The automotive industry is caught between an app and a hard place. On one hand, carmakers are feeling growing pressure from thoroughly modern consumers, who expect their next car to respond more like a smartphone.
On the other hand, the complexity inherent in developing connected cars and autonomous driving is so dire that cars of tomorrow will need to be designed more like airplanes.
James Buczkowski, Henry Ford technical fellow and director for EE systems at Ford Motor Co., came to the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco this week and issued a “call for action.” In a dual keynote speech with Jim Tung, MathWorks fellow at MathWorks, the Ford executive concluded that, without tools and methods that keep up with the automotive design challenges, a car’s complexity will just keep growing. No longer will consumers be able to say: “It just works.”
To illustrate the dilemma, Buczkowski shared a slide comparing automobiles with smartphones and airplanes in terms of consumer expectation, production volume, product lifetime, operating environment, maintenance required, and regulation.