• Opinion
I crave a car that gets me. It knows not just static information – my in-vehicle entertainment preferences – but can dynamically adjust the level of information I need while driving.
Continental showed off at the CES 2023 a curved ultrawide display (1.29 meters). The tier one claims that individual areas of the screen, when not needed, can be dimmed locally. (Image: Continental)
What’s at stake:
Everyone’s mimicking Tesla, pioneer of the software-defined vehicle. Software will buttress next-generation vehicle architectures. But shouldn’t carmaker imagination reach further, to a vehicle defined by user experience?
The “software-defined vehicle” is a convenient and overused terminology when auto industry types discuss the architecture of future vehicles. The term implies a car whose functions and performance can be patched, fixed, and updated over the air. Such software can alter and improve control, for example, of a vehicle’s firmware and entertainment system.
But c’mon. Can’t we do better than that?