RJ Scaringe
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks, Alex. It’s a great question. When you look at a product as complex as a vehicle and in particular vehicle that’s connected with the host of sensors between cameras, radar, ultrasonics, with a whole bunch of actuators, so this is suspension, braking, motors, the traditional model is to buy, as you said, a number of compute platforms, ECUs from different Tier 1 suppliers and to put all those different ECUs together. And then the OEM essentially does some part of – at least prescribes how it should be done at the application layer. From our perspective, to create a really unique customer experience, experience in which we can fully leverage all the sensors, all the hardware in the vehicle and continually improve the vehicle over time, truly improve it, more than just putting a new color on the screen, but actually going deep into the performance of the vehicle, whether that’s referring to self-driving, whether that’s referring to performance attributes or whether that’s digital characteristics or digital capabilities of the vehicle. We feel really strongly that it’s important to both develop and control the full stack. So that’s designing and developing the compute platforms across the vehicles. So that’s all the electronics. Of course, by doing that, being able to design a very efficient network architecture and then of course, within that, building all the layers of software from the low-level operating systems all the way up to the application layer. And what’s exciting to see is the beginnings of, from a customer-facing point of view, why that matters. And so we’ve done a number of OTAs, over-the-air updates, already with customers, and these are just an early sampling of what’s to come. So, adding features like a garage door opener to the vehicle, adding enhanced self-driving features, adding additional drive modes, adding additional diagnostics platforms. So there is a host of things we can go very deep into the vehicle across platforms because all those platforms are controlled internally. And this is important, not just on the consumer side. This is also, we feel, really important on the commercial side, where it really underpins a lot of the core capabilities we embed in our FleetOS product where we can predictively analyze the need for maintenance, we can predictively manage the health of the life cycle of a vehicle. So there is a number of characteristics that are useful as well on the commercial side.