Qualcomm Moves Toward Industry Leadership In Car Cockpit Systems

One of the problems with cars, both gas and EVs, has been the disconnect between cockpit systems and the rest of the car. I mean that often, the cockpit system in a new car can be as much as 8 years old when that car ships. I remember considering buying both a new Ford and an Audi R8 and deciding not to because their cockpit systems were seemingly out of cars that had come to market more than 5 years earlier and, with most current vehicles, given the level of integration, updating these systems aftermarket is often not worth the aggravation.

Qualcomm has aggressively stepped up its automotive program. Its technology has not only generated $45B in design wins, up 50% from 2022, but it is also moving toward dominance in this market going forward.

Why We Need Tech Companies In The Auto Market

As most likely know, cars go through a 3-to-5-year development cycle. This means that from the time they do their focus group work and spec a new car to the time that car is ready for sale, 3-5 years have passed. This creates a rather significant problem in a market that is used to personal electronics advancing on a 6-month to 1-year basis.

AI is advancing aggressively in all markets, particularly the computing advancements in autonomous driving. This has created a massive problem for the automotive industry, which likely won't survive on this slow cadence. No one wants to buy products, particularly very expensive products, that are already obsolete when they buy them.

Tech companies, and particularly Smartphone companies like Qualcomm, are used to far faster product cycles and have been successfully providing over-the-air software updates for decades. Meanwhile, the automotive industry is just getting started with over-the-air update efforts (which still too often tend to update).

Qualcomm's Execution

While a number of tech companies are targeting the automotive market, Qualcomm has stood out in one big area: advanced cockpit systems. They have advanced technology for center console information systems, the driver cluster display, driver monitoring, rear seat entertainment, augmented reality displays (which we haven't seen much of yet), surround view monitors, passenger displays, AI technology stances, e-mirrors, computer vision rear surround technology, occupant monitoring, and information safety.

They are also working on a next-generation AI cockpit which should not only be able to converse and take commands from the driver with a natural language interface (no more having to learn specific commands) but also provide a far higher level of safety and security for the driver and passengers in the car.

To roll out this technology, Qualcomm has created an AI Hub, which is used to help automakers speed this technology to market by allowing the company to pick an AI model, pick a target (what they need that model to do), pick a runtime (an existing code base), rapidly test, rapidly validate, and rapidly deploy the technology. All of this not only improves the quality of the result but massive increases in the speed at which the technology makes it into the car, virtually eliminating that 3-to-5-year technology lag that otherwise would occur. One huge benefit is that Qualcomm's platform only takes five lines of code to import modern AI solutions from Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, stability.ai, or Alphabet (Android). They even have a unique NSP (Neural Signal Processor), an automotive NPU (Neural Processing Unit).

Wrapping Up:

Modern electronics have had a rough road with cars; their 3-to-5-year development cycles have created huge disparities between the world's technology level, particularly smartphones, and the tech level of new cars. You too often get a new car with already obsolete tech, which is particularly problematic if we talk about critical AI systems like self-driving.

Qualcomm has aggressively addressed this problem with a rich set of technologies that are driving them to dominance in the automotive electronics market, particularly cockpit technology. This should aggressively eliminate the problem of new cars shipping with old tech, and this new tech, given Qualcomm's experience, should be far more reliable.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.