,

01:07:25 if you believe that's a fundamental piece of it.

01:07:28 There's no development happening on V8s.

01:07:30 Nobody is investing money in manual transmissions,

01:07:32 unfortunately.

01:07:34 All of the energy and resources is going to batteries,

01:07:36 battery technology, hardware, software systems,

01:07:40 LiDAR, you name it.

01:07:42 Is this the right take?

01:07:45 Or are people, am I wrong?

01:07:48 I'm looking for confirmation.

01:07:50 - You wanna go first, or no?

01:07:51 - Yeah, I'll go first.

01:07:52 So I think, again, it's gonna not be an all or nothing,

01:08:00 in the same way that you're not gonna go straight

01:08:02 to a fully autonomous car.

01:08:03 You're not gonna go straight to a fully software-defined

01:08:06 vehicle, car, vehicle, vehicle.

01:08:08 And you're not necessarily gonna go straight to an EV.

01:08:12 So there's gonna be that transition.

01:08:14 And I think Jeff's right.

01:08:17 You can't tell the industry or the consumers,

01:08:20 this is what you've got.

01:08:21 And probably a lot of your listeners are going,

01:08:24 "Whoa, no, I will never do that."

01:08:27 Well, at some point, there will be enough people

01:08:30 in the world that say, "Electrification is what I want."

01:08:34 That it does that inevitable that EV will come in.

01:08:39 But we're gonna see stepping stones.

01:08:40 We're gonna see a lot of driver assistance

01:08:44 and other functionality coming into even our ICE vehicles

01:08:49 right now, because they're the vehicles that are on the road.

01:08:52 And as you do these incremental improvements,

01:08:54 rather than going straight off to design a new vehicle,

01:08:57 which is hard, then you're gonna see this functionality

01:08:59 and this software-defined functionality coming

01:09:01 into these vehicles, regardless of what their power train is.

01:09:06 - I just don't see it.

01:09:08 With respect, the car companies, right?

01:09:10 The EVs are, according to some calculations,

01:09:14 like an order of magnitude fewer components, right?

01:09:17 You don't have valves, no pistons, no valve springs, right?

01:09:21 You don't have the factories to build them.

01:09:22 And then you don't have to build the parts

01:09:23 and supply them for whatever,

01:09:24 20 years after they're built, right?

01:09:26 It's a motor.

01:09:27 It's got like three moving parts.

01:09:29 And it's the battery cells.

01:09:30 And the battery cells are like the same thing

01:09:32 done 120 times in this pack.

01:09:35 Like, done.

01:09:36 We wish all the car companies had passionate leaders

01:09:41 that were all about driving,

01:09:43 but they're mostly bean counters that are saying,

01:09:46 fewer parts, look at this margin of the bottom line,

01:09:49 as long as we get the battery pack to the cost down,

01:09:52 like we'll be, even the after-sale piece,

01:09:56 there's less to support.

01:09:58 Like this, to me, all roads, hence the name of the podcast,

01:10:02 point to this happening.

01:10:04 I get that we're gonna have this step.

01:10:06 I tell people all the time.

01:10:08 We didn't call it, we would have done a podcast

01:10:10 if this thing was gonna happen tomorrow

01:10:12 and be as easy as possible, right?

01:10:14 Like there's, we know the grid's gotta come up.

01:10:16 We've got more infrastructure, more charging.

01:10:19 I get it.

01:10:20 But with that interjection, Jeff, do you have any thoughts?

01:10:24 - Yeah, what you've mentioned about EVs and cost,

01:10:28 I think what's really driving this

01:10:30 is exactly that, it's economics, right?

01:10:32 And if there's another fuel type

01:10:35 that will drive economics as efficiently as EVs,

01:10:39 then that could win, right?

01:10:40 So I think there's definitely an economic component of this,

01:10:44 but I think what Robert was talking about

01:10:48 is somewhat true as well.

01:10:50 If you look at, again, let's go back to watches, right?

01:10:55 Quartz watches are cheap.

01:10:57 It's totally driven by economics,

01:10:59 but people still pay a lot of money for mechanical watches.

01:11:01 So I don't think the traditional analog combustion engines

01:11:06 are necessarily gonna die.

01:11:07 Will they become niche or not?

01:11:10 That remains to be seen.

01:11:11 I think it will be driven by the marketplace,

01:11:13 but it could be EVs, it could be hydrogen cells.

01:11:16 The good thing about the hardware that Arm is producing

01:11:21 and the software that we're producing

01:11:23 is that it is drivetrain independent, right?

01:11:26 And I think what is inevitable

01:11:28 is the digital transformation of our transportation.

01:11:34 And if it's an EV, I mean, I think we'll be ready for it.

01:11:38 If it's not an EV, I think we'll be ready for it.

01:11:41 But yeah, you will have bumps in the road,

01:11:44 no pun intended, on EV adoption, right?

01:11:47 I think there has been some not so positive news

01:11:51 about EV adoption recently,

01:11:52 but I don't think any trend always has a linear,

01:11:56 always up and to the right kind of trajectory.

01:11:59 You're always gonna be kind of up and down and up and down.

01:12:02 But generally speaking, I do think as a whole,

01:12:05 because of the economics,

01:12:06 EVs definitely have a lot of promise.

01:12:09 - And it's not even up and down.

01:12:10 For the folks listening at home,

01:12:12 last year over a million EVs were sold in the US.

01:12:16 It's actually closer to between 1.2 to 1.4,

01:12:18 depending who you look at.

01:12:20 More EVs sold last year,

01:12:22 more EVs sold in Q4 of last year than all of like 2016.

01:12:26 It's literally up and a little bit flattened out,

01:12:29 and it's probably go back up again

01:12:31 as this next generation of lower cost EVs comes to market.

01:12:34 But that is all we have time for.

01:12:39 I wanna thank you gentlemen again for coming in.

01:12:41 We didn't get to talk about everything on my list,

01:12:43 but we covered a lot of grounds.

01:12:44 We might have to have one or both of you back,

01:12:46 maybe both of you back independently,

01:12:48 and we can go dive deep into what you guys do.

01:12:49 But thank you so much, Jeff and Robert.

01:12:52 This was awesome.

01:12:53 I appreciate you guys coming on.

01:12:54 - Thank you. - Thank you very much.

01:12:55 Great to be here.

01:12:56 (upbeat music)

01:12:59 (upbeat music)

01:13:02 (upbeat music)

01:13:04 (upbeat music)

01:13:07 (upbeat music)

01:13:09 (upbeat music)

01:13:12 (upbeat music)

01:13:14 (upbeat music)

01:13:17 (upbeat music)

01:13:19 - The inevitable vodcast brought to you

01:13:21 by the all electric Nissan Ariya,

01:13:23 inspired by the future, designed for the now.

01:13:26 (upbeat music)

01:13:29 (upbeat music)

01:13:31 (upbeat music)

01:13:34 (upbeat music)

01:13:36 (upbeat music)

01:13:39 (upbeat music)

01:13:42 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Recommended