5G Factor: CES 2024 Takeaways – Automobiles Shine

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Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.

Transcript:

Ron Westfall: Hello, and welcome, everyone, to The 5G Factor. I’m Ron Westfall, Research Director here at The Futurum Group, and I’m joined today by my distinguished colleague, Olivier Blanchard, our team leader in terms of all things devices, as well as components, and also addressing communication networks in 5G naturally.

And today, we’re going to hone in on the major 5G ecosystem developments that have caught our eye with a particular focus on the Consumer Electronics Show just finished to kick off 2024. And so, Olivier, with that, welcome back to the 5G Factor, and many thanks for joining today. How have you been bearing up between episodes?

Olivier Blanchard: Oh, listen, it’s been a busy 2024 already.

Ron Westfall: Yes.

Olivier Blanchard: I just came back from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, as you said, and dealt with about of COVID or COVID-adjacents, whatever.

Ron Westfall: Oh, man.

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.

Ron Westfall: I’m still out there.

Olivier Blanchard: It’s hard to go to a show like CES where basically the whole world converges into one place in the middle of winter and not come back with something.

Ron Westfall: Exactly. Even if it’s in the middle of the desert.

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.

Ron Westfall: And so, yes. I think it’s a telltale. And hopefully, though, some of the messages coming out of CES were a bit more positive, let’s say, to a speedy recovery, of course. Of course, yes. We want that to get taken care of. And so, yeah, with that, let’s dive right in and talk about things that jumped out at us at the Consumer Electronics Show. And I think to kick it off, we’ll look at Qualcomm which, at the show, underscored its ecosystem-wide momentum and critical position as a key partner of the automotive industry. And they did this by highlighting basically the breadth, the maturity, and the breakthrough innovations across its Snapdragon Digital Chassis portfolio, which I think is thoroughly understood throughout the industry.

And so as a result, what they did at the show is pretty important. And so for us, the increasing demand out there for more power efficiency, open and scalable solutions has made Qualcomm Technologies basically a trusted partner to serve the needs of the automotive industry. And that, as a result, has empowered the company to become a driving force in shaping how software-defined vehicles or STVs will evolve. And this includes the fact that the Snapdragon Digital Chassis ongoing market momentum includes a full suite of products for Gen AI enabled digital cockpits, connected car technologies, connected services, advanced driver assistance, and automated driving systems. So already, I got AI into the conversation, and we’ll run with that more.

Now also, this includes fulfilling the performance demands, of course, for the automotive, automized footprint that is programmable and highly customizable, alongside diverse software and operating system ecosystem support for all tiers of mobility platforms. And specifically to call it out today, more than 350 million vehicles are on the road using Snapdragon Digital Chassis solutions. So clearly, the impact is built in.

Now, in addition, the Snapdragon auto connectivity platform is a roadmap that’s being developed through Qualcomm’s multiple decades of connectivity experience, with the automakers being equipped to meet the increasing needs for higher levels of safety and intelligence powered by 5G naturally, as well as LTE connected services, vehicle-to-everything or V2X, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, satellite communications and precise positioning.

Plus, the Snapdragon Cockpit Platform is delivering the advanced functionality that’s been expected. And that is something the automakers are using to create more highly immersive and intuitive in vehicle experiences, alongside other capabilities such as enhanced graphics, multimedia, and, again, AI capabilities that could be scaled across vehicle tiers and personalized for every occupant. And so with that level set and kickoff, Olivier, from your perspective, what really stood out in terms of the Qualcomm announcements at CES related to the automotive segment?

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah, well, CES is a huge show. And it’s also very spread out, which people who haven’t been there, don’t necessarily understand. It’s not like Mobile World Congress, where everything is under one roof. So they’re different pavilion focusing on different things. And the automotive pavilion was essentially the Las Vegas Convention Center, for the most part. And then there was some micro-mobility that was spread around.

And Qualcomm occupied a pretty significant portion of the floor there, not just the Snapdragon building that they built inside the Convention Center. It’s like a complete office building with presentation suites and meeting rooms, but also in their demo section, but also with all their partnerships. So in the lobby, you had, for instance, the new BMW X model that has… Actually, it’s not an X. I can’t remember which model it is. It’s been a long week, but that has essentially all of the Qualcomm Snapdragon platform implemented into it. And I think it’s the first vehicle that has the full stack of Qualcomm Snapdragon automotive solutions in it.

So I think one of the main things is that up until now, Qualcomm has, first of all, coined the term digital chassis for software defined vehicles, which I think is clever, and it helps them make the case for what they’re doing. But essentially, they’ve been building a stack zone by zone or use case by use case. So essentially, what you have is you have the connectivity piece, which is a natural fit for Qualcomm. We know how they are with 3G, 4G, 5G and their antenna solutions. So putting that in the vehicle just made sense because all these vehicles, whatever other functionality they have are connected vehicles.

Second, you have cockpit, which is self-explanatory. You have essentially everything you see from the driver standpoint. You also have the infotainment systems that fill the rest of the car with sound systems, video screens, cameras, other functionality there. If you want to take your Zoom calls from the back of the car, you can do that without using a device, et cetera. The one thing that I think that they were a little bit behind on because I can’t do everything was ADAS. And so I want to qualify what I mean by that. I think that Qualcomm had a solid ADAS platform, solid data solution, which stands for driver assist technologies and systems basically.

Ron Westfall: Right.

Olivier Blanchard: So anything from presence detection in your blind spot. So your mirror lights up a little bit because it detects a vehicle, lane recognition, trying to steer the vehicle back into the lane, et cetera. All those things, it was fine. But as we get closer to automated driving solutions, which are part of ADAS, but get into the L3, L4, L5 mode, I think that the Qualcomm solution was missing a few elements. One of them, I think, was solved by their acquisition of Arriver, I think last year, about a year ago, which gives them 360 perception and intelligence of that perception.

I guess, one of two things that struck me the most about Qualcomm’s announcements and presence at CES was the fact that their stack of digital chassis solutions is starting to look very, very full and very complete. And the advantage of that is, if you understand Qualcomm’s model of essentially building solutions, and then partnering with pretty much every OEM in a particular market segment, whether it’s mobile, PCs, IoT, or, in this case, automotive, it offers every single automaker a complete platform that they can build a vehicle around, so from essentially just soup to nuts, which they can deliver ready to use. And then the automaker can come in and bring in their own solutions, plug them in there, do their own software, do their own integration, or they can pick and choose whatever sections or whatever layers of the platform they want, connectivity, ADAS, cockpit, whatever, mix and match however they want, implement whatever elements of that they want, or not implement others, fit in their solutions like LEGO blocks, where they want to and essentially have not a fully custom, but a fully customizable platform to build their vehicle experiences on.

And I think that’s something that’s fairly unique to Qualcomm. I can’t think of any company that has this offering on that scale, and with the ability to deliver on time, which is important for police cars, so they can help them develop the vehicles. They can deliver the chips and the solutions on time and at scale, because they’re that big of a company. And they’re essentially able to help automakers build vehicles that could be competitive with Tesla. And I think that’s the elephant in the room. Everybody is still chasing Tesla in terms of ADAS, in terms of EV performance, and in terms of just having a full stack of hardware, software, and integrated solutions that they can put into a vehicle. And so having a partner like Qualcomm that brings that level of layers that are all integratable, all interoperable, and be able to do it on their time and exactly how they want to do it is unique. And so, yeah, Tesla should be worried, I think.

Ron Westfall: Yeah. No. That’s a very, I think, important takeaway. And yes, we kicked it off by noting that Snapdragon Digital Chassis has already implemented in 350 million vehicles. So that automatically shows us that this is something that can scale. This is something that has that market influence you’re pointing to, Olivier. And so, yeah, it’s definitely welcomed for competing against naturally Tesla. But also, ultimately, globally, like in Europe, there are more imports from China on the EV side. And the China market is distinct. But as we know, Tesla competes there as well. And so, yeah, this is just something that I think is a tribute to Qualcomm’s ability to drive the market, to make software-defined vehicles more of a reality to advanced zonal architectures that you pointed out. And so that is scratching the surface just so the announcements they made at CES. They made really a multi-prong announcements. And with that, let’s look at some of the other key components so that we’re basically covering the major aspects of what Qualcomm did at the show.

And in addition, Qualcomm spotlighted its Snapdragon ride platform. And what’s distinct about that, it comprises the company’s automated driving system-on-ship or SoC family. So really, this is the bedrock for how Qualcomm is able to drive a lot of their software innovation. And that links to the fact that it’s helping to build those more efficient automated driving system or AD solutions that you invoke. And also, Snapdragon ride is a platform that’s enhanced by, again, that scalable AD stack. And also, it’s targeting active safety for the layer two, layer three functions that we know are important for measuring how independent our autonomous a vehicle can be out on the road. And this is really employing a solution that in many ways is forward-thinking, but it’s also powered, I think it’s important to note, by the Snapdragon ride cloud solutions and also the generative AI capabilities that are essential for simulating how to improve the Snapdragon ride solutions out there.

Plus, they unveil Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC, which is designed to support mixed criticality workloads across heterogeneous compute resources, that’s a lot to say in one sentence. But it gets the idea across that it’s ready to fulfill these very demanding environments and scenarios we all know that we can’t have safety compromises or mistakes out there on the road, regardless of what level the automobile builds at, including naturally autonomous driving applications. And so this is something I think is encouraging to see that that’s also providing momentum for what they are described as the Flex SoC in terms of collaborating with other key players out there like Bosch, Mechatronics, Autolink, ThunderX, and more. So that, again, circles back to Qualcomm has, the channels, the ecosystem partners to make these things move. Also, there was Snapdragon car to cloud, which are new features and services that can be added throughout the vehicle’s lifecycle for those again, highly personalized experiences across all tiers for all the occupants.

And here, when it comes to car-to-cloud applications, we’re seeing another set of players like Salesforce, JP Morgan, and they are taking on a key roles in terms of enabling feature upgrades and connected services to the customers out there on a on-demand basis. And, finally, Qualcomm is offering its digital chassis SoCs for two-wheelers. So we’ve been basically focused on the four wheeler aspect or four wheeler plus aspects here. And this is something I think is also very exciting. And I know Olivier had a chance to literally have a hands-on experience with the two-wheel aspects here. And that’s again, supporting things like advanced rider assistance systems, now ARAS, or again, capabilities are built specifically for motorcycles, electric scooters, three wheelers, e-bikes, ATVs, and vehicles that are purpose built for farming and agriculture. So I’m going to stop right there and hand it off to you right there, Olivier. What else about the Qualcomm announcements that looked out at you?

Olivier Blanchard: It’s a lot. How long do we have? Yeah. I think, obviously, it’s very well-thought-out. Qualcomm’s built a fairly large ecosystem, and it’s this force multiplier, right? So on the one hand, you have these solutions that go into the vehicle that help the automaker build a vehicle and put in cool features that people will want and then people buy them. And that’s nice. And that’s how we can think about it if we want to. And we can think about car-to-cloud in terms of diagnostics, for instance.

So I have a car. It’s connected. It has all these intelligent smart features. And my car-to-cloud connectivity deals with letting someone on the other end, probably a dealership, maybe the OEM, maybe the car maker itself, know that I’m up for an oil change. There’s something not working quite right. Maybe, my tire inflation is a little bit low. Maybe, there’s something else going on with the engine. The battery is dying or not operating based on the normal parameters or it’s aging too quickly. It could be a variety of things. That information is picked up, gathered, not only am I as the user getting a notification, but maybe the OEM or my service provider is getting a notification as well. And they were letting me know, “Hey, it’s time to bring the car in because X, Y and Z.” And they can already prepare and get replacement parts ordered or at least on standby for when I get my car in so that the service will be a lot quicker and less of an inconvenience.

So that’s one aspect of it. Another aspect of car-to-cloud obviously is just the connectivity itself where you have your satellite radio, you have your Netflix in the car or live connectivity for video games in the back seats for the kids. So there’s a lot of entertainment functionality as well. As I mentioned, some of the cars that I saw that are built with this or they’re prototypes built with these platforms built-in, had cameras in the back that were specifically, not for the driver to surveil the people in the back or to watch kid necessarily, although there is an anti-cam in the back of one of these vehicles that I looked at, but to enable people sitting in the back seat to not use their phone, not use their laptop necessarily, but still be able to connect and make a Zoom call, even be on a group Zoom call with everybody else in the car directly with the screen and the camera that are placed in the back of the seat just like on an airplane.

So there’s some cool functionality that way. But I think where things get really interesting is where that connectivity and that those cloud services work to improve automated driving and ADAS systems, because as you know, these vehicles have cameras and they have onboard AI, and they have all these systems that are constantly gathering data from your driving style, from the roads around you, how the vehicle behaves, how other vehicles behave around it. And all of this trains the system, and it trains the system directly locally, but it also trains it on the cloud. There’s a digital twin of your vehicle and of your vehicle systems living on the cloud that your hours and hours and hours of driving and the millions of combined hours of driving, of all the people driving these vehicles are helping train. This is something that Tesla pioneered. It’s something that they had long before anybody else thought to do it. And I think that’s where they’re much further along with their automated driving technologies than other automakers. And Qualcomm, I think, has taken a page from that thinking. And so a huge piece of this car-to-cloud play for Qualcomm is helping train ADAS and helping train these automated driving solutions in the cloud to get to a point a little bit faster where we exceed the very low L3 threshold that we’re at now. I would actually rather call it an L2 plus, plus maybe to be fair.

Ron Westfall: Right.

Olivier Blanchard: But so that we can get to L3, L4 and L5 a lot quicker than we are. And that’s a huge play because you need that connectivity, and you need it to be connected to the right systems in the right way. So that’s a huge thing. And I think it touches on two of the features that you talked about. I think we need to have a separate 5G factor for the transition, or the expansion rather of the four-wheel digital chassis to the two-wheel digital chassis because, obviously, you’re going to be a little bit limited there when it comes to ADAS because you can’t ADAS into a motorcycle in the same way.

But there are a lot of things, connectivity-wise, whether it’s connection to the cloud or connection to other vehicle through V2X that are really important for safety, that are really important for again the diagnostics and the over-the-air updates, OTA updates as they’re known in the space, things like theft prevention and also just moving a lot of the entertainment and just audio connectivity of using your phone for essentially pairing your phone and a helmet mounted system for GPS, for calls, for music, for alerts in case the vehicle or your phone or some other third-party device on the motorcycle warns you that there’s a car approaching from the back a little bit too fast. All those things, moving them from the phone and the third-party headset to a combined system where you’re moving everything to the actual motorcycle, to a system in the motorcycle with a much thinner client that can attach to a helmet bypassing the need to burn your phone battery or to rely on your phone for a lot of that connectivity or rely on a third-party heavy computerized helmet mounted system.

So there’s some cool stuff coming down the pike as well. I think it’s still a little bit early days for this. I think there’s something out to be done. But I think, yeah, Qualcomm’s moving in the right direction with that. I think if they’re able to compete against the Cardos and Senas of the world and basically take the phone out of the equation a little bit, I think that’ll be a really big plus for the motorcycle OEMs and for the users as well.

Ron Westfall: Yes. And I think those will be momentous strides. And, yes, it’s aligning with your very critical point about safety first.

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.

Ron Westfall: So not only is it about making these systems more safe, but also theft prevention as well pointed out. And that, I think, is something that naturally the insurance companies will embrace. And as we all know, auto insurance is very much a big player in how this can be measured in terms of progress with the technologies. And I think to your point, Olivier, we can spend even more time on Qualcomm. However, let’s also look at some other announcements at CES.

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.

Ron Westfall: We could probably do just two shows on this. But with that in mind, let’s look at one that you had the opportunity to talk with at least a couple of the players from this trio announcement between Stellantis, BlackBerry QNX, and Amazon or AWS. And that was basically their development efforts on a virtual cockpit for automobiles. So we’re circling back to the four-wheel aspect here. And this collaboration is part of the group’s Virtual Engineering Workbench or VEW. And that is a platform designed to accelerate the delivery of again innovative car technology to the customers out there. And what they are focusing on is accelerating the utilization of QNX Hypervisor in the cloud from, again, BlackBerry, which can function as that virtual lab for developing car controls and systems, basically a digital twin, a type of implementation. And the platform is designed to enable, again, realistic virtual versions of the car controls and the systems without having to make disruptive changes to the main software to run them, and to really chop down the development cycles from months that can be achieved basically within a day or two in many cases.

And so they’re hoping that through the use of the QNX Hypervisor , through AWS Marketplace, Stellantis can basically introduce more advanced simulation of virtual cockpit into a cloud-based environment. And again, this has been going on for two years now. And basically, according to Stellantis, the virtual cockpit platform is equipped with tools for the virtualization of graphics, audio and so forth. And again, this is aligning with what we already talked about using digital twin-type technologies or digital twin technologies to fuel this innovation. And so, naturally, at the show floor, you had a chance to talk with BlackBerry, for instance. And what were your impressions from what they’re doing in terms of the innovation here?

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah. So it was really fun to run into BlackBerry at CES, like, “BlackBerry? What? BlackBerry store?”

Ron Westfall: Right, right, right.

Olivier Blanchard: BlackBerry is definitely still around.

Ron Westfall: Exactly.

Olivier Blanchard: And within the realm of automotive, they’ve completely reinvented themselves and tasked themselves with a nice mission of helping fill some of those intermediate layers between the actual platforms, like the base core platforms, that what we’re talking about with Snapdragon, and the automakers’ needs. And there’s a lot of system integration, which is something that we probably need to talk about also at some point, all of those layers between the silicon and the user of the vehicle, essentially, and getting you there.

And BlackBerry has found some cool layers to fill in between. And so the QNX and Hypervisor product and some discussions that I had when I was there, some of the demos that I experienced were really interesting. And it’s not to circle back, but when I was getting the demo of the cockpit solution, it was looking very familiar. And I asked the QNX BlackBerry specialist who was giving me a demo, I was like, “Are you running this on Snapdragon?” And he laughed, and he opened the counter below his giant touchscreen. And it had a bunch of Snapdragon hardware down there. He’s like, “Yeah.” So it did sound familiar.

So to go over one of our points earlier, which is you have these base platforms, and then whoever, can build customizations around them. So they still operate in the same general way, which is good for users, because you can go from one vehicle to another, from one brand to another. And a lot of it might seem familiar. You might not have a steep learning curve going from one smart vehicle or one connected vehicle to another anymore. It’s still like all the same, just with different skins and different customizations and performance characteristics. However, I thought what was interesting wasn’t so much the cockpit itself, because I saw a lot of that, and it’s well done. But what I did see was a virtualized vehicle where their Hypervisor platform was able to obtain sensor data for critical systems without needing to put their own sensors in the vehicles.

Ron Westfall: Okay.

Olivier Blanchard: So, for instance, say you have a fleet, however large, it could be a fleet of 10 or a fleet of 10,000 service vehicles, and they’re driving around, and they’re just picking up and dropping off deliveries. So you have these vans, and they have suspensions, and they have beds that need to be horizontal. And they’re taking delivery of boxes at point A, delivering it to point B, C, D, E, et cetera. And the suspensions and the level of the bed that’s holding everything in place in the back of the truck need to be adjusted properly, so that deliveries can happen, and there’s no damage done to the materials that would be transported. The Hypervisor solution can be trained to essentially get sensors from the suspensions above each of the four wheels of the van, and understand where the load is balanced, adjust that remotely or intelligently by itself without having a human intervene, and just continuously monitor and do that through essentially the entire day-long life cycle of that vehicle’s deliveries.

It can also, based on the distance and travel, so basically essentially knowing where it’s going to go and how it needs to get there, with the weight added to the vehicle, calculate whether or not, especially if it’s an EV, whether or not it needs a charge, or can even make the deliveries. And so it might dispatch another vehicle to come make some of the deliveries and instead because it doesn’t have enough of a charge. So that’s just one system. They’re still a little bit limited in terms of what systems they’ve implemented, but there’s going to be a lot of coming. So essentially, what this gives Blackberry and QNX is the ability to, first of all, do this for an automaker, but also provide this as a service offering for a delivery company, any kind of logistics company to help manage some of their truck systems to optimize them throughout the day to make sure that the deliveries happen on time, that there aren’t any breakdowns, that there aren’t any mechanical failures. So it detects problems early. It tries to solve them just automatically on the cloud. And, yeah, it’s cool. And it works really well, which is also super interesting.

Ron Westfall: Yeah, it’s a solid start. And, yeah, I wish I had saw the demo. And I think we understand that it also plays into that safety first motif. As we know, cargo shifting in a transport vehicle can, unfortunately, result in accidents, and so forth. And this is something that can make a huge difference in that regard. So this is, again, something that we anticipate will gain ecosystem traction as people learn more and more about it.

Olivier Blanchard: There’s another aspect to this real quick, that was interesting. Because of the angle of the vehicle and see how much it’s sagging, the same system is able to automatically adjust the angle of the lights of the vehicle-

Ron Westfall: Okay. All right.

Olivier Blanchard: … so that…so safety, so that, one, you’re not shining your brights at oncoming traffic if the truck is loaded a little bit heavy in the back, but also so that the headlights are always tracking and illuminating the road exactly as they should be regardless of how the load is set. And so it’s, again, another automated safety feature that’s enabled by the Snapdragon platform and by partners in those intermediate spaces like BlackBerry, QNX. And, obviously, that’s something of tremendous interest to companies like Stellantis and other automakers out there that have a lot of vehicles commercial or for a consumer-facing out on the roads.

Ron Westfall: It’s neat, that’s for sure. And I think it’s good news for 2024. We’ll definitely be revisiting this topic. I think we’re going to see a great deal of more focus, product development, investment, and marketing in terms of what else can the ecosystem advance in terms of automotive capabilities. And I think the market is definitely responding. So this is-

Olivier Blanchard: And how much connectivity it’s going to require. Right now, we’re good. But as the system proliferate and more and more bandwidth is needed per vehicle, it’s going to be on the carriers to follow the lead.

Ron Westfall: Exactly. And I think it’s a perfect segue to capstoning this outstanding webcast, that is, it is a 5G connectivity use case that is not only present, but will become stronger. And I think we understand why. It’s because of just the sheer scaling that’s required, but also the built-in flexibility that only a 5G standalone network can deliver out there on the wide area network, as well as some of the other 5G advanced capabilities that will be required to make a car-to-cloud connectivity, all the more resilient, reliable, and so forth. So that’s a definite key takeaway from CES ’24. And with that, thank you so much again, Olivier, for joining The 5G Factor today.

Olivier Blanchard: Thanks for having me as always. Always a pleasure.

Ron Westfall: Oh, well, I’m looking forward to our next conversation, which I wouldn’t be surprised would be automobile.

Olivier Blanchard: Yeah.

Ron Westfall: And so, yeah, we covered basically, really, the major announcements, but I know there’s plenty of other ones. And I know we’ll have more opportunity to touch on some of the other key takeaways that’s going on. And with that, to our viewing audience and our listening audience, thank you again for joining us and spending time. We look forward to seeing you again at our next webcast. So please don’t forget to bookmark us. And with that, have a great 5G day, everyone.

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