Effectively achieving the software-defined-vehicle (SDV) transition means breaking old habits

While automakers are embracing the need to make the SDV transformation to keep pace with the disruptive newcomers challenging the status quo, the path forward is proving to be more complex than anticipated. With the converging trends of hardware consolidation, electrification, AI, and always-on internet connectivity, today’s automotive environment offers a unique opportunity to reimagine the entire vehicle electronics development and deployment processes. But like many other entrenched industry sectors that have made significant transformations, established practices can impede progress. 
We often observe a development process which remains highly sequential, where hardware decisions and board support firmware are prioritized, before meaningful progress on upper software layers can begin. Additionally, proprietary operating systems, tightly coupled to each new hardware design, are still the rule in automotive. These operating systems generally require lengthy commercial negotiation for licensing and access before development can begin, causing costly delays early in the software development cycle. 
Given the recognition that a more software-centric approach is required, it certainly means bringing in more software talent and adopting agile DevOps methodologies, but balancing this against profitability constraints can be challenging, as many have already discovered. Seeking outside expertise to best establish new practices and get the most out of new software technologies can be helpful here.

Managing Mixed-Criticality Workloads

And since we now have more consolidated hardware platforms in the vehicle, running  mixed-criticality workloads, where safety and non-safety applications must run on the same operating system and hardware instances, can reduce costs and make the software architecture more efficient. Historically, virtual machines (VMs) have been widely used to provide strong isolation between workloads. However, relying exclusively on VMs has drawbacks. Among these are that VMs require higher resource overhead, increased complexity in system management and software updates, which is a problem for vehicles where power and cost constraints are significant optimization concerns and safe, efficient software updates are essential.
These traditional approaches are understandable, although all indications are that transition efforts are moving along slowly and faster progress is required to remain competitive in this SDV transformation. Red Hat can certainly help enable automakers to accomplish this, as we have participated in many major industry transitions, and in many ways, we are seeing history repeat itself. The telecom infrastructure industry’s transition to software-defined networking (SDN) holds many parallels to what is happening in the automotive sector right now. It's worth retracing those steps briefly to understand these parallels and benefit from the lessons learned there to move faster.

Learning from the Telecom industry’s SDN transformation

Twenty-five years ago, communications networks relied on fixed-function, bespoke hardware with tightly-coupled bespoke software. They were hard to maintain, update and reuse. The first major step was a concerted effort to move to more standardized, blade hardware systems and transition to open source Linux for administrative modules. With the advent of software-defined network design breakthroughs, with a complete separation of hardware and software, they moved to standardized enterprise server platforms with virtual network functions which could run on any vendor’s hardware. The leading Telecom providers also rallied their supply chain into open, collaborative communities to co-develop common middleware, reducing duplication of efforts and leveraging the community-driven innovation pace of modern, cloud native technologies and containerization. Adopting container technologies was particularly impactful, resulting in improved resource utilization, increased scalability and the ability to deliver safer, finer-grained software updates to the network elements.

What can the automotive industry learn from this example?

Like the automotive industry, telecom providers and their suppliers embodied a conservative, risk-averse culture and initially had similar uncertainties about open source, open collaboration, and hardware abstraction. But, in the end, after taking the aforementioned steps in their SDN transition, the Telcos were able to realize greater agility, faster time to market, increased flexibility and choice in their supply chain, and a lower total cost of ownership, without sacrificing business-critical uptime and performance. The automotive industry can realize all of the same benefits, following the same path. The time to act is now.

Recommendations for success for acceleration the SDV transition

We believe the imperative for automakers here is to move faster, with greater resource efficiency and cost effectiveness, taking advantage of modern, open technologies, leveraging community and the broader ecosystem. We can point to several specific recommendations as follows. 
Today there are innovative virtual platform environments exhibiting unprecedented performance levels for starting software development in the cloud, independent of hardware to accelerate timelines. Embracing open source to start development immediately, without waiting for complicated licensing and commercial agreements to get started, can save months of lost time. Automakers must foster open collaboration across the supply chain through shared tooling and open standards and adopt DevOps methodologies and modern, cloud native technologies to enable rapid, continuous innovation required for the SDV. This includes utilizing containerization in order to avoid the drawbacks noted earlier in relying solely upon VMs, and to enjoy similar benefits that the Telcos realized as outlined in that discussion above. 

Red Hat and its expansive ecosystem, is here to help you execute on these recommendations.

By embracing modern, standardized open source operating systems such as the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System, software development can begin immediately in leading edge virtual platform environments in the cloud before the target hardware is even available. 
And Red Hat also brings an extensive hybrid cloud portfolio of cloud-native software development solutions to enable efficient establishment of a continuous “software factory”, capable of delivering software innovation throughout the vehicle lifecycle.

Finally, Red Hat is on track to deliver a General Availability release of Red Hat In-Vehicle OS, with a product certification as a Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) based on ISO 26262 ASIL-B standard, in the summer of 2025. And crucially, with continuous re-certification baked into the Red Hat In-Vehicle OS release process, customers can count on taking advantage of regular updates that a Red Hat subscription offers, without extensive delays.
Automakers can benefit from Red Hat’s leadership in delivering a safety-certified, efficient Linux platform solutions to enable them to shift left much sooner, get to market faster, with greater software reuse across models and model years, and at a lower total cost of ownership.