Here below are the top five technology trends for 2023 that are likely to play a significant role in shaping the EV market

1. The Rise of 800V EV Platform & Charging Infrastructure

2. Battery Continues To Get Better And Better

3. Innovation of Cell-to-Pack Technology

4. Maximizing Electric Vehicle Range

5. The Emergence of Software-Defined Vehicles

This article was published on LinkedIn and Medium

https://medium.com/@mahbubulalam1/the-top-5-electric-vehicle-technology-trends-for-2023-b33f43aeee76

Recently I was an invited speaker at IEEE Globecom 2020 Special Workshop on Communication and Networking Technologies for Responding to COVID-19. The speakers at this virtual workshop were all distinguished individuals and the topics covered were broad and insightful from contact tracing to smart devices, from detection & mitigation to data privacy & online lectures to AR/VR for smart health services, etc. It reminded me of a keynote speech by

This special workshop reminded me of what drove me into engineering and entrepreneurship. The global economic downturn due to the pandemic COVID-19 outbreak acted as a catalyst to further amplify the adoption of new technologies and innovations above and beyond the pace, we got used to for the last two decades. Few things already seem very clear that platform firms like Amazon, Alibaba, Uber Eats, Zoom, etc. are dominating the markets even more. Companies will further accelerate their investment to conduct their business remotely over the internet to be more resilient to potential future lockdowns. My talk discussed about the industry, technology and innovation trends for the post-COVID-19 era.

My talk focused on the “Technology and Innovation Trends for the Post COVID-19 Era”. Here below is the abstract of my talk: Industry Trends Post COVID-19 Technology & Innovation.

The industry trends listed above were already in motion for the last few years. However, COVID-19 will accelerate these transformations. COVID-19 has pushed the government, companies, and society over the technology tipping point and transformed these industry trends forever.

Healthcare Post COVID-19

US healthcare spent was roughly $3.6 trillion in 2018 which makes it the highest per capita in the world with $11,172 per capita. Prior to the pandemic, 11% of the U.S.’s non-elderly population, roughly 30 million people, were uninsured or underinsured. It is estimated that due to COVID-19 shelter-in-place measures, which led to the economic lockdown, and the continuous lack of financial support from the government an additional 8 million people fell into poverty.

Telehealth Surge Under COVID-19

COVID-19 has caused a massive acceleration in the use of telehealth. Consumer adoption has skyrocketed as consumers replace their canceled healthcare visits with telehealth. In 2019, U.S. consumers’ use of telehealth made up 11%. However, now 46% of consumers are using telehealth services. Providers have rapidly scaled offerings and are seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients via telehealth than they did before according to a McKinsey survey.

Higher Education Post COVID-19

COVID-19 changed the way of educating and I noticed it first-hand with my daughter studying at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Many schools and higher educational institutes were caught off guard with the first lockdown coupled with stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders from their state governors and city mayors during the Spring of 2020. Schools and teachers had to reinvent themselves overnight and learn on the fly how to conduct virtual classes effectively, interact efficiently with students through chat groups, video conferencing, scheduling video meetings, voting, distribute assignments, document sharing, etc. It tests the higher education institutions’ commitment to ensuring education for all its students and how to solve problems remotely.

e-Commerce Post COVID-19

COVID-19 changed the face of the retail to a complete online Augmented Reality (AR) retail store with innovative ways to improve the shopping experience of customers, reduce the numbers of products customer returns and streamline the overall purchasing process.

Media & Entertainment Post COVID-19

Deepfake is synthetic data in which existing data, voice, image, and/or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness. Deepfake is also capable of generating realistic-looking images that even humans can’t recognize whether it’s real or not. Deepfake techniques are also used to generate synthetic data to balance algorithmically biased datasets for supervisory training of machine learning & deep learning models in order to improve overall model accuracy.

These People are NOT Real. These Images were Produced by StyleGAN

Cybercriminals are harnessing the power of this technology to reel in more victims. The thumbnail and heading make the victim really curious about the content of the video so they click through it “clickbait”. As soon as they navigate to the site, their computer is exposed to malware such as ransomware, keyloggers, or spyware. If they don’t have adequate cybersecurity in place, their computer is infected and they have to deal with the fallout.

On December 25, 2020, a hilarious digitally altered version of Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas speech was broadcast on the BBC and ITV.

The Deepfake version of Queen Elizabeth II took several swipes at members of the Royal family, and the Queen even danced in a Tik Tok routine. All of it was designed to warn of the ease of misinformation that could spread in the digital age.

Connectivity Post COVID-19

A push towards a greater 5G investment and faster market adoption in developed economic countries will be mainly driven by the potential economic boom and contribution to countries GDP expected from 5G connectivity. 5G will create a value of $13.1 trillion in global sales activities by 2035.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Decision Making Post COVID-19

Many companies have adopted a data-driven approach for operational decision making as part of Industry 4.0. A data-driven approach can improve decisions but it requires the right processors “human” to get the most from it. However, to get the maximum value contained in the data, companies need to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their workflow. Removing humans from workflows does not mean humans are obsolete, there are business decisions that depend on more than structured data e.g. strategy, creativity, corporate culture, empathy, emotion, and other forms of non-digital communication. This information is inaccessible to AI and extremely relevant to business decisions e.g. AI may determine that investment in digital marketing will result in the highest return on investment; however, a company may decide to slow down the growth for improving product quality.

AI-Driven Decision Making Combined with Human Judgement

Industry 5.0 refers to humans working alongside robots and smart machines. It is the age of Human-Machine Convergence. Industry 5.0 aims to support, not supersede, humans. COVID-19 proved the point that without human involvement manufacturing cannot function on its own. Industry 5.0 will automate the mundane tasks and relieve workers of physically demanding work so that workers can focus on creative craftmanship and concentrate on other tasks.

Download my slides

https://ctifglobalcapsule.org/

Session Chair: Prof. Dr. Ramjee Prasad

Keynote Speakers:

• H. Vincent Poor, Princeton University

• Walter Konhauser, Oktett64 GmbH

• Sudhir Dixit, Skydoot Inc.

• Mahbubul Alam, DIMAAG-AI Inc

Where is The Comprehensive Plan for Forest Fire Management?

Most of the West Coast of the United States are experiencing unhealthy air quality for weeks from the wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California (see image below: “PurpleAir”). Last week Wednesday, September 9th, 2020, we all woke up to a surreal experience, the sky above Mountain View, and the entire Bay Area was orange, raining ashes and burned smell from wildfire across the west coast of the United States of America. Inside the house was still dark as night at daybreak and it got worse as the day progressed. I thought this is how the sky on Mars would look like. The week before it was a heatwave with a temperature above 100 degrees Farenheight (~ 38 degrees Celsius) and the week before that (last week of August), the Bay Area experienced 10,800 lightning strikes which sparked 367 fires and more. We are experiencing all these extreme acts of nature in the middle of the pandemic (COVID-19) and global economic crisis.

I have been receiving calls from families and loved ones for daily updates and worried about my safety and wellbeing. I can only imagine what the people and the first responders impacted by the wildfire are undergoing and the folks that are still at the frontline for our protection and safety. To be blunt and honest wildfire in California is almost every year and there is no doubt in our mind people experiencing these calamities that climate change is the main cause. Until recently I was unaware that wildfires contribute to roughly 20% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions per year but then why is wildfire management not a top national & state priority!

Fire is a natural component in many ecosystems across the west coast however large scale intense wildfires are becoming an increasing concern. The Socio-economic impact is huge, from the immediate loss of human lives to the health & wellness of residents to the destruction of infrastructure and economic activities. It’s time to create a federal and state holistic fire management plan which will integrate climate scenarios, environment, health & wellness, culture, policy, regulation, bio-diversity, and socio-economic aspects.

Comprehensive Forest Fire Management

The approach to forest fire management should be systemic and it should encompass real-time smarter & faster-interconnected fire management taking into account different scenarios from climate, terrain, socio-economic impacts, human habits, etc. It requires a comprehensive lifecycle approach which includes a circular multi-phase approach such as prevention and preparedness, from detection to response and from restoration to adaptation. In each of these phases, there is a subset of activities shown in the figure below.

Click here to read the complete article published on Data Driven Investor (Medium).

Top 5 market trends in the automotive industry for 2019

1: Commercial Robo-Taxi will be in The U.S. Markets

2: Cellular-V2X Trials and 5G will Dominate Autonomous Vehicle Safety

3: Gain Consumer Trust and Confidence in Driverless Car with Enhanced Digital Trusted Services and Cyber-Physical Security

4: Data Will be The Digital Currency for Automotive. Key Value Driver for Automotive will Shift to Software, leading to Software-Defined Hardware

5: Improve In-Vehicle Experience to Convert “Time Wasted” to “Time Well Spent”

The article was first published in Data Driven Investor

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/technology-market-trends-in-the-automotive-industry-for-2019-a51f1c2356b3

In today’s digital world, trust is our most valuable asset. Without trust, you cannot create value. To allow people to trust in one another when they do not know each other well, the currency was devised to ensure that all perceived values were equally recognized by both the buyer and seller. So, a currency that doesn’t have trust is one that is not useful.

In 2018 a high-end vehicle has, on average, more than 100 million lines of code. To put this in context, that is more than 50 times what the F22 fighter jet contains! Obviously, that means protecting all this software code is mission-critical. According to Intel Corp., an average autonomous vehicle generates 4 terabytes of data per day. Based on McKinsey projections, the monetization from connected and autonomous vehicles data and services is projected to grow from $30B to $1.5T by 2030. So that represents zettabytes (1000s of exabytes) of data at stake, which presents a massive opportunity

A growing number of connected cars and electronic content per vehicle and reinforcement of mandates by regulatory bodies for vehicle data protection are driving the automotive cybersecurity market. In short, data must be protected to ensure total confidence among those who will be entrusting their lives to these vehicles’ implicit safety. That is why there must be, not only security in its purest sense of being free from threats but trust, in all facets of the data.

Security is the foundation upon which trust is built. “Trusted data”, defined at its core as the data which are immutable, transparent, auditable, encrypted and distributed data records which is much more significant than just data security. For example, if on a one-hundred-dollar bill, the identifiers put into place include special security efforts such a watermark, a unique ID, a special type of paper used, etc. This makes it far more difficult to duplicate, generating the foundation of a secure currency. For it to become trusted, however, demands a far more thorough undertaking. It requires tracking to see where it is going, to whom it is going, how it is being spent and that someone is not spending more than its actual worth. A currency is only valuable when there is confidence that all these protections are in place.

In the same way, data in a digital economy must also have protections to provide confidence in its authenticity. If it became easy to counterfeit one hundred dollar bills, the trust would erode immediately. That becomes even more important with digital currencies such as data. A recipient of the information needs to unequivocally believe that there has been no tampering with the information contained within and that its source has been uniquely identified.

The trust value chain must be established by a combination of transparency, governance of the data and a continued record of transactions taking place as they are supposed to. In a data economy, in order to ask organizations to do business with a vendor or partner, the process must go beyond just making the data communication secure. They must trust the data integrity, which can be provided through a combination of architecture, technology, protocols, and secure data governance.

Trust enables organizations to create value and capital markets to function properly. With trust comes confidence for organizations to make strategic moves and seize the upside of disruption. Where Trillium plays a key role in this is by encrypting the communication that occurs within the vehicle. The Trillium Secure in-vehicle security products provide adaptive firewall and self-defending intrusion detection and protection solutions, which can run on telematic control units, gateways and/or on domain controllers, ensuring that only communications that are supposed to traverse are allowed. In-vehicle security products are complemented with cloud-based AI for self-learning capability from external sources and from other vehicles connected to the platform., as well as establishing a secure connection between the vehicle and the cloud through a blockchain architecture.

While the industry as a whole has taken for granted that this incredibly powerful new technology will revolutionize the entire world, if the data it is learning from is flawed, then there will be no confidence whatsoever. This is an incredibly important objective for everyone to understand! If the data is not trusted, the machine learning that occurs will be faulty, as it is working off assumptions that are flawed. That is why a platform of trusted mobility is so groundbreaking. Trillium Secure has recognized the necessity of this fact and predicated its technology to first and foremost guarantee that trust across all types of data transmitted. But it is more than just revolutionary. Trillium technology creates a level of digital trust second to none. At its very essence, the DNA of the platform provides trust, security, and integrity so that data can deliver value without reservation. It is architected in such a way that every action taken is predicated on ensuring this mandate. By doing this, the company will truly make a fundamental contribution.

To examine this further, Trillium’s platform is transformative at three distinct levels:

For the Individual:

At its essence, the data generated from connected vehicles is yet one more place where an individual can become concerned about both its legitimate use, as well as its illegitimate use by black hats who might look to profit from its sale or illegal mining.

The benefit of Trillium’s platform is the ability to keep data private, control its dissemination and notify each individual whenever it might be used for monetary benefit by any entity with access to it.

In this way, the entire premise discussed throughout can be said, without exaggeration, to over deliver on the critical promise of trust.

For the Industry:

In the new privacy world order established by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), compliance with all privacy regulations globally becomes more valuable than ever. There is no grey area in this endeavor and the expectation is that all personally identifiable information data generated from connected vehicles, must be, not only trustworthy but also private.

Trillium Secure value is delivered through a distinct combination of the following: a) it lowers operational expenses, which positively improves the bottom line, b) it provides ways to generate new revenue streams, and c) it simplifies the operation and usability of complex systems at large scale.

Together, this ROI becomes immediately justifiable from both a top and bottom line perspective.

For Society:

Finally, and perhaps most important, Trillium Secure looks at the impact that it can help contribute to the world.

As stated, once that data trust and vehicle cybersecurity have been established and validated, a new set of positive paradigms will occur. Traffic can become significantly reduced, if not outright eradicated, which can have a huge effect on helping the world combat climate change. Furthermore, the stress many commuters face each day when dealing with debilitating gridlock on highways and side streets can become a thing of the past, increasing both quality of life, as well as actual longevity.

All these benefits combined will provide a clear, positive use case that makes a compelling argument for the benefits of Trillium Secure’s widespread adoption. Once accomplished, the platform and services can help to accelerate the trust needed to allow a truly connected world of transportation.

The article was first published in Data Driven Investor

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/in-the-transformative-age-of-transportation-why-trusted-mobility-platform-and-services-are-a-must-f540286dacff

Imagine a time when there was no internet, no laptops, and no mobile phones…Generation X, born between 1964 and 1979, often referred to as Digital Immigrants, introduced computers for the first time and initiated the path toward digitalization. Viewed as the renaissance of entrepreneurship, they created labels and brand names, wanting things and wanting them immediately but were not technologically sophisticated. The next generation — Generation Y or Millennials — born from 1980 to 1995, are referred to as Digital Natives, having unlimited access to information through the internet. This generation has also grown up with mobile phones, e-commerce and social media making them tech-savvy and immune to traditional marketing and sales pitches. Then came Generation Z, born from 1996 to 2010, who have never known a world without internet and mobile phones. They are globally focused, visually engaged, educationally transformed and socially defined, integrating technology seamlessly into all parts of their lives like the air that they breathe. Of the world’s 7.7 billion people, Millennials or Gen Y and Gen Z will comprise 64 percent of the total global population by 2020. When a new generation comes of age, joins the workforce, and is able to make financial decisions on their own, there is a need for new products and services that meet the needs of this generation. Let us call them Artificial Intelligence (AI) Natives.

 Gen Z – the AI Natives expect technology to seamlessly integrate with their active lifestyle.

Example 1 — Communication: For Digital Natives, emails are organized according to the time and conversation in a sequential manner. But AI Natives expect the emails to be organized according to the contextual information of the email and urgency of action required.

Example 2 — Shopping: Digital Natives use Amazon to search and order goods even though it might be a repetitive order. On the other hand, AI Natives expect Amazon to notify the user of the replenishment of goods and only request purchase approval. It should also take in to account the usage behavior of the individual.

Example 3 — Payments: Digital Natives use Apple Pay or a digital wallet to pay for goods and services. AI Natives expect Apple Pay or a digital wallet to automatically pop up a request for payment approval if the store, goods or services are part of the routine behavior of the individual.

Example 4–Online Retail: Digital Natives use online e-commerce like Macy’s, Nordstrom, etc. to order clothes. They check the product at home and return the product if it is not to their liking. AI Natives expect personalized augmented outfitting online so they can decide before ordering.

Example 5 — Transportation: Digital Natives use ridesharing apps like Uber, Lyft, etc. to order cab/taxi service by making multiple decisions and selections such as current location, destination, type of vehicle, fair price, etc., and then they have to wait for a few minutes before the rideshare service picks them up. AI Natives expect ridesharing services to understand the individual’s need, usage pattern, desired destination, estimated time of arrival, etc., and proactively notify the user for the ridesharing service and only request the user for confirmation.

Click here to read the complete article

What are the ways 5G is set to enhance High Definition (HD) mapping and more?

One of the key aspects of 5G is the uplink data rate, which is data moving from the vehicle to the cloud. Compared to 4G, 5G significantly increases the sustainable bandwidth of both the uplink as well as the downlink. But that by itself is not good enough. How do you get close to real-time decision making? This would translate back to ultra-low latency with guaranteed jitter and delivery.

Second, High Definition (HD) mapping requires high-speed bandwidth to transmit massive volumes of data. HD mapping also insists on location precision in order to know where objects are relative to each other. A third necessary element is a support for high vehicle density per cell site. Making it possible for many vehicles to be close to each other and at the same time access a high sustainable data rate is very important.

One thing that 5G provides, for the first time, is latency in sub-milliseconds. Today, if we look at 4G LTE we have 10-30 milliseconds elapse for a round-trip communication, but for 5G it would be under one millisecond, which is almost near real-time. The time can be further reduced. The peak bandwidth of the downlink is going to be about 20 Gbps, whereas sustainable bandwidth is 1 Gbps for the downlink. But sustainable uplink is also on the order of 10 Mbps. Peak bandwidth can go in the order of 100 Mbps. Having a sustainable uplink of 10 Mbps and a sustainable download of 1 Gbps is a big deal. 5G will improve vehicle density by 100x compared to 4G, i.e., 5G will achieve 100 times more density of devices/vehicles that can use real-time data streaming.

Last but not least is the logical separation of the 5G network for industry/markets. Unlike today’s 4G network, where you have a single network that is used for applications ranging from those for utilities, telemetry, and metering to watching movies and emailing, all using one single 4G/LTE network. 5G has network separation capability. So, a logical network, which could encompass connected driving features, can be solely dedicated to autonomous driving. This means that only vehicles will be using that particular logical network, and so network performance, business modeling, pricing, etc. can be focused on vehicles’ needs. The latency can also be managed because there is only a specific kind of traffic. Currently, there is a mixed pattern, which makes it difficult for 5G carriers to understand where optimization is required. 5G will enable HD mapping in the cloud and then send that information back—in close to real time— creating a superior user experience.

Better Suited for V2X? V2X is not a technology, there are use cases for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), Vehicle-to-X (where X can be anything) etc., it depends on what technology we use. Today, when people talk about V2X, what they mean is Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), also known as IEEE802.11P. 5G comes from the evolution of cellular technologies such as 2G, 3G, 4G and WiFi. Worth considering is the difference between DSRC and 5G cellular technology for vehicle use cases. Both are applicable for V2X, but which one is better suited? From a security and coverage perspective, the two main components of V2X are V2V and V2I. DSRC-based V2V does not require an infrastructure, which means that the beacons are sent out from the vehicle and can detect other vehicles nearby. The same thing can be achieved with 5G Direct and even with 4G LTE Direct. This kind of communication also enables device-to-device (D2D) communication.

5G will have D2D communication capability similar to DSRC V2V communications. From that perspective, DSRC is focused on communication and the security around certificates. This can be used for 5G as well, except that 5G also has security on the radio link level because of the inherent security that comes with USIM (Universal Subscriber Identity Module) or eUICC (embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card) technology. Though we get the advantage of the mobile security, we might still end up having a list of vehicle certificates to be revoked in DSRC or even in 5G, this is above the communication level. Security at the communication level, 5G would provide better security because it is evolving from 3G/4G security and has inherent communication security built in it. DSRC does not have the same level of communication security on its own, so we have to add higher layers of security. But if we think about the certificates, the infrastructure, or the X509 certificates, they can be in both because they are not on the communication level, they are on a higher level of authentication and authorization.

If we look at cybersecurity, which includes silicon to communication to authentication/authorization, 5G is much more well-defined and enables V2V communication in which people have different variations, there is no standard. Looking at coverage that is better suited for different strategies and services, one of the key characteristics of 5G is that for the first time we can have infrastructure-less communication. It is not just about page speeds and low latency. What does that mean? It means that 5G now has the ability to have the mashed technology—it can hop from one vehicle to another vehicle, to create an ad-hoc network of vehicles that communicate among themselves. DSRC also does this to some extent; it does not require infrastructure for V2V, so it creates a network of its own. 5G can offer the same services DSRC offers. With regard to strategy, if we look at it from a WiFi perspective then we are banking on DSRC. If we look at it from a cellular perspective, then we want to extend the cellular capability to enable mesh networks and ad-hoc communication. The cellular V2V approach is newer whereas the DSRC has been around for many years with people doing trials and POCs.

What Matters Cellular V2V and DSRC can complement each other, but they can definitely compete with one other as well. If we use DSRC for V2X, we have to spend billions of dollars to build the infrastructure for V2I. A new infrastructure has to be built, operational expenditure and roadmap with future enhancements that justify the ROI and the ownership of this project, which would probably be taken up by the government. To take advantage of V2I, massive infrastructure investment is required, whereas 5G has the advantage of cellular technology and carriers that are interested to roll out different use cases. In this scenario, the carriers pick up the bill of the infrastructure. The carriers can logically separate out the infrastructure for mobile internet, for smart grids, for connected devices, for autonomous vehicles, and so on. In this way, they can monetize the technology in different ways and the infrastructure remains a shared infrastructure. From this perspective, 5G has an advantage over DSRC because the cell towers and real estate, etc. can all be leveraged and used. The carriers can monetize their investment not only from one vertical but from many different vertical use cases: industrial, retail, end user, connected car, automated drive, utility, etc. That bigger pool of verticals increases the chance of having a favorable ROI. With that in mind, 5G is better suited. What we’ve learned from DSRC V2V and V2I use cases can be leveraged for 5G, as it is just the underlying technology. It does not really matter whether you use 5G or DSRC, what really matters is how we use the application built on top.

Ready to Go Nationwide 5G infrastructure is ready to go nationwide because of the business case note earlier. The business case for the carriers is well proven and they are looking to have 5G rolled out not only because of the capacity increase, but for the first time they would have the ability to monetize and provide dedicated networks for vertical industries and charge differently, which they could not do before with broadband internet services. Carriers are definitely ready. But DSRC is absolutely not. No country has billions of dollars to roll out this dedicated infrastructure only for vehicle safety. Another thing to understand is the silicon that has to go into the vehicle. The advantage that 5G has is that silicon is produced at a massive scale for smartphones. So, the cost of them building that silicon and the robustness that they have from the 3G/4G network, used by billions of people, are still upon unproven grounds in DSRC. DSRC lacks a use case even the size of a hundred thousand people. There are a lot of new challenges that will appear for DSRC because of the inherent security of cellular technology of 3G/4G that it does not have. Of course, 5G will have its own challenges but they will pale in comparison to those that the DSRC will have. The cellular approach to V2I will extend to V2V as well because every car needs connectivity. It will also be applicable to V2P, where the beacon will be released from the person and the car will detect it in order to avoid accidents. The best part of cellular technology is its broad applicability of it—in smartphones, in cars, in hand-held devices. The applicability is so broad that you can truly have a V2X rather than only V2V or V2I. This can be further extended to device-to-device, where bicycles and motorcycles will be able to avoid fatal accidents. The massive volume of smartphone production is going to drive down costs faster than any other technology.

Conclusion The window for DSRC to be implemented and to become successful is only becoming smaller and smaller. As 5G comes in, and DSRC does not have that kind of volume, it is not mandated and is not in the car, they are losing that advantage. Once 5G comes into the towers and cell phones, then it is going to be much more difficult to introduce a new technology and get investment only for vehicles.

Here are the four key responsibilities every CTO needs to execute:

A CTO Crafts Strategy, Not Code

Every so often, many first time CTOs forget that as a C-suite member their responsibility extends further into taking care of strategy and business development work. “My dual role isn’t only about merging the functional silos and mindsets of R&D and marketing within our organization,” says Mahbubul Alam, CTO and CMO at Movimento. In his experience, CTOs need to be able to reach across and bridge functional silos within an enterprise and foster efficiency, collaboration, and speed across the company.

A CTO Leads People and Process

For most CTOs, their day offers a challenging combination of strategy and leadership. If anyone was wondering how exactly a CTO spends their day, if not writing code, here are some of the activities which typically occupy their focus and attention:

• Guide development work, by establishing standards and processes that ensure agile and self-reliant operations within the technology vertical

• Foster leadership skills within the technology team and encourage innovation

• Making sure that the company is progressing on the right track while implementing the best practices in engineering, development, and technology adoptions

• Working in-sync with other stakeholders, like the product and marketing teams to synergize verticals towards business outcomes

A CTO Unifies the Company

An age-old problem that still prevails in many companies is that of teams working in silos. When employees are more aware of what’s going on with other teams, they are likely to take more informed and effective decisions. The role of the CTO, in this case, would be to highlight the achievements of the engineers for visibility across the organization, and also, raise the engineering team’s profile externally.

A CTO Represents the Company

A large chunk of a CTO’s functions include :

• Attending and speaking at conferences

• Encouraging developers by addressing them locally

• Hosting, sponsoring, or attending awareness-raising meet-ups

• Giving interviews to various media channels.

Your CTO may not always be available on site, as much of his functions involve profile-building, or spreading the word, or even publishing thought leadership content. This ensures that your organization continues to thrive and keep hiring talented professionals that contribute to the core value proposition of the company.

The article was first published in StraightTalk

https://straighttalk.hcltech.com/articles/4-key-cto-responsibilities

What is Disruptive Change?

Disruptive change refers to an innovation that creates a new market and value network that eventually disrupts an existing one, displacing established market leading firms, products and alliances.

Surviving the Disruptive Earthquake

The crucial factors for a business that wants to survive disruption is that they must be innovative and adaptive. Innovation and adaptability do not just apply to technology, but to business models as well. If we are not willing to walk away from an existing business that has become threatened, we may not be able to adapt quickly enough when change comes. We need to leverage the existing disruptive forces of Cloud computing, Connectivity and Contextual information wherever possible to help us stay ahead of the disruption.

Change is an inevitable part of the modern business environment where organizations, and the people within them, must constantly re-invent themselves to remain competitive. Sustaining success depends on an organization’s ability to embrace and adapt to a changing environment.

Read the complete article on

Traditionally, the automotive industry only adopts a mature technology. Unfortunately, the rapid pace of software development requires the automotive industry to become more innovative with respect to how it views software. More importantly, the dramatic increase in cybersecurity attacks demands cooperation among OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, software developers and cybersecurity firms at a scale that has never been reached before. Today’s automotive cybersecurity solutions in the marketplace are at best an after-thought. There are still many unanswered questions including how to safeguard internal vehicle systems from attacks, ensure data integrity while also providing data privacy and secure vehicle-to-cloud communications in millions of vehicles that each supports hundreds of ECUs, sensors, domain controllers, radars, LiDAR and ADAS. In order to deliver cybersecurity solutions to address these specific questions for connected and autonomous vehicles, a number of factors must be considered such as scaling globally to a massive number of vehicles, detecting software tampering and malware, support an array of telematics, information and safety applications, enabling precision access control to vehicle software suppliers and meeting regional safety, privacy and driving regulations.

Fortunately, there are two new emerging technologies, Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) and Blockchain, that offer a path forward. SDP enables the provisioning of secure communications between the software process within the vehicle and cloud-hosted applications while Blockchain enables secure messaging. By combining the any-to-any connectivity of the SDP with the scale of the Blockchain, an efficient cybersecurity model for connected and autonomous vehicles can be created.

In order to further provide secure connected and autonomous vehicles in a systematic manner and provide the required safety, a number of practices should be adopted:

• Incorporate an industrywide automotive cybersecurity lifetime (from cradle to grave) compliance certification program. Make cybersecurity a mandatory part of a vehicle’s product development process.

• Establish a joint automotive cybersecurity taskforce that is responsible for proactive prevention, mitigation and correction of threats.

• Provide regulatory agency access to vehicle metadata (non personally identifiable information) for random cybersecurity compliance checks and validation.

What is a Software Defined Perimeter (SDP)?

SDP also known as “Black Cloud” where application infrastructure is effectively “Black or in the dark” meaning that underline network infrastructure cannot be detected. SDP is a new approach to cybersecurity that is designed to provide on-demand, dynamically provisioned secure network segmentation, that mitigates network-based attacks, by creating perimeter networks anywhere in the world, whether it is in a cloud or in a data center. The architecture comprises three main components:

• Virtual Gateway: A SDP virtual gateway is deployed in a cloud, data center or a connected gateway in the vehicle depending on the use case. This SDP virtual gateway combines the functions of a Firewall, VPN and application layer gateway in a single virtual appliance by only allowing approved software on authorized devices to connect to protected applications inside the vehicle as well as to the cloud.

• Client: To allow vehicle software processes to connect to protected applications, they must utilize the SDP client which can be embedded inside e.g. an over-the-air (OTA) software management and data client. This SDP/OTA client has three distinct purposes. Firstly, it allows the automotive policy engine to determine the vehicle identity. Secondly, it allows the remote analysis of software and system processes to detect the presence of malware. And lastly, it provides a secure application layer connection between a software process or ECU inside the vehicle to a software process on a cloud application server.

• Controller: Tying the SDP/OTA client and gateway together is a controller. The SDP controller functions as a hub between the client and the gateway as well as external policy systems.

The SDP’s interlocked security controls protect software systems within a vehicle and their data from cybersecurity attacks. All SDP transactions are cryptographically certified to mitigate real-time tampering while the architecture scales to millions of vehicles supporting billions of software modules and ECUs.

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain, also known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), is a decentralized database for ledgers and transactions. Bitcoin, also known as a cryptocurrency, is one of the most famous and widely adopted global virtual currencies in the world and is based on Blockchain. Users gain access to their Bitcoin balance using their private key.

Being immune to a single point of failure and security issues provides a lot of advantages to Blockchain compared to traditional databases. The main advantages of the Blockchain are its immutability, scalability with data security, high data integrity, super transparency (all nodes have visibility into every messaging/transaction metadata) and its ultra-low cost per message/transaction making it very suitable to e.g. micro-payments. Deployments of Blockchain can be either public or private, where, in a public Blockchain (permission-less), any node on the Internet can read from and write to the ledger with appropriate application whereas, in a private Blockchain, all the nodes in the network are known and have explicit permission to read and write the ledger.

The above-mentioned Blockchain characteristics make it ideal for automotive use cases and OEMs could use a private Blockchain as a platform to enhance their overall cybersecurity for vehicles, validate software bills of materials, enable cost-effective micro-payment, strengthen identity management and improve data validation. Examples include pooling of data from vehicles, fleet management, optimize business processes, enable peer-to-peer mobility sharing capabilities that can all disrupt existing business models and improve overall operations.

Combining Software Defined Perimeter and Blockchain for Automotive

Blockchain enables secure messages that can carry a wide variety of payloads from the status of sensors to the delivery of private encryption keys while an SDP provides secure in-vehicle and Internet links. Thus, blockchain messages can be used by ECUs to signal management systems on their status. If a situation requires a secure bi-directional link, an SDP connection can be provisioned from a vehicle-to-cloud resource and, once set up, Blockchain can be used to transmit messages between internal vehicle systems. The combination of SDP and Blockchain technology creates a system that is very lightweight and scalable, and yet has the ability to create secure enclaves when required. In addition to supporting telematics and safety applications, this Blockchain/SDP platform can also support multiple cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum and thereby be a critical digital payment foundation for the automotive ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

Both SDP and Blockchain represent the cutting edge of technology. For example, Gartner listed SDP as one of the most important new technologies in 2017 to reshape the enterprise market. Similarly, Blockchain is being adopted as a secure messaging protocol in a wide variety of applications due to its low cost and high scalability. The automotive industry could adopt both technologies as a foundation for secure OTA software/firmware/content updates, secure data exchange, and autonomous driving communications. Both Blockchain and SDP are open license free public domain standards and both concepts are proven in large-scale critical deployments in areas such as finance and telecommunication. This restriction-free model means that there is no barrier for the automotive industry to adopt and innovative on top of them.

With attacks rising every year, cybersecurity has become one of the most important focal points for the automotive industry. A disruptive approach must be incorporated to battle the threat of against cybersecurity attacks that are becoming more sophisticated each day. With the Blockchain-based SDP, OEMs have a unique solution that can empower the global automotive industry to secure connected cars and autonomous cars with confidence.

Download the complete article Next Gen Auto Cybersecurity w SDP and Blockchain

Webinar on how to protect autonomous vehicles and connected services with SDP

Graham Jarvis assesses the cyber-security risks of emerging autonomous technology.

All the major automakers are currently developing autonomous technologies and solutions for their future autonomous vehicles. These technologies introduce new cyber-security vulnerabilities, and some of which require creative assessment techniques to effectively ensure that they are safe from cyber-attacks that could lead to control of a vehicle being taken over by a criminal acting remotely to either steal it, to extort money from their owners; or to use it with malicious intent to cause death or injury.

A paper published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Cyber-security: An IET/KTN Thought Leadership Review of Risk Perspectives for Connected Vehicles adds several other “cyber-threat motives and targets” to the equation. These include denials of service attacks, fraud and deception, targeted data theft, freight and goods theft, politically motivated ‘hacktivism’, vehicle immobilization, premises security and burglary too unoccupied businesses and homes, industrial espionage, sabotage and terrorism to a very long list of potential cyber-threats and motives for attacking connected and autonomous vehicles.

Emerging vulnerabilities

New technologies and solutions often come with their own benefits, but with them several vulnerabilities often emerge. “As connectivity evolves, and as software and hardware systems become more complex, the chances of vulnerability grow exponentially,” claims Sam Lauzon, automotive cyber-security software developer, Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan. He adds that there isn’t a system on Earth that, “has ever been truly 100% free from vulnerability or flaws, and vehicles are no different”.

“Consider the smart phone security updates occurring monthly – a smartphone isn’t generally responsible for a person’s safety but a vehicle is and the public now demands a vehicle to be ten to hundreds of times more complex with features that aren’t statistically proven to be safe (like Tesla’s Autopilot).”

He notes that it took over 50 years for vehicles to made reasonably safe. That evolution of the automobile began in 1908 with the Model T Ford. Even in 1965 a book claimed that cars were, he says, “unsafe at any speed”. So, given the amount of time, money and energy it has taken to improve the safety of traditional motor vehicles, people shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that modern technology is perfect. However, this is the premise that automotive manufacturers are going to use to sell their connected and autonomous vehicles.

Assess as a whole

David Trossell, CEO and CTO of data acceleration company Bridgeworks adds: “Many of the electronic systems for cars come from specialist product providers, and many have their own cyber-security penetrating tests and detection mechanisms built into their products.” However, the vehicle manufacturers are now integrating a wide array of differing systems and so he advises that they should be tested within the vehicle as a whole system.

The problem is that, with over the air connectivity, a vulnerability in one system could permit an attack to spread to other systems within the vehicle. “Now when we add sensors that are used to survey outside of the vehicle this opens up more possibilities for attack,” he explains. “Many technologies are being used in multiple environments to reduce design and manufacturing time, which leads to a carry-over of issues and concerns from one field to another. (i.e. the problems of your smartphone software are being ported to your car’s infotainment system),” says Lauzon.

Subsequently, assessing the cyber-security risk to the latest technologies is fast becoming a “a cross-domain and multi-discipline task which requires incredible flexibility and creativity to stay ahead of the curve,” he reveals. He adds that, “normal electronics engineering tools, such as spectrum analysis and oscilloscopes are utilised” to identify the wireless characteristics of the radar, LiDAR and ultrasonic sensors of the vehicle. He adds that newer software-defined radio techniques are also taking hold.

Stronger security

Mahbubul Alam, CTO/CMO, Movimento Group, says that it’s not enough to take enterprise IT security, add some modifications and then adapt it to an IoT environment. He stresses that vehicles need better and stronger security than that can offer. So, in his opinion, a new approach is required:

“We need a different approach to address these ever-growing security risks. Something that is safe today, may not be safe tomorrow. We need a foundation of technologies that provides much more inherent security, transparency and immutability. We must ensure that the operational architecture is not one of command and control between the vehicle and the cloud. If the cloud is compromised, the car should still be safe. Or vice-versa, if the car is compromised, the cloud should still be secured.” He thinks this new approach should involve distributed ledger technologies because he claims they will “create inherently secured blocks across the network”.

Understanding vulnerabilities

The Mcity and University of Michigan whitepaper, Assessing Risk: Identifying and Analyzing Cyber-security Threats To Automated Vehicles, underlines the need to understand the vulnerabilities affecting with the vehicles. It also proposes the Mcity Threat Identification Model, which reviews threat agents, potentially vulnerable components of autonomous driving applications – from sensors to GPS systems and databases, and an assessment of the attack methods used by following the STRIDE (Spoof identity, Tampering with data, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service and Election of privilege) classifications developed by Microsoft.

The analysis also looks at the motivations for any potential or actual cyber-attack upon a vehicle, and at the impact it has or may have on the stakeholders. This loss may be financial, or about a loss of privacy and safety. Loss could also be defined as an injury or as death too.

Sensor manipulation

Lauzon adds: “Specific attack tools to specifically manipulate newer types of vehicle sensors don’t really exist in the commercial space. Many of the tools being tested are common, every-day instruments like laser pointers, mirrors and even cardboard cut-outs. When considering attacks originating from the general public, as these local sensor attacks are likely to originate, cost is a huge factor. Nation state actors are unlikely to attempt local vehicle manipulation for any type of large scale attack, simply due to logistical limitations.”

He also finds that autonomous vehicles are very sensitive to sensor manipulation, and even a machine learning algorithm isn’t needed to be trained in “an adversarial way to learn incorrect or inefficient data.” That’s because he says there is currently an inability to accurately identify the decision-making process artificial intelligence (AI) takes, and so “an AI machine learning algorithm can never be 100% safe from a theoretical modeling standpoint.”

The decision-making process may in fact change at any given time – whenever AI learns new information. He concludes that this means that any “safety attestation would have to be performed at every iteration and all of the probabilities [would need to be] tested”. He also claims that this problem intensifies when “malicious individuals are feeding it incorrect data”.

Required: unique solutions

Roger C. Lanctot, director of automotive connected mobility at Strategy Analytics, argues that fundamental architectures need to change to allow hack detection and this requires the automotive environment for unique solutions to address the issues affecting it of low bandwidth, limited memory, low power operating, and of a non-centralized operating environment. Beyond this, there is a consensus that multi-layered cyber-security defense and testing approach is needed to assess the cyber-risks and to protect each and every connected and autonomous vehicle.

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The CASE Framework With the automotive industry making the transition from traditional mobility to smart mobility, we found that most OEMs share a similar outlook. At CES 2018, Mercedes talked about this concept of smart mobility as human-centered innovation.

C – Connected Products Vehicles have been connected to call center/concierge services and infotainment system apps like Spotify and Pandora for quite some time now. Today, they are connected with each other and the surrounding infrastructure to enable automated driving, as well as over-the-air (OTA) software updates to continuously enhance the security and efficiency of the vehicle. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, one in every five vehicles on the road will be connected, amounting to more than 250 million connected vehicles globally.

A – Autonomous Vehicles With Level-2 automated vehicles (driving assist features) already on the roads, many companies are already extensively testing Level-4 and Level-5 automated vehicles (no steering wheel required). Projects are underway to implement these automated fleets in the trucking industry and the public transportation systems of many cities around the world as early as 2019. Mobile shopping stores and autonomous delivery of products are already in the pipeline for OEMs and other tech companies.

S – Shared Economy More than 45 million people in the US alone have used ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft in 2017. The projected growth in the number of users by 2022 is 72.4 million. While these services are currently concentrated in urban areas, the rise of autonomous vehicles on the road will soon extend these services in to the suburbs as well. As the ride hailing industry is expected to grow to $285 billion by 2030, OEMs are partnering with Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing companies to maintain a competitive edge.

E – Electrification With falling battery prices and rapid technology advancements, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates electrified vehicles will take up over 50 percent of the global auto market by 2030. The number of global EV (electric vehicle) charging stations is also forecasted to grow to more than 12.7 million units in 2020 to support the production of pure electric and plug-in hybrids, encouraging more people to buy these vehicles. Stringent government regulations on emissions has also played a major role in the automotive industry’s green efforts.

This CASE framework helps us understand the direction of the automotive industry. In addition to the four main building blocks of connected products, autonomous vehicles, shared economy and electrification of vehicles, OEMs strongly emphasize on putting the customer in the center of this business transformation.

Click here for 1, and 2 of the CASE framework blog series

The advent of autonomous vehicles is not only shifting the way the automotive industry does business, but bringing rise to a whole new industry: the mobility service provider. At Movimento, an Aptiv company, we’ve developed the Inside-Out Smart Mobility model to illustrate the new relationships between consumers, automobiles, OEMs, and mobility service providers.

Smart Cars & Smart Cities It’s evident that fully automated vehicles will start taking over the roads soon. However, to enable these autonomous vehicles, roadways and city infrastructure must also be smart and connected. Initially, the vehicle will have to drive from point A to point B while sharing the roadway with both autonomous and manual driven vehicles, in a safe and efficient way. The consumer may need to influence the route taken. For example, you may need to tell a robo-taxi where exactly to stop in a busy city street so you can safely exit. Or you will need to move a disabled vehicle after an accident. The car may have to handle traffic and transportation infrastructure beyond street signs and crossing lights. It may have to pay for tolls, figure out that a lane is blocked because of a construction site or make way for an emergency vehicle. In some situations, the customer may need additional assistance from the mobility service provider since they may not be familiar with the vehicle and what to do. The operation of the vehicle will drastically change. While there will still be much interaction with the car, consumers will have to authenticate themselves. Consumers will have to communicate destination and route preferences, and in many future mobility service scenarios they will no longer drive themselves. Becoming passengers, time during trips will be used in different ways – productively or for leisure. Becoming passengers, time during trips will be used in different ways – productively or for leisure. Travel time may be used to relax. Alternatively, customers may take on a more active role while on the route, interacting with their surrounding environment, noticing details they were not able to observe and enjoy as a driver.

OEMs & Suppliers Vehicle manufacturers and suppliers are leveraging massive amounts of data generated by autonomous vehicles to create new products and services while improving existing ones. This allows for predictive maintenance of vehicles and early recall detection, while enabling the continuous enhancement of autonomous vehicles through over-the-air software updates. New on-board marketplaces are being developed that will host a variety of third party applications and enable digital billing and payment options. Consumers will be provided with a multitude of entertainment and utility options where they can make a reservation, order food or simply be productive on the go. OEMs and suppliers will continue striving to make the in-vehicle experience safer and more reliable for consumers. Considering the shift of the automotive industry from vehicle ownership to mobility-as-a-service, they are also exploring fleets and fleet management systems. In the mobility services world, consumers do not have to worry about vehicle maintenance and repair themselves. There will be a multitude of aftersales services provided by OEMs and suppliers to the mobility service provider such as fleet management, configuration, monitoring, diagnostics and software update services. Such services may not be end-consumer facing and only contribute indirectly to the consumer’s perception of quality and reliability.

Green Cars & Ride Sharing An increasing demand for electric vehicles (EVs) will drive vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to provide eco-friendly and sustainable options to customers. EVs are becoming popular due to the rising fuel costs and enticing tax rebates. Additionally, consumers value time now more than ever, and with convenient and cost-effective options, people are less concerned about things such as vehicle maintenance and parking. Mobility services will soon take over the automotive industry and include a wide range of transportation services from robo-taxis, ride-hailing and ride-sharing, to a variety of rental and lease services. Mobile stores and autonomous delivery options are going to bring everything that a consumer needs right to their doorstep by providing “on-the-go” e-commerce and dining experiences. From a consumer standpoint, specific vehicle brands of robo-taxis may be less relevant, as long as expectations for cleanliness, space, comfort and convenience are reasonably met. There may be several tiers and “specialty” offerings where the brand of the car may still matter. For rental and lease services, the type of vehicle and brand may still be very relevant. For a ski trip to the mountains, consumers may prefer a car and brand with a high safety reputation. For a family vacation, consumers may splurge for a vehicle that would normally be financially out of reach. In case of accidents or breakdowns, responsibility for cause and dealing with the aftermath may be shared between other parties involved, the mobility service providers and the OEMs. Today’s aviation industry may provide an indication on how the role of mobility service providers and vehicle manufacturers will be viewed. In the aviation industry, consumers pay close attention to the operational reputation of carriers, such as how old the fleet is, how well the fleet is maintained and which planes are in the fleet, as well as the reputation of airplane manufacturers. The automotive industry is likely to follow a similar business model.

Family & Friends Today, many existing automobiles are beyond their utilitarian purpose of transportation and are viewed as a status symbol and a source of self-esteem and recognition. The manufacturer brand may not matter as much as the characteristics of the vehicle itself. Design, convenience, safety, performance and quality of the product are relevant since consumers invest a significant amount of their wealth into the product and are responsible for its operation and upkeep. Since vehicles will not be owned anymore, the vehicle’s role as a source of self-esteem and recognition may be diminished. However, consumers may compensate gaining status and satisfaction by using mobility services. These services may be perceived in society as more modern, technologically advanced and environmentally friendly. Consumers may gain status by sharing rides, providing rides, sharing their cars, driving responsibly, efficiently and safely. Thus, usage monitoring and scoring, usage-based insurance and similar related services gain importance. With mobility services, the consumer’s relationship with automobiles will change significantly, based on the in-vehicle services offered to them. Consumers may further use the newly gained time to socially connect with family, friends and their community. After the home and office, the car will be the third space in which consumers are digitally connected. Next to all the social network and communications services that are already available on the mobile phone, there will be a wide range of new services that are linked to mobility services. For example, parents may want to monitor and ensure that the robo-van brings the kids safely to school and back home, or a student may want to do a background check on the driver who offers a ride-share to the university town three hours away. In each of these quadrants, there will be a multitude of service providers offering a wide range of mobility, safety and security, social and communication services that will be aggregated and personalized by new mobility service providers such as Movimento, an Aptiv company. Smart mobility is changing our relationship with vehicles, fundamentally changing the way we get from point A to point B. This blog is a part of the Smart Mobility series. Read more:

1. Rethinking the automotive industry

2. Millennials make a ‘CASE’ for smart mobility

3. CASE framework: Our customer-centric approach to smart mobility

By the year 2020, an entire new generation will have grown up with mobile phones, high-speed broadband, cloud services and apps for everything at their fingertips. This is mainly due to the ‘digitalization’ of services fueled by the Internet of Things (IoT), which has the power to disrupt every industry and everything around us. It will completely change the way we live, play, work, pay, travel and drive. As connected and software-defined cars become common on urban roads, there will be a considerable number of software devices installed in the vehicles. IoT will offer a stimulus to the car industry by connecting and making use of data through the cloud for the 250 million cars on American roads.

The Convergence of Automotive and IoT

IoT is rapidly transforming the automotive industry from connected cars to autonomous cars, enabling new consumption and monetization models such as car sharing, ride sharing, usage-based insurance, data marketplace and others. Through this convergence, graphical displays, touchscreens, computer graphics, voice control and human gestures are quickly becoming the car’s interface, with electronic sensors and algorithms determining much of the driving experience. The software-driven features coming down the road have new auto infotainment apps but brand-new features such as personalization, Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS) and extensions for car sharing, region-specific adaptations, car-to-home integration, new vehicle safety options and remote mobile control have become a reality because of connectivity and IoT. The increasing scale of data from the vehicle and connected devices represents a remarkable revenue opportunity for the players that can provide insights from data, the value from transactions and new innovative aftermarket services.

Commonalities between Connected Cars and Smartphones

We are constantly updating the apps and the software of our smartphones for various reasons – bug fixes, better security, app improvements, software enhancements and so on. Because smartphones and tablets are mobile and follow us everywhere, it is easy for phone makers to send these update requests. We are compliant because we want the latest and greatest features our phones offer us and are willing to “follow the rules.” We log into our home or work Wi-Fi and, presto, our phones and tablets perform even better for us. Today, the focus is not just on the software needs of mobile gadgets, cars are becoming the next extension of digitally connected devices in our lives. In the mobile and telecom industries, “software” is never a noun, it is a verb, a continuous evolving process through the next release, the next update, and so on. The previous automotive model has been – “sell the car, and it is done.” But today, a typical connected car can have more than 100 million lines of code. When there are so many lines of code, a certain number of bugs are bound to be present. We need to have the capability to deliver the next set of software updates that would not only fix bugs but also provide software and security improvements.

As vehicles take on more electronics and engage with machine learning, behavior learning, ADAS and the like, such features will see continuous improvement in algorithms and software. Putting these improvements to use will require Over-The-Air (OTA) software updates, and automotive grade OTA is the foundation that this practice needs to thrive and survive. Without OTA, there is no connected car security, there is no autonomous car, there is no driverless car because if you cannot improve it using OTA technology, you now have a situation where car owners must go to the dealer and everybody will be out of sync. Take for example, recalls. A study found that around 25 percent of those who receive notice of a recall do not get the repair done, so how do you make sure that vehicles comply with the latest government regulations with regard to security, privacy, certification of interoperability and making sure they have the latest firmware/software? This requires a foundational technology like OTA software and firmware updating capability.

The Era of the Software Defined Car

The Software Defined Car can enable a whole host of revolutionary changes and stretch the adaptability of the car all the way to the end of its physical lifespan — new innovations and feature improvements to meet changing consumer demands the entire time the car is in service.

The Software Defined Car is not just about downloading new apps to the car. It is about letting the car’s function be defined by software components that stitch together the environmental sensors, safety systems, mechanical linkages and visual interfaces to build a vehicle where the function can be redefined after it has shipped. This enables new business models. For example, car-sharing services could allow members to store their preferences in the cloud and then download them to the vehicle, not just streaming music or apps but the way the car drives or how much horsepower it has. The OEM can offer its customers an upgrade for higher horsepower or more mileage per battery charge for an upgrade fee, just like Tesla does.

Millennials are expected to account for 75 percent of the three billion global workforce by 2025 and are currently the largest living generation in the United States. This generation has less money to spend and are putting off major purchases like houses, cars and luxury goods or avoiding them entirely. They are turning to a new set of services that provide access to products without the burden of ownership, thus giving rise to a “sharing economy.” With instant access to price comparisons, product information and peer reviews, this generation is looking for the brands that offer the most value at the lowest possible costs.

Millennials are also in the active pursuit of being healthy and using eco-friendly products, driving the industry to make significant decisions about the products they are building. Their affinity for technology is a key driver in the future of smart mobility. These insights have driven us to create the CASE framework, the fundamental pillars of automotive transformation.

This outlook on the future of mobility consumption clearly illustrates the need for new automotive business models that cater to the evolving needs of consumers that include green, on-demand and great user experience mobility options.

The Future of Mobility Consumption What does the future of mobility look like? Who will consume these transportation services in the near future? Arthur D. Little, in his research “Future of Mobility 2020”, defines the seven types of mobility consumers of the future:

• Greenovators: Sparking green innovation and taking up the majority, these mobility consumers will be primarily interested in smart, green and sustainable mobility options. They will demand the integration of ecological mobility concepts oriented toward their own personal well-being and the good of society.

• Family Cruisers: There will be an increase in the fragmentation of family and friends network, resulting in an increased demand of customized mobility options for these consumers.

• High-Frequency Commuters: They will be extremely mobile job nomads, who are on their way to work, to meet customers/ business partners and for short-term projects. They will be able to organize themselves in carpools at short notice and would prefer ride-sharing and short-term car rental options.

• Silver Drivers: These comprise of a new generation of older people that will predominantly choose vehicles that will meet their comfort requirements. They have a wide variety of mobility interests and are extremely active in their leisure life.

• Global Jet Setters: This group is always en-route between the major cities of the world. They demand mobility options that offer them the feeling of comfort and productivity.

• Sensation Seekers: These mobility consumers will view cars as the ultimate objects of experience and will be ready to pay for it. They will link driving to attributes like freedom, fun and pleasure and demand a multimedia networking experience with maximum safety.

• Low-End Users: A significant segment of mobility consumers will no longer be able to afford individual mobility to the extent they do now due to rising fuel prices and government regulations. They will drive the demand for efficient and inexpensive mobility solutions.

Click here for part 1 and 3 of our blog series.

Mahbubul Alam, CTO and CMO of the Movimento Group makes that clear. “If we use DSRC for V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything), we have to spend billions of dollars to build the infrastructure for V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure),” he begins. “A new infrastructure has to be built along with a roadmap that shows the return on investment and the ownership of the project, which would probably be government. 5G has the advantage of cellular technology and carriers that are interested in rolling out different use cases. In this scenario, the carriers pick up the bill for the infrastructure and logically separate it out for mobile internet, smart grids, connected devices, autonomous vehicles and so on. They can monetise the technology in different ways and the infrastructure remains shared.”

Another helpful string to 5G’s bow is that it is an enhancement of existing technologies, so can operate in a complementary way. In that sense 5G creates a bridge, as Niclas Nygren, Volvo’s senior director for strategy and innovation, vehicle software and electronics explains: “4G capabilities, bandwidth and latency, work well with current connectivity services and autonomous cars at AD level 1-4 and will be sufficient for several years. 5G capabilities, bandwidth, latency, network capacity, will enable more advanced and demanding sensor sharing for autonomous Level 5 V2V. During roll-out of 5G, customers will initially experience patches of high bandwidth 5G but most of the time fall back to 4G capabilities. Thanks to the same base technology the handover will be seamless. You will not initially be able to run services that rely on a continuous 5G connection but, even in a limited 5G coverage scenario, increased bandwidth at your home for vehicle software and map updates will give increased customer value.”

Is 5G as secure as DSRC?

Breaches of cyber security are making the headlines in every sphere of life where the amount of digital information generated is expanding. Can 5G be safe and private enough for increasingly autonomous driving? “Communication security and privacy was carefully designed from the very beginning into DSRC-based V2X,” cautions Andre Weimerskirch, UMTRI’s associate research scientist, cybersecurity. “While I expect security that protects against forged V2X over-the-air messages can be directly ported to cellular-based V2X (C-V2X) the privacy implications have to be considered. For instance, it needs to be checked whether cellular V2X communication leaves any trace that allows tracking of vehicles, or mapping of transmissions to a real-world identifier such as a phone number or vehicle ID. To my best knowledge, no such evaluation has been performed yet, but I believe there are planned efforts in the pipeline.”

Weimerskirch doesn’t see the obstacles to these privacy and security issues as insurmountable though. “Securing wireless interfaces and protecting in-vehicle computing against hackers can be approached with typical best-practice mechanisms,” he adds. “I don't expect any significant differences between DSRC and cellular-based V2X.”

Where’s the testing at?

Urban test beds for V2V and V2X in New York and Tampa Bay in the US have been well-documented but the experts we talked to weren’t sure of the future of such schemes. “The results of these test beds have been a mixed bag,” Lanctot puts it bluntly. “They are a revelation for cities that have not previously taken a deep dive into transportation data and focused on life-saving applications and technologies. Unfortunately, it is a ‘too-little, too-late’ proposition and the funds available for wider deployment are non-existent.”

5G Cellular V2X may still have a long way to go in setting standards and testing but Volvo’s Nygren says all of that is on its way. “5G C-V2X basically aims at solving the same problem in the same frequency band in a slightly different way but details of the standard are yet to be defined, roaming issues need to be solved and massive testing is needed to validate the technology…Definitely, there will be a lot of test and trial activities from 2018 onwards.”

As Movimento’s Alam concludes: “The key message is that the window for DSRC to be implemented and become successful is only becoming smaller. No country has billions of dollars to roll out this dedicated infrastructure only for vehicle safety.”

The article was first published in TU Automotive

https://www.tu-auto.com/connected-car-battle-lines-are-drawn/