Empowering the Automotive lndustry – The New Road Ahead for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Authors

Dipl.-Ing. R. Lokner MBA, Microsoft Corp, Redmond, USA

Year

2020

Print Info

Fortschritt-Berichte VDI, Reihe 12, Nr. 813

Summary

Digital transformation is fundamentally reshaping the automotive industry, thanks to changing customer expectations and the rise of the cloud, advanced analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other breakthrough technologies. Cars are increasingly becoming connected, creating new opportunities for automotive manufacturers (OEMs), Tier one suppliers, and ecosystem partners. A connected car solution is the starting point for seizing these opportunities. Autonomous vehicles are the logical next step in this connected, mobile future, and they will lead to a reimagining of everything from the roads we drive on to the cities and environments we drive in.
Research and development activities dedicated to autonomous vehicle technology are well underway, yet automotive manufacturers are already experiencing roadblocks. Producing a streamlined, end-to-end workflow across all phases of autonomous vehicle development from data ingestion and preparation to training and simulation to building and validating autonomous vehicle software is a challenging technical and logistical endeavor with tremendous compute and data storage requirements. Test fleets are dispersed across the globe, generating vast amounts of data that must be ingested, processed, and trained at scale in a cost-effective manner. As technology evolves, this data will continue to explode, and an on-premises approach will no longer be a feasible solution from a cost and speed-to-market perspective. Only the cloud has the power, flexibility, and scalability to support these data-rich and compute-intensive workloads, freeing up bottlenecks across the end-to-end workflow and facilitating multi-user scenario execution leading to safe driving algorithms.