Cultural Clashes In The Making Of Intelligent Electric Vehicles
Dr. Shaoshan Liu is the founder/CEO of PerceptIn, Autonomous Mobile Clinics project lead at BeyonCa and Asia Chair of IEEE Entrepreneurship.
The term “intelligent electric vehicle” (IEV) naturally signifies the integration of intelligence into the car-making process. Traditional car engineering is already a very complex process; the making of IEVs adds additional complexities, as it requires talents from many other industries such as internet services and software engineering.
These talents all come from very different backgrounds with a wide spectrum of work cultures. The mingling of these cultures presents a unique challenge to IEV OEMs and, if not well-managed, could lead to failures of product launches or—even worse—safety problems.
In this article, I will attempt to explain the cultural clashes in the making of IEVs and provide a few recommendations based on my own experiences.
In the past two decades, internet and software companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have dominated the technology world. Technology talents from these companies have spilled over to other industries and have made a significant impact. The IEV industry is no exception, as it demands talent from these companies to bring innovations into IEVs.
Many of these talents are accustomed to fast-paced iterative innovations—such that new product ideas pop up daily and features are defined and evolved quickly. This innovation culture has enabled many internet startups to expand rapidly through iteratively adapting their products to fit the needs of their target users. For instance, simple A/B testing would enable product managers and developers to quickly decide whether or not a feature is beneficial.
Nonetheless, in the IEV business, things have changed; whether it is a startup or an established company, you have only one chance. When you launch the car, either you make it or fail at it. You do not have the capital or time to continuously refine a car to meet customer needs. Hence, adapting an internet-style innovation culture could lead to disasters in the IEV business.
Car making is a complex engineering task, and its core culture emphasizes stability, reliability and safety. In the early stage of car definition, everything needs to be defined and not changed afterward, and everyone needs to follow the same schedule. Missing a deadline pretty much means the end of the world in the car business.
In addition, to ensure reliability, car OEMs often collaborate deeply with established suppliers, as more reliable components always prevail over more innovative components. To ensure safety, long and comprehensive tests have to be conducted before a car can be released to the market. There’s no time to introduce new feature ideas for the cars when the cars are being tested.
Continuing with this development culture will ensure that newcomers in the IEV business will phase your company out.
As you can expect, when these two groups of people begin working together, it can start a war. The software developers would accuse the car engineers of lacking an understanding of innovation and living in the fossil age. Conversely, the car engineers would accuse the software developers of being naïve regarding engineering complexity. Soon, these people would no longer talk to each other, and your IEV product would turn out to be a weird animal.
There are arguments for decoupling car engineering and software engineering by exposing a commonly agreed-upon interface. While this could be ideal, we are entering the stage of scenario-driven car-making in which a feature may start from a human-machine interface but end in a controller in the chassis. The software developers and the car engineers have to work closely to make this happen.
While I am also eager to develop a formal methodology to address this problem, I can only provide a few practical suggestions at this point.
1. I believe the role of project management is crucial to the success of an IEV product. A few years back, I would agree that world-class software developers were the key to success, especially with Tesla’s success in integrating many advanced software features into IEVs. After going through the process myself, I believe Tesla had some great project managers (likely Elon Musk himself) who understood both software innovations and car engineering and who were able to develop reasonable goals and judge along the IEV-making process which features could reliably and safely be integrated into the product. After all, integrating intelligence into electric vehicles adds complexity to engineering management and demands a new generation of project managers who are not there just to enforce a process but also have a deep understanding of both worlds.
2. IEVs have a 10-year life cycle, and not all great features can be presented at the product launch. Make sure you overprovision your products with enough computing power and sensors so that future features can be smoothly integrated into the IEVs without jeopardizing existing features. In addition, ensure that you have a great over-the-air (OTA) update team to avoid software update disasters.
3. Some teams are decoupled in the traditional car-making business—for example, the software team and the E/E architecture team. In the making of IEVs, however, you want to make sure that these teams report to the same boss. Otherwise, when you get near product launch, your software may not fit in your hardware, and you’ll have to rush to your poor tier-one supplier for firefighting.
In summary, this cultural clash problem not only applies to IEVs, as technology products are becoming more complex. Hopefully, as more IEV products reach the market, a more formal methodology can be developed to manage the ever-increasing complexity of technology products. This methodology by itself would be a great feat of technology and engineering management.
