Last week was BlackBerry’s annual analyst summit. Since BlackBerry’s tools and QNX operating system are expected to be heavily used in the next generation of cars, this event often provides a view into the future of automobiles. That future is coming very quickly, and it promises to change most everything we currently define as an automobile, from who drives it, to how it behaves while you own it. These changes are also expected to dramatically reduce automobile ownership by individuals.
These future cars will increasingly be like computers with wheels on them. They’ll have more computational power than the supercomputers of a few years back, be wrapped with services, and come preloaded with accessories that you can enable later. The only thing these cars will have in common with the cars of today is their appearance, and even that isn’t a sure thing. Some of the proposed designs look like rolling living rooms, while others fly.
Let’s talk about the software-defined vehicles (SDVs) that will come to market in only three to four short years. Then we’ll close with my product of the week, also from BlackBerry, that is perfect for today’s conflicted and changing world. It’s something that every company and country should have implemented by now — and is critical to the pandemic and hybrid work world we currently live in.
Carmakers’ Troubled Journey to the SDV
Software-defined vehicles have been slowly making their way to market over the last two decades and it hasn’t been pretty. This future car concept, as I noted above, is basically a supercomputer with wheels able to navigate on, and sometimes off, road as needed autonomously, often far better than a human driver can perform.
I first looked into SDVs back in the early 2000s when I was invited to visit GM’s OnStar effort which was having significant operational difficulties. The issues were that OnStar management wasn’t from the computing industry — and while they hired computing experts, GM wouldn’t listen to them. The result was remaking a long list of mistakes the computer industry had made and learned from over the prior decades.
Post time: Jun-20-2022