Digital Sustainability and Digital Diversification: The Two Key Challenges for Automotive Software Development

The personal car is experiencing a drastic shift regarding the properties desired by customers. Traditionally, customers focused on physical qualities of the car, such as durability, safety, and fuel-economy. While these qualities are still relevant, the integration of the car into customers’ digital ecosystems becomes more important. Customers expect digital functions, which they use in other environments (home, mobile phone), to work seamlessly in the car. Such functions are, for example, music streaming and video streaming, virtual games, and text, audio and video communication.In this experience report, we describe two main challenges of such in-car digital functions: (i) digital sustainability: the need to continuously update and expand digital functions over the course of cars’ lifetimes and (ii) digital diversification: the need to address drastically different customer demands regarding digital functions in global markets. Given these challenges, we motivate that multi-purpose in-car software platforms will need to be established to address these key challenges in the future.