It’s anybody’s guess when it comes to future demand for EVs. KPMG is the latest to put a perspective out on the subject – drastically slashing timelines for EV adoption based on a survey of senior industry executives. KPMG says the surveyed executives reported a median expectation for EV adoption by 2030 to 35% of sales from 65% … Read More
The Smartphone Snitch in Your Pocket
The story in the New York Times came with a sensational headline: “Couple in Car Survive 300-foot Fall into a Canyon.” The canyon in question was Monkey Canyon in the Angeles National Forest outside Los Angeles and the couple survived, so the story goes, thanks to their satellite-connectivity-enhanced iPhone.
This is the kind… Read More
Regulators Wrestle with ‘Explainability’
The letter from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shines a bright spotlight on a major weakness of current automated vehicle technology – explainability. The letter is in reply to a request for comment from interested parties by NHTSA… Read More
Functional Safety for Automotive IP
Automotive engineers are familiar with the ISO 26262 standard, as it defines a process for developing functional safety in electronic systems, where human safety is preserved as all of the electronic components are operating correctly and reliably. Automotive electronics have now grown to cover dozens of applications, and… Read More
Don’t Lie to Me
Some things just really rile me up. Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. Bernie Madoff explaining his investment strategy. Elon Musk inveighing against restrictions on free speech. But there is a new candidate for boiling my blood – word of a potential merger of vehicle data aggregators Wejo and Otonomo.
These two… Read More
Hyundai’s Hybrid Radio a First
Current owners of a wide range of Hyundai connected cars encompassing multiple model years are receiving or have received notification of the availability (i.e. eligibility) for a software upgrade that will connect their in-vehicle radio to the Internet. For those owners who receive and have this update installed they may not… Read More
Mobility is Dead; Long Live Mobility
What the hell is going on in the automotive industry. Every automotive executive is talking mobility, mobility, mobility while simultaneously divesting every mobility asset that has been amassed over the past 10 years of surging mobility mania.
The latest spinoff of a mobility asset was Volkswagen’s sale of its WeShare car … Read More
Configurable Processors. The Why and How
Configurable processors are hot now, in no small part thanks to RISC-V. Which is an ISA rather than a processor, but let’s not quibble. Arm followed with configurability in Cortex-X. Both were considerably preceded (a couple of decades) by Synopsys ARC® RISC CPUs and CEVA DSPs. Each stressed configurability as a differentiator… Read More
Requiem for a Self-Driving Prophet
In a few short years, self-driving tech enfant terrible George Hotz managed to get a rebuff from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a brush back from both the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) while single-handedly inventing the aftermarket for autonomous vehicle technology. … Read More
MIPI in the Car – Transport From Sensors to Compute
I’ve written on and off about sensors, ML inference of the output of those sensors and the application of both in modern cars. Neither ADAS nor autonomous/semi-autonomous driving would be possible without these. But until now I have never covered the transport between sensors and the compute that safely turns what they produce… Read More
IEDM 2025 – TSMC 2nm Process Disclosure – How Does it Measure Up?