How will we engineer tomorrow's always up-to-date and on-purpose mobility solutions?

The automotive landscape is being reshaped by two exogenous factors: the need for increased user and usage centricity and the progressive yet unstoppable shift towards sustainable mobility.

These factors are already changing today’s automotive industry. Differentiated car usage and CO2 emission constraints are accelerating the need for new and innovative propulsion systems. Witness the shift towards hybrid or fully electric powertrains, especially for urban cars, and the exploratory moves towards hydrogen propulsion for extended-range mobility solutions. Configurable and modular embedded software means cars can increasingly modify their behavior to better meet their driver’s intent for increased fuel efficiency, performance, or comfort. At the same time, they have become more personalized and a social marker for their owner, offering an immense variety of customizable options.

With the accelerated rise of software and reshuffling of the mobility sector, carmakers will get to the next stage of creating automotive and mobility experiences - configurable and modular vehicles. These vehicles can be profoundly reconfigured to best meet their current usage. Intelligent and connected software adapts car behavior to the driving environment and driver habits. Adjustable hardware such as modular cargo solutions or switchable propulsion units can be matched to meet new load carrying and driving range needs. Making cars more modular and reconfigurable along their lifecycle – starting from the production stage, makes upgrades simpler, cars more adaptable to evolving needs, and retrofits more straightforward. It allows each car to change over time to meet its ownership needs.

To enable this flexibility, carmakers need to evolve their engineering and conception processes, push standardization of both hardware and software to the next level, develop new modular platforms, and create deeper catalogs of options communalized across their product range. Such concepts will also impact vehicle production processes spanning body and trim assembly, painting/coloring, electronics module mounting and wiring, and software configuration. They will also create new monetizable services to evolve the car along its ownership cycle, keeping it up-to-date or adapting it to changing fashion or clients’ preferences. It will also catalyze the development of the used car market by enabling profound refurbishment of vehicles, allowing used car clients to access options more tailored to their requirements. This model finally opens a clear and pragmatic path to a more sustainable automotive industry. It extends car lifecycles by years or decades (vs. ten to twelve years today), makes repairs more manageable, and offers the possibility of recycling or repurposing only a part of the vehicle.

Many carmakers have understood this shift, are experimenting with this concept, and are developing microservices-based software architecture that will enable this transition. The most innovative companies have even started developing disruptive physical ideas and platforms to capture the opportunity entirely. However, all these initiatives are yet at the inception phase: the race has just begun to become tomorrow’s leader of the “always up-to-date and on-purpose” mobility industry.

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