Florian Rohde – Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) Pioneer

A pioneer in the vehicle technology space, it could be argued that Florian Rohde actually invented the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) during his time at Tesla over 10 years ago.

Florian helps vehicle manufacturers and software companies release software-defined vehicles to market quicker, safer, and more efficiently. He coaches companies develop, integrate, and validate automotive systems and software with the latest cutting-edge technology, continuous integration, and validation, considering all safety, security, and regulatory requirements.He also speak at conferences, events, or investor groups – he founded the System Validation Team at Tesla empowering extremely high paced software delivery for entire vehicles, so he basically invented the software defined vehicle (SDV).

Due to his work Tesla can now build, validate and release full vehicle software within less than a day utilizing my validation architecture and toolchain design

NIO, Chinese multinational automobile manufacturer headquartered in Shanghai, scan run fully automated vehicle regression testing in the lab based on the infrastructure and integrations he implemented recently as a consultant.

The transition to autonomous driving technology is widely discussed topic today. In order to make autonomous vehicles work safely in the long run it will be a necessity to keep their software up to date at any time.

Florian Rohde

Consulting and Speaking

Florian founded iProcess in 2014 with the goals to help bring automotive products into this world, better and faster.

He provides the best industry-driven consulting experience and offers easy, simple and scalable solutions based on our clients’ needs.

Several top 5 Original equipment manufacturer (OEMs) and suppliers have received and implemented numerous of Florian’s consulting inputs to improve their software development and validation processes toward a software-defined vehicle.High profile Silicon Valley companies have implemented functional safety based on his consulting when they moved from pure online business into transportation.

Florian works best with established original equipment manufacturers [OEMs] who want to understand how the next level of the automotive industry is driven and achieved by the software-defined vehicle

He also works with start-up companies and cross-movers who want to engage with large customers or authorities and are looking to define and install processes and methods required to fulfill the requirements to become a collaboration partner.

Florian has been a terrific speaker at our events. He has engaged our audience with his passion, his unique industry expertise and his entertaining on-stage presence

Eric Starkloff, President and CEO at National Instruments

Keynote Topics

Software Defined Vehicle (SDV)

Trends in the industry / Architecture / Technology / Solutions

The term has been present in the industry for a while now, and it is a well used buzzword by start-ups to sell the idea of their importance in the future as well as by established OEMs and suppliers to signal that they are gearing up for the next big thing as well.

Now for about 10 or so years, there is a new generation of cars emerging and getting ready to take the relay from the EE era vehicles:

The software defined vehicle.

As the EE generation did not replace the established mechanical base of the vehicle but rather amended it, the SDV is also building on its predecessors. Given that fact, it is just fair to refer to evolution and not revolution.

So as I said, the SDV is still using a mechanical vehicle and a bunch of electronic control units.
The difference now is that these control units act together rather than as individual controllers of components.

Sure, there is still a physical distribution of controllers in many architectures, but this is changing.
Generally, this 3rd vehicle generation can be seen as a complete system with subsystems and not as an orchestrated coexistence of many components.

That being said, the architecture becomes centralized, there is shared calculation power, shared communication, and a design that allows the vehicle to act as one.

This centralized architecture gets accompanied by a new era of connectivity.

These days cars can exchange data with the cloud at any time to achieve many new features, on one hand for the improvement of its own performance such as over-the-air software updates of predictive maintenance, and of course, to improve the user’s wellbeing with information, infotainment, and communication.

A new approach in this generation of vehicles is the conditional existence of features.

Customers get the option to book features temporarily, for example, assistant systems for the long road trip or pay-per-use fast charge support. And customers can add features after the initial vehicle purchase, maybe some budget freed up, or they learn about something later.

Also interesting here is the used car market, where as a buyer, you can look for a car close to the configuration you like and then buy the missing features afterward.

In many cases, this concept requires oversizing the hardware built into the cars, and many OEMs are working on a financially sane way to do so.

On the other hand, it can also reduce the variety of hardware developed and saves costs that way.

Most important: the software defined vehicle is only successful when it is utilized properly, which means continuous improvements, over-the-air updates, and a growing pool of features, which also requires a change in mindset that the start of production means the end of development, can’t say that anymore.