Industries
The vehicle outlives the roadmap
A car sold this year is still on the road, still emitting and still expecting a response long after the programme that launched it has been reorganised twice. Automotive software is the discipline of building for that second decade while shipping in the first.
The platforms behind connected vehicles.
What automotive platforms demand
The vehicle is not the product.
Every connected vehicle programme we have worked on has found the same thing: the prototype proves the hardware, everybody celebrates, and then the real project starts. What follows is an infrastructure problem wearing a product's clothes, and it tends to arrive about six weeks after the party.
Half the fleet is offline right now
Vehicles drop, duplicate, arrive late and occasionally lie, and any given one spends a good part of its life in a tunnel, a basement or a valley. A platform that assumes clean telemetry works beautifully in the lab and falls over on the road, so ingestion has to be built for mess rather than surprised by it.
Environments as code
A model year outlives the team that launched it, usually by a decade. When the whole environment is defined as code, a new engineer can rebuild it and an auditor can read it, which is the difference between a platform and an installation somebody once performed and then left.
It is a programme, not a launch
Connected vehicles do not really have a launch date, they have a start date. Who is on call, how an over-the-air update ships, what happens at 3am in a market eight hours ahead: that operating model is part of the architecture rather than a phase that comes after it.
How the pieces fit
Signal to decision.
The vehicle and everything around it emit, one gate normalises, three lanes carry it, one surface makes it legible. The gate is the part nobody demos and the part everything else depends on, and the dashed line around the middle is the bit that matters ten years in: the whole of it defined as code, so it can be rebuilt rather than remembered.
The vehicle, and around it
Four kinds of source, all emitting.
- Vehicle
- Telematics
- Gateway
- Fleet app
Ingest
One gate normalises everything that arrives - and the gate itself is defined as code.
Three lanes
Out of the gate, running concurrently.
- Stream
- Store
- Alert
One dashboard
Signal somebody can actually act on.
How we help here
The parts of this we build.
This is platform and infrastructure work first, with an interface on top, which is why it draws almost entirely on the technology side of the studio and why the conversations usually start with an architect rather than a designer.
The work
A platform, a mobility business, a marketplace.
The cloud foundation under Musashi, KDDI's platform for the automotive industry, with the entire environment defined as code and built to the standards a telco audits against. A carmaker's move into branded mobility, prototyped fast enough to test the business case before anyone committed to it. And a national vehicle marketplace that was building every feature three times, once per platform, until one codebase ended it.
Talk to us
Got the vehicles, stuck on the software?
If the fleet is on the road and the platform around it is what is holding the programme up, that is exactly the shape of problem we are built for.