Open Mobility Coopetition: How we can provide quality and choice for users, win in business and reach sustainability

31.5.2023

Co-authored by: Max Senges ( 42 Berlin 42 Wolfsburg ), Michael Plagge ( Eclipse Foundation ), Daniel Lueddecke ( 微软 ), Ansgar Lindwedel (he/him) ( Bosch / ETAS ), Peter Fintl ( Capgemini Engineering ), and Thomas Fleischmann ( CARIAD / 大众 )?

Mobility has always been a collaborative ecosystem, both in terms of multimodality (users combining several modes of transportation), as well as in the development, production and maintenance of the various vehicles - with OEMs orchestrating a multitude of highly specialized supplier companies.

New approaches for how stakeholders in these ecosystems cooperate to meet ever increasing end customer requirements have previously resulted in several disruptive innovation waves. Today, the industry faces the most challenging and impactful transformations in its history: the paradigm shift towards digital vehicles.

In this article a team of collaborators from across the wide spectrum of future mobility stakeholders has put together their analysis and pitch for the use of Open Source software in the car of tomorrow and to join the Eclipse Open Source venture around the Software-defined Vehicle. We believe together we can create a future in which all parties win in business AND succeed in providing more sustainable mobility systems, safer traffic and increased user satisfaction.

On its journey towards becoming a software-driven industry, automotive companies had to learn -sometimes the hard way - that the traditional collaboration model for collaboration across the value chain has reached its limitations. While before it was understood that a cooperation was encouraged on the level of specifications, the ownership of the IP itself was shared with a limited number of defined parties.

In today’s emerging development ecosystems where the speed of innovation, optimization of costs as well as resilience of value chains is imperative, we believe that Open Source components are an essential part of the solution. By design Open Source allows for collaboration among the contributors to create a shared vision that identifies their overlapping goals and then to cooperate towards those goals.?

There are many intricacies regarding how individual participants can or should adapt their business models, technical R&D, and organizational practices in order to reap the benefits and overcome the challenges. However, especially in the re-emergent two system world economy, it is exactly this set of abilities - to openly cooperate and compete on open markets - that is essential to outperform closed and centralized economic and technical systems.

This open paradigm also comes with the substantial strategic advantage that it is superior for learning and innovation.?

The Pitch

The fundamental vector of making Eclipse SDV successful, as we are embarking on this open joint-venture, is to develop and align on a shared vision for the desired result . Here is what we are working together to build:

• Safety for road users → the unquestionable argument in favor of driving automation is the radical reduction of accidents, esp. deadly accidents from more than 1350000 in 2016 to close to zero. We believe that open source components - both in the development toolchain as well as in the functional areas of the product itself - have the potential to bring such systems faster, safer and more affordable to road users worldwide. Open sourced standards will ensure that collaborative, assisted or automated driving will help to reduce accidents, free up people from driving tasks,? optimize traffic flow to reduce energy consumption - all to increase mobility? users satisfaction.

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• Security for vehicles → In the past, the automotive industry ensured security of their systems by a close control of their interfaces and obscure functionality. In modern vehicles, where numerous control units are tightly connected via bus systems and where vehicles must be “always-online” those concepts look increasingly outdated. As demonstrated by the IT industry for years, cybersecurity is significantly more solid in open systems than in closed walled gardens. Linux based Open Operating Systems and open servers such as Apache keep the global Internet up and running for more than two decades. A second strong argument of open source security is that regulators around the world want to ensure fast moving passenger devices are well-secured. By collaborating on solid cybersecurity, companies can reduce homologation and certification costs. Again with open source and open standards, everybody (except the bad guys) wins (and saves money) when all stakeholders co-create our security architectures and practices.

• Interoperability → to enable a race-to-the-top when it comes to interoperability, openness has another set of very tangible benefits: users can travel from one smart city to the next without having to bother to setup new parking apps, etc. And, of course, we need an international standard for vehicles to interact with traffic management systems (yes there will continue to be traffic lights in the future; we need backward compatibility). Furthermore, just as we can use any gas station on the planet, we need one charging system that allows us to charge all vehicles (at least those using the same energy source). In addition, interoperability and standardization are at the core of car sharing systems, allowing for a seamless end user transition from one service to another.???

• Last, but certainly not least, the killer argument: Affordability → for the past decade, the automotive industry struggled to meet end customer requirements (especially when it comes to software). At the same time, billions of dollars have been spent to develop new vehicle platforms, while suffering enormous pains throughout the software integration processes, and delaying important SOPs of new vehicles. In a nutshell: they were not building vehicles to meet customer expectations (at least from a software perspective), all while spending way too much money, and shipping too late. This is a complete nightmare for maintaining or building a healthy business. Hence, designing, developing, and maintaining SDVs is the most viable path to provide affordability, not only for those buying the products, but also for the ones having them as core of their business. One of the factors leading to software SOP delays is insufficient modularity and reusability, as well as outdated toolchain ecosystems. Both of these issues are, at least partially, addressed by collaboration in the open.?

To summarize, the Eclipse SDV opportunity is to be part of jointly developing an ecosystem of modular core-functionalities that help everyone save costs, ensure smooth orchestration etc. At the same time, the OEMs and mobility providers still have all the opportunities (and challenges) to win the hearts of the users by providing unique offerings through: design, interfaces, quality, synergies in product ecosystems, etc.?

To grow the talent that spreads the ecosystem, Eclipse SDV has partnered with SEA:ME an Open Education program that allows all stakeholders to use and evolve the educational materials necessary to train the next generation of engineers. Again, stakeholders not only share the investment, but also benefit from the speed and breadth of evolution of the learning.?

The Roadmap

So what might be the different steps to reach the blessed land of a mature Open Software-defined Vehicle?

• We have done the First Step: The Eclipse SDV Working Group (SDV) has been founded to tackle those challenges and to bring Open Source in critical parts of future vehicles. The last months have been really exciting because a significant constellation of stakeholders - Bosch, Microsoft, Mercedes, VW/Cariad, General Motors, Continental, ZF to name a few - have gathered and build a critical mass at the Eclipse SDV Working Group by contributing actual code to the SdV open source codebase. They all have skin-in-the-game, so now we can move to phase two:?
• Development of a shared Vision and Roadmap: we all know that the map is not the territory and no-one can fully map out the future. But, with a shared vision stakeholders are able to align their different goals in order to influence and drive a successful outcome. So starting today we embark on the challenge of defining an engineering vision through which we can all win over the business leadership within our various companies, and thereby unlock the necessary investments in expert-time and monetary resources.
• While more and more stakeholders put their entrepreneurial and strategic prowess (and their resources) into the Eclipse SDV community, the founding engineering community must produce a series of small wins to prove the concept and build trust.?
• At the same time, the technical architectures and development roadmaps to realize the vision need to be put together by the most senior engineers. These proposals must stand the stress-test of being? scrutinized from an engineering point of view. This is extremely important as we must realize the promise of delivering the best possible technical solution, and avoid being hijacked by individual business or political interests. The community must? be able to rely on experienced professionals that can develop high quality software and guide less experienced contributors.?

Eclipse SDV has the potential to provide the path for a highly attractive secure, safe and interoperable technical ecosystem as well as entrepreneurially rewarding scenarios for all participating stakeholders. Certainly there are numerous challenges when it comes to replicating the success of open source software in an environment of safety critical, highly-demanding systems. But we are strongly convinced that we can jointly solve those challenges of safety assurance, quality and liability.

We are looking forward to collaborating on this joint venture - not last because we have only one planet earth, thus coopetition in pursuing the paths with the best chances to reach sustainability fast must be imperative!?????????????????

The Call to action

Join us and become part of the conversation. To create the shared vision and roadmap, and deliver results, we need everybody with an educated opinion about future architectures to be engaged. This is no “standing at side and commenting in private” venture.?

Take action and become part of the discussion and software development; right below this post and/or by joining the collaboration at https://sdv.eclipse.org .