Is software the ‘primary driver of value creation’? The BMW iX3 is a software-defined vehicle but doesn’t feel it
The question “is this new car a software-defined vehicle?” gets a response for which the clichéd term ‘Gallic shrug’ could have been invented.
It would only have been bettered if the engineer had a Gauloises hanging nonchalantly from her mouth as she did it, but even in France I suppose that’s frowned upon indoors these days.
Glances are exchanged between engineers and executives and designers while they consider the answer. They’re aware that other companies – most notably BMW with its Neue Klasse EVs – have used the term ‘software-defined’ recently. And I think they feel as I do about it. What does it even mean? No idea, mate. It is, as they put it, “an industry buzzword”, so they put it back to the interviewer: what would make it software-defined? He’s not entirely sure either.
Nor am I. And our friends at the Car Design Research agency share some of this scepticism. “Understanding what this tangibly is and how it actually adds value is at best murky,” they say.
My best understanding of ‘software-defined’ is that it is a vague concept. There are two aspects to a vehicle, I suppose, and both are in some ways influenced by software.
First, there are the vehicle dynamics, or the driving experience, and in all new cars software plays some kind of part here. Even in the Ariel Atom, which has entirely mechanical brakes and steering and gearshift and clutch, the throttle response is still to a degree defined by software: the engine responds as fast as it can while remaining within emissions compliance.
By the time you have a car with by-wire throttle, brakes and perhaps even steering, and if it has adaptive suspension, most of the driving experience is controlled, if not exactly defined, by software. As a driver, you’re only ever interacting with software, while it’s interpreting what you want and telling the hardware. Does that make your car software-defined? It could.
Second, there are a vehicle’s other systems – anything not involved in controlling its driving. Such as the fan blower on my 23-year-old Audi A2, which steadfastly refuses to do what I tell it, because there’s a circuit board or some lines of code telling it to do something else. It’s 100% software-controlled at that point, but I don’t think you would hear engineers or marketers saying it’s software-defined, even though its behaviour is certainly (and infuriatingly) not defined by me.
And the more of this interaction with software rather than hardware you have, the closer a car is to becoming fully software-defined, presumably.
One industry executive recently wrote to me to, er, define ‘software-defined’: “[It] refers to a paradigm shift where the vehicle’s core functions and features are no longer hardwired into physical components but are instead controlled, enhanced and updated through software.
“This approach decouples hardware from functionality, enabling continuous innovation, over-the-air updates and rapid deployment of new services throughout the vehicle’s life cycle.
“In an SDV, software becomes the primary driver of differentiation and value creation.” Does it still sound a little buzzwordy to you? Evidently to my shrugging companions, any definition does.
The curious thing for me is that the best thing about the BMW iX3, the first car based on BMW’s new software-defined platform, is the way it drives – on passive coil springs, with passive dampers and conventional anti-roll bars. The steering is electrically assisted, sure, but the steering wheel is hard-connected to the wheels. What defines how competitive and compelling I found this SDV was not its software at all but very much its hardware-defined driving experience.
I can’t tell you what the new French car in question is yet, other than it’s electric. Does it contain software? For sure, lots of it, much more than its predecessor. Does that make it software-defined? Its makers would think not, or perhaps shrug and suggest that it is, if you really like to put it that way.
Cars will inevitably get more and more software and increasingly we will be interacting with it more than we are hardware as time goes on. The best cars, I think, will be those in which you don’t realise, being convinced you’re just driving and the car is doing what you tell it.
