Roughly 90% of all future innovation in the car will take place in the electric/electronic area as the number of lines of code in vehicles could grow to 300 million from the 50 million to 100 million they have today.
Everything is about ecosystems today, but there is often confusion about what this word actually means. In technical terms, ecosystems are digital platforms where the hardware plays a subservient role to the software that runs off of massive server farms known as the cloud. The Android operating system found on a range of interchangeable mobile handsets such as the Samsung Galaxy smartphone underpin Google’s ecosystem. Another way to think of them is as a type of shopping mall, built not out of bricks and mortar but bits and bytes.
In the automotive world, many partners including dealers, mechanics, mobility providers and others would share a symbiotic relationship built around an automaker’s vehicle as the core access point. Via a single convenient login, a consumer can access a virtual world of one-stop shopping where they consume news and entertainment or purchase goods or services from various vendors.
Like a shopping mall, ecosystems flourish when there is a lot of traffic. The more potential customers there are, the more developers are attracted. For example, the full potential of the Apple iPhone’s connectivity was truly harnessed only after countless third parties started developing content for the App store.
