The Anatomy of Software-Defined Vehicles Realized for Series with Systems Engineering

Software Defined Vehicles promise faster time-to-market for new features, lower total cost of ownership, more secure software through faster and simpler over-the-air updates and a more desirable development environment, lowering entry barriers to automotive software development. It bears the promise of reducing the number of hardware control units, thus allowing for new, more efficient E/E architecture topologies. This large spread in scope of potential use cases results in many different and often ambiguous expectations of what a Software Defined Vehicle actually is. We present a classification of Software Defined Vehicles applying different approaches within our safe and secure Engineering, comprising software and E/E architecture, depending on the use cases’ focus on time-to-market, packaging and total cost of ownership—or all of these. In addition, we show how this classification represents added value in series production and we demonstrate its realization with systems engineering in a practical example.