I’ve spent my adult life working in and around the automotive industry. After earning a mechanical engineering degree from GMI I spent the next 17 years working on electronic control systems that help cars stop, go and change direction before I drove away to write about what other engineers were creating.
One of the big trends in the last few years is a move by many of the larger automakers build more of their vehicle software in-house. Among those that have elected to go down this path is General Motors with its upcoming Ultifi platform. However, a major downside of every automaker creating a unique software platform and expecting suppliers and third-party developers to create applications and services is that not everyone has the resources to support multiple platforms.
This approach meant that if the hardware needed to change, major parts of the application would also need to be rewritten or a software update may require hardware changes as well. The abstraction layer actually does the communication to the underlying hardware including sensors, actuators, and compute platforms. It also provides APIs that any application can call to perform various functions.
There is a potential downside though. With dozens of major automakers globally, if each had unique APIs, suppliers and third-party developers would have to rewrite their code for every vehicle and most don’t have the resources to do this on a regular basis. This is what happened in the mobile device space and led to the demise of platforms like Windows Phone and other competitors to Android and iOS. Apps were compatible across platforms, and without apps, consumers wouldn’t buy the devices.
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