The Next Gen OS
The OS – the “Operating System” – is the way information moves from one place to another, as well as providing a toolkit of basic capabilities that others can use. Other things use the OS as a car uses the road system.
Our “Next Gen OS” is designed for drive-by-wire EVs (electric vehicles). With minor changes, it can be used for any vehicle. For AVs, this is the platform on which the AV software works.
Why do we need a new OS?
The CAN bus – today’s OS – was invented by Bosch in 1983. There were no cyber threats or any of the technology we use today back in 1983. In 1983 Motorola released the first consumer cell phone. The road to connectivity had just begun.
But every year brought new technology. Those who were maintaining the OS simply added more code, like a bandage on a cut. Every year more patches. Today’s car OS has more than 100 million lines of code, most of it, it seems, bandages on top of previous year’s bandages.
Our Next Gen OS will have 1 – 2 million lines of code. And with every update we will first throw away the old software, clean everything up, and add the new code, like all high-performance teams do.
100 million lines of code for a family SUV is, to us, unimaginable.
What will the new OS deliver?
We will start with a clean slate.
It’s formal name: Vehicular Ethernet with twisted pair cable architecture and fully encrypted to modern standards: 1000BASE-T1 (802.3bp-2016) that runs at 1,000 Mb/s.
What does that mean?
- The amount of copper is cut in half. Lower manufacturing costs. Lower weight.
- Being 1,000 times faster will support anything that is asked of it:
- Fully encrypted at the source
- Hypervisor defences against cyber risk
- Drastic reduction of the number and complexity of ECU’s.
- Fully Fail-Safe hardware to support software right-sized for each vehicle.
- The OS of the most advanced Autonomous Vehicles.
- Infotainment beyond belief.
- Defences of military grade
- No ODB2’s or any other kind of plug-in. Never. There will be no way that a bad actor can get into the car’s systems.
What does it deliver? Safety. High performance. Less weight. Less cost. For the car’s manufacturer (OEM) it will lower their product liability.
The OS will collect a ton of data and pass it on to the OEM:
- The car’s condition and situation
- Everything to be known from the Infotainment system
- Everything to be know about the actions of the car itself.
