Opening Keynote

This talk explores the evolution of the automotive industry towards a software-defined future, emphasizing the importance of electric vehicles (EVs) and advanced technologies. The speaker, who leads cockpit and connected systems for Ampere, a division of Renault Group, discusses the transformation from traditional car architecture to high-speed networking systems. He highlights the significance of partnerships with companies like Qualcomm and Google in developing a software-defined vehicle ecosystem that includes cloud computing and onboard capabilities. The speaker also touches on the consumer experience, the role of over-the-air updates, and the need for continuous modernization of vehicles. He concludes by stressing the importance of collaboration within the industry to innovate and adapt to future challenges.

Hello everyone is right there. >> Okay, you're not sleeping. This is good. So I'll keep in English because they asked me to do it in English. First of all, um, in the whites of the mo of the conference, innovate, accelerate, uh, and, uh, celebrate. I would like to bring you to the future, to the future of your car, to the future that you don't know right now,

but will come. So you have opportunity to uh think about the car in a completely different uh way or thinking about your car in a completely different way. Uh we're going to talk about a transformation of the industry, a transformation of companies. And let me start who is Ampere? Aair is uh first European intelligent pure EV player. What this means it's a division of Renault group focused

on electric vehicle which is the coolest trend and focus on all the electronics in the car and changing the car from a classical architecture with many devices to a high-speed networking systems where the performance does matter. Um looking forward in a day where the car will be fully autonomous and will be a mean for transportation from point A to point B. We need to consider us as

passengers, not as drivers. And we need to consider us as a central point in the car. And I'm head of cockpit and connected for Ampair Renault Group. So I make sure that your feature is very enjoyable and you have enough time to celebrate to enjoy it and innovate and be productive in the car. So today we'll talk about what does it mean a softwaredefined car which is

very interesting. We know wheels, tires and so on but we'll talk about software portion of it. We'll talk about a new way of thinking of who are our partners. They are not anymore we buy parts you supply parts. They are already a software definfined parts. We're going to talk about softwaredefined hardware. So now how hardware can be software defined but we'll understand and we'll talk about what

will happen after point of sale after the car become yours or somebody else car later how we will make sure that it continue to be modern upto-date and usable. Let's talk about softwaredefined vehicles. First of all, when we think about the next generation vehicle, we need to think about the vehicle as arena of capability of cloud computing and onboard computing. we are talking about merging both worlds.

Bringing the cloud in the car, but also allowing the car to be the next thing that you are using. So we starting from the bottom line where you cannot define a competitive modern constant up to- date vehicle without selecting powerful hardware and therefore we have very good partnership with Qualcomm. Then you need to find a way to deal with the big players on the market who have

the capability to transform the industry. Think about 5 years ago or even seven years ago. How was the radio looking in your car? The central screen, a radio with some buttons, you can change the station and that's it. Just few years ago, I had the opportunity with my colleagues here in Bulgaria in my formal company to launch the first domain controller on the market with metades at

that point of time and that was first of its own transformation of digitalization of the and we have Linux operating systems and now most of the new cars on the market they use as a central screen for infotainment with capability to connect to the store with capability to download your preferred application with capability to stream Spotify or whatever from your car and the Renault has it already

on the market. If you buy the high-end screens and so on in Renault Group, it have it but it's due to partnership with Google. Such a uh modernization of the copy cannot happen without the right choice of and then we all use our handy handsree right we use the telephones we say we are so binded to our phones even the new generation they they don't know how

to live without a phone I had the pleasure to be in a place where there was no connection with my kids and somehow we realize that they board games which we never played in our life. But the importance of us digitalizing our life with assistance in the car with the capability to have the latest and greatest map is completely different feeling, completely different experience. Think about how

many of you have a embedded navigation in the car and how fast the map become obsolete. how fast the businesses who are developing growing are updating the maps and is your car map up to date constantly I'm talking about embedded car navigation right so this is why when you have the right selection of the industry when you have the right selection of the technology you can always

be up to date and again Google maps is fully integrated in uh recent vehicles top. You don't need to connect your phone. It's there. Your account is there. Your wife is there. Your digital footprint is in your car. And if you change to another car, you have it with you as well. So therefore, to define a software vehicle, it is a matter of thinking. It's a matter

of how and what you offer to the customers to make their life and experience a little bit different. So therefore there are three big companies that join effort to make this together. Renault group, Google and Qualcomm. And together with Google we are the next big thing similar to Android called Caros. That will be the cluster experience the safety aisle where you can have cluster information, vehicle speed

and so on. until autonomous driving take it over. Right? So let's talk about softwaredefined partnership. How does it work with the classical models? You buy something or you get offer for something, you buy it, the part comes. This is how it works automotive industry today. In many cases, the car is assembly of parts from multiple suppliers. But we see even competitors they try to vertically integrate as

much as possible. But the biggest differentiator is the software stacks being able to come up fully with your IP being able to monetize customer experience even post point of sale. So therefore the traditional model says I buy from you and you deliver to me does not work in the industry. They work for simple parts but does not work for complex parts does not work for parts that

you want to enhance the experience of the user. So we are talking about uh huge models huge opportunity as as I mentioned you start with different vehicle architecture we're talking about zonal computing what this means you have two maybe three in best case two supercomputers you can consider that as a servers they have really quite a lot of uh compute power and then you have local experience

type of um devices that manage actuals, manage things that move the things, your pedal brake or turn signal activation or your lights in the back of the car so the others can see And then you abstract that. You said that's just the hardware. And based on that, you drive modern parenting system, systems that are flexible, that allows you to move features back and forth because what you

want to do is to be able to add contents in the future. Many times due to regulation, due to uh uh customer uh desires, the car need to modify, car need to change. Maybe you don't realize, but every new car has more and more European regulatory and legislation expectation. On one side, I'm sure you know about the gas, the emissions, the green deal and so on. But

on the other side about safety, about sharing data, about collaborating because all of us while driving, we can help others drive safer. I see something on the road, my front collision camera is seeing incident, reporting this incident. The next car 30 m behind me from the cloud get the information says, "Hey, pay attention. There is something going on. You don't need to even to press the button.

I'm sure you use ways to report police or something saying okay there is police hidden on the left on the right but that will become a natural choice because you also need to think in perspective and this is why innovate. Tomorrow you're not going to drive right tomorrow the car will drive itself. So the car need to be capable to understand what is ahead and how to

drive you safely from point A to point B. It's just a matter of thinking. It's a matter of innovation. It's a matter of defining the right partners and technology. And such a technology cannot happen without a cloud computing, cloud services and so on. And then you're in the industry where all of you operate. That's not anymore automotive industry. let's talk a little bit about softwaredefined hardware and

I'll come back again cloud and things that are more familiar to you. In a high-end vehicle, a car that is currently on the road full of feature, you usually have between 60 to 100 devices, electronic devices. Some are small, some are big, some communicate less data, some communicate more data, but it's quite a lot. And if you want to have constantly modern car, it's almost impossible to

keep the software of all these 100 ruffled device up to date because you need to keep maintenance. You have a huge supplier network that need to keep software for you to provide updates and so on. And in many cases due to regulatory expectations things change and you cannot keep updating the car, right? If you compare with consumer electronics, what we all used to, how often your telephone

is modern or effective or productive. Think about that. How often you personally change your phone? How many change the phone every year? Let me try to see that. How many change your phone every year? Okay, not so much. Or maybe I'm not seeing between the projectors. How many change your phone every two years? How many change your phone? Three years. Every 3 years. Good, good, good. Every

four years. Okay. Simple question. What you do with the phone after you change it? You try to give it to somebody to recycle with the hope it goes somewhere in some poor country, but they don't care about that your phone anymore. Even the poor country they want big display modern stuff and so on. Right now transfer it to the wife. The telephone cost this not telephone. The

telephone costs 100 uh€1,000 more modern. How much cost a car nowadays? 40 50,000 euro. It's a good So what you do three years with your later with your car? Do you for scrap? Do you send it for scrap? No. I hope so. I mean, they are rich people. I get the point. But not everybody would scrap a car four years later. So this is why it's essential

for all of us to think about how to keep this car 10 plus years active because every car producer expect every part supply to be able to produce minimum 10 year parts plus 10 more years in case after end of production of the car. So this means your car in the best case would be able to receive OEM parts minimum 13 to 15 years best case. So

this why if you buy the latest model you have 15 years. If you buy it before it change the model 10 years right be clear. And and that's a transformation that we all need to understand. So therefore we two main issues or high performing and peripherial devices. The peripherial devices should be as simple as possible. They should manage all actuators, accelerators, devices and so on. I'm sure

you go Audi outside and you'll see how they are backlight like spaceship, right? And that's because these LEDs that are behind are managed individually. If it was a bulb on and off, you would not make this nice effects, right? But all this cool stuff happen because of that simple devices. And these simple devices, they will keep be simple. The peripheric devices, but the central devices, you have

like two over complicated systems that can exchange content in between each other. that would be able to transfer compute power from one to the other if you cannot if you do not have space time you will move it to the other device just to ensure they will be connected with very high speed communication we're talking about gigabit now in the car on the market up to 10

GB communication in between these two issues and they'll unheard for the year of sale compute power similar to your iPhone or your uh Android phone and so on. So therefore there are two main computers in the best case there could be three as I said one would be everything around cockpit which I'm leading the cockpit experience and the second is everything else autonomous driving body chassis electronics

and so on. So this is why in the era of hardware define you need to come up what you want to offer from software. How you define what want you do? how you define the use cases to move things around. And then early enough, just to be clear, very early enough, you need to talk with the silicon vendor who produce these chips to give you the capability,

the power, what you would intend because the silicon vendor, the chip vendors, they need a certain period of time to produce these chips. then you need a certain um introduce them with your partners who produce hardware and develop in parallel the software. So you need forward looking statement something that is four four five six years ahead and I what I like in my job is that we

are always talking about the future. I live in the future, right? Uh the the negative side of being in automotive industry and talking for the next generation vehicle is that when you go to automotive exhibition, you are very tired. Who says I've done this many years ago that's not cool thing and especially for me it's very difficult to select my car just to give you that's impossible.

I says no no that's not too old. I want something more modern and so on. So therefore when you think about what you do today, how many of you go and select and talk to the chip vendors on your cloud server, what capability they will deliver to you and before they produce the chip, you're using it as virtual environment for you, right? And why? Because when you

have the backend server, when you have quality infrastructure, the hardware is also for you invisible. You don't care. There is already enough virtualization technology that you not to think about that. And that's what happened. The consumer electronics, the modern stuff from the future come in the But you need to understand there is a major difference. I know that there are some folks from automotive industry who are

friend of mine they know the difference. How many of you put your iPhone or Google phone Android phone in the fridge? In the fridge? Hands. Okay. How many in the freezer? Minus 18. I don't see hands. But in the automotive industry, we freeze it to minus 40 because you want this electronics to work in the North Pole in Finland, right? So therefore, when you design hardware, it's

not just about a hardware that can do my job, but hardware that can survive harsh conditions from minus 40 to Sahara plus 85, right? 85 is hard time in the modern electronic just to let you know because they need cooling and so on which come up to the conclusion this hardware need to survive need to be cooled. These are very powerful chips and we are going to

a next generation thing called liquid cooling. So actually all these two supercomputers in future will be liquid cooled. It's not only the batteries. I'm sure you know about the batteries, but also the hardware just because they have so much power and energy in order to make your experience to the next level. Two years ago, there was a conference and Joro remind me about my statements where I

was talking that what's happening on the market is 16 displays All the cars do not have 16 displays just to be clear. But they are such a cars and you want to manage them from one device. One device 16 displays. All these displays here managed by one device in the car because it's easy to maintain. It's easy to update. If there is something break, it's easy to

replace. So therefore the hardware as the core of the business is very essential. You need to think forward what I need as features as software capability. What I need as a product results. How I design the complete car infrastructure to be simple to manage and drive. how I work with my partners who are the silicon vendors because they are also giants. I know some of the colleagues

here from from a big company uh which is also silicon vendor how they produce the parts how industrialize it and how two three years down the road everybody enjoy the cool features in the car. So it's a matter of thinking and therefore you start with software definfined vehicle you start with softwaredefined partners who you want to play with then you need to work with the software defined

hardware who are your hardware vendors that can deliver this capability. Hopefully you are ready to launch a car. You're selling the car on the market and you come up with the bucks. You know there are always bucks. We live in the software world and we need to be sure that the car can be maintained up to date. The car can keep being updated can car be in

regulatory compliance. And now I would like to talk to you about containers on wheels. I'm sure you all know the containers and what this means. But it's very important that we need to understand that we have connected vehicles that have already abstracted hardware that have overthe-air update that have data orientation have been connected to the clouds and so on. and can deliver not only experience from the

incar computing power but also from the and also need to be flexible and then we don't need to invent the hot water for the second time. I mean this is Bulgarian expression but we don't need to innovate second time for things that already exist on the market. We need to see which are the technologies that IT world is offering for such a capability. Auto was not invented

by Data orientation was not invented by So therefore we need to ensure that we have the right orchestration how to deploy. We're using DevOps. I'm sure that DevOps was not invented by automotive industry. Several years ago when we discuss uh DevOps you were the only one in automotive world who was talking about DevOps. Then we need to talk about micros service architecture capability to change one while

everything else works containerization dockers clear and maximum use of open source. Again, nobody in in this world where you have high competition, in this world where you uh desire things to go fast, nobody have time to learn twice, if it's already identified, if it's already found, you need to use it. And open source is the right thing. But you also need to contribute back, right? Keep in

mind that many of the things that I talk about car OS talking with silicon vendors they become public although that we innovate with the tier once with the Google with Qualcomm and so on whatever is innovated become public and accessible to the others. Many many many years ago when Renault uh made the partnership with Google infotainment Android system was not mature and Renault was one of the

first to bring this as officially on the here I'm in the area where you are the expert guys and I'm smart user let's say like that smart forward we are talking about all the capability of uh IT world to package certain uh information to be able to abstractly deploy it in the cloud services in the super machines on the vehicles and if there is a problem to

ban it and isolate it. Why? Think about just few swipes ago I was telling you that the car has the digital twin in our partnership with Google. We have the capability to run on the target but everything else cut off fish in the cloud emulators and so on and I can simulate fully the car or the cockpit of the car in the cloud. My speed is different.

I have the advantages for all the AI Gemini copilot capability to bring speed in my development. You always have mistakes if the virtual world does not match with physical world but they are much less. So therefore the technology that you are used to is fully applicable for um we need also the right orchestration because we are talking about hundreds of thousands cars per year minimum to several

million per year depends on the brand on the deployment and so on. And we're talking about a capability to deliver update packages instantly. We don't need to wait. They are pioneers in this business in the automotive world and we need to be to the level where you're used to as a c customer. Now the customers have higher acceptance of defects and for us it's really important to

consider this as opportunity to get faster but we still need to deliver better results. Often we see defects we said okay we accept that next update we'll fix the car and so on. And I have few more minutes to to come up to a most critical slides I would like to say is if you think about the software we talk about softwaredefined future we have a car

a vehicle that is fully defined by software you have a business model and partnership with OEMs and giants that are defined based on the software princip. principles. We are talking about hardware that was defined due to means of the and we are talking about a deployment and maintenance capability that will keep the car up to date. So we're talking about a software defined company. I personally think

because this is our future. It's going to be software defined industry and sooner or later everything we do will matter a lot more for you because you'll be enjoying the pleasure and the time to do the things right. This cannot happen if we all as contributors as friends do not collaborate and do not have software as core of our thinking. Innovate, celebrate, accelerate and drive the future

by software. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to talk in front of you and I would like to use one of the phrases by Illinois Roosevelt. He said, "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift." This is why it's called present. further develop that. You cannot do anything from history. It's fact. It's there. If you spend your time, your wife to talk

about the past, somebody mistakes and so on, you're wasting your right? Just because it's a fact, it's written in the books, you know, can you tell Asparuk who settle Bulgaria, go to a little bit more west and settle it somewhere in the middle of Europe? No, you cannot. But we need to use the maximum of the knowledge that we have and we also need to realize that

future is really mystery. We don't know if things would happen. We do our best to define the future but we don't know what will happen. We don't know things that does not depend on us. 90% of the things that's around all of us does not depend on us individually. Only we control only the 10%. So therefore focus on the today, learn today, be focused today, spend your

time here today, focus on the things, be proud of what you do today because with what you do today can change the future but cannot change the past. And therefore look positive, think forward and drive the future. That's opportunity for all of us to be on the next level and to be accelerate, innovate and drive the future. Right. Thank you all. I'm demo. Thank you very Thank

you.