OEMs will Adopt Full Zonal Architecture Only When Risk and Cost of Transition from Legacy Systems Reduces with Technology Maturity
Today, consumers expect their cars to offer features that enhance safety, comfort, and convenience. Over the years, every electronically controlled feature added to vehicles demanded its own electronic control unit (ECU) and supporting communication interfaces, adding more components and burdening vehicle electrical/electronic (EE) architecture with complexity, weight, and cost. A typical premium sedan would house about 100 ECUs and a kilometre-long wiring harness but would not be future proof.
Megatrends such as CASE convergence are expected to augment this burden as a growing number of features are added under each domain. These advanced features will require higher processing speed, no latency, and a V2X enabler. To manage these concerns and meet the requirements, automakers and the vehicle development ecosystem are reconsidering the legacy approach and architectural design. With the advent of battery-electric and software-defined vehicles (SDVs), OEMs plan to redesign platform layers ground up, starting with vehicle EE architecture, built on high-performance computers and Ethernet backbone.
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Companies Mentioned (Partial List)
A selection of companies mentioned in this report includes, but is not limited to:
- Aptiv
- Bosch
- Continental
- GM
- Mercedes Benz
- NXP
- Renesas Electronics
- Snapdragon
- Stellantis
- Tesla
- Visteon
- Volkswagen