The complexity of vehicle software systems is leading to millions of recalls. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Software-related recalls drive former Tesla engineer Hemant Sikaria crazy. He has good reason. Speaking with Forbes.com recently, he told of a non-Tesla vehicle he once owned, and loved, that was recalled three times in a few months. The rest of his family had the same bad luck and made a dozen trips back to the dealer for software repairs over the course of three months.
Indeed, Sikaria says in 2018 alone, 15 million vehicles were recalled due to software-related issues. But now Sibros, the company he co-founded, is in a stronger position to try to greatly reduce that number after Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced today it will make Sibros’s Deep Connected Vehicle platform available. What that means is Sibros’s solution can now be discovered in the AWS Partner Solutions Finder.
The Sibros “secret sauce” is the firmware it developed making it possible for an automaker to provide over the air (OTA) software updates to all of vehicle’s system and getting them to work in concert.
“We can update 80-plus electronic control units and micro controllers in the vehicle and typical automakers update maybe only the infotainment system,” said Sikaria. “It needs a piece of software to work with all the supplier software as well as in-house software and be able to manage the complexity of all the configurations of software.”
This capability, according to Sikaria, could not only save him and his family the inconvenience of trips to the dealer to have software-related issues repaired but millions of other motorists. He cites 15 million vehicles were recalled for software problems in 2018 alone, costing automakers between $150 and $1,000 per vehicle.
Hemant Sikaria, CEO and co-founder of San Jose, Calif.-based technology company Sibros.
By, in effect, getting all of a vehicle’s software on the same page, he says, creates a kind of high tech teamwork, rather than working independently in their own, not necessarily compatible worlds. He reaches back, once again, to his own experience to illustrate the point relating, “if I was in reverse and changed the volume on my radio, the reverse system would not auto brake if there was an obstacle.”
Founded in 2018, the San Jose, Calif. company has been working with a number of automakers Sikaria chose not to name as well as companies producing electric and autonomous vehicles as well as electric bikes.
The relationship with AWS will now make Sibros’s cloud-based system even more available to automakers.
“The continued growth of connected vehicles and autonomous development is accelerating demand for new mobility solutions from predictive maintenance for fleets to advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) development,” said Bill Foy, Director of Automotive, Amazon Web Services, Inc. in a statement. “With over 300 million connected vehicles globally sold, hundreds of million lines of code, increasing complexity, and the growing frequency of recalls, our automotive customers are on alert to verify the quality and security of vehicle software to ensure driver safety.”
The urgency to find a way to catch software glitches before they happen is only growing with the availability of sophisticated advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) along with the development of more capable autonomous and electric vehicles.
Says Sibros’s Hemant Sikaria, “The amount of software is going up, the complexity of software is going up.”
