How Digitization Will Change The Design of the Automotive Industry?

In the near future, whole automobile industry will be revolutionized due to digitization and adaptation of the automotive design system.

For the automotive industry, the conventional production paradigm has been to import, assemble, and incorporate loads of different parts and subsystems from numerous supply chain vendors. For much of the past century, this brittle hardware-driven approach made sense, but now the market is being replaced by a more scalable software-driven paradigm.

When automakers were forced to synchronize numerous activities of too many different vendors, old factory assembly lines found it impossible to introduce new features to vehicles. This lack of alignment puts a restriction on quick developments. Similarly, vehicles have been sold to consumers under the conventional product business model with 99.9 percent of the features already in place for the lifespan of the product. Put clearly, what you see on the floor of the showroom is what you get.

As the industry undergoes a profound makeover, something that is shifting today. Automotive design’s future will be electric. We will periodically issue continuing product upgrades over time by switching to a software-driven model to upgrade current functionality and to rapidly introduce new features to the hardware platform.

To remake the conventional car industry, this vision applies the concepts of the new tech market. The primary concept is to build a standardized vehicle operating system platform, much like a computer operating system such as Windows. In this way, by easily uploading software upgrades to the car directly from the cloud, we can decouple our reliance on complicated hardware repairs.

For the last century, the hardware of an automobile has become a kind of fundamental asset. What we are doing now is programming into the software layer new functionality, which helps us to constantly fine-tune the user interface. Ultimately, users will be able to configure their vehicles for interior cabin settings, mirrors, seating, temperature, infotainment, navigation, and much more, based on personal preferences.

In this modern approach, engineers can accelerate new features into cars without waiting for the product to be launched next year. For their prototypes and assemblies, manufacturers get a more versatile and extensible framework. And most importantly, consumers get a unique and personalised driving experience.

This tech approach has direct similarities to the mobile industry in many respects. Any software developer will create new apps for the operating systems of the iPhone or Android and give consumers improvements in their respective app stores. Based on the OS platform, handset hardware manufacturers can now produce new products without the need to collaborate directly with software developers to incorporate new functionality and functions.

Taking the Fast Lane into the Future

To alter the actions of the car’s hardware, NIO also has the potential to adjust vehicle functions by installing cloud app updates. We are now advancing into the next-level tech framework with a common interface to provide much more functionality. 

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Having a structured approach provides many advantages. Without thinking about connectivity failures between various hardware parts, a common interface helps engineers to speed up the production of new applications. Standardization also eliminates the unnecessary replication of procedures while allowing future customization a more versatile forum. Also, manufacturers can achieve big cost savings by developing their newest systems in-house, rather than paying costly licensing fees to outside vendors. In turn, these cost savings can then be passed on to car owners.

In turn, we are developing a full operating system for software such as Android or iOS, but one built for cars instead of smartphones. In time, the onboard computer that manages vehicle actuators and controls will require greater memory and storage capacity to integrate extensive commands coming from the user and the cloud. In addition to a wide dashboard screen that provides multimedia options operated by the onboard computer, we have already built a voice-activated agent for users to send verbal orders straight to the car.

This evolution of software is already shaking up the car industry’s competitive environment, especially as more electric and autonomous vehicles take to the roads. The laser focus of NIO is to create a luxury user interface that alters how individuals feel about their vehicles. In essence, by greater comfort and simplicity, this new relationship with our vehicles will change our lifestyles.

The primary focus for R&D, architecture and manufacturing teams at NIO is to include the best user-facing applications and services to improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. This software-defined approach is focused on building the whole vehicle around the experience of the user-all we do stems from this mentality.

In the software layer, the advancement of autonomous driving would need much more functionality to handle all the various scenarios a self-driving vehicle may experience as it travels with special driving laws and traffic patterns around different cities and climates. For this cause, even while the consumer is driving the car, we would need to train and tune our vehicle data models much more often across the software platform.

These advances over days or months are not something we can do. It will take years to succeed, and then only by taking a cautious, progressive approach. Finally, our major challenge would be to create cars that will be as expandable and adaptable as our smartphones.

Or of course, vehicles have a lot more components than mobile, because the degree of difficulty is much greater. Computer technologies that are easy to build and easy to use can be the core of this big market change. The digital future would encourage car makers to deliver a premium user interface that yields unprecedented consumer satisfaction by ensuring dynamic product upgrades that are accessed from the cloud in real-time.