Key Takeaways from the 7th Annual State of Automotive Recalls Summit

Sibros was invited to participate in the 7th Annual State of Automotive Recalls Summit hosted by the Society of Automotive Analysts last month, in partnership with advisory firm Stout Risius Ross. 

The summit has traditionally taken place in a face-to-face forum in the Detroit area, yet for this year, due to COVID-19 and shelter-in-place orders, it was hosted as a live webinar focused on the most current automotive industry defect and recall trends.

Sibros’ CEO Hemant Sikaria joined a panel of automotive industry analysts and advisors, providing specific insight around software related recalls and solutions that could create new value for OEMs.

The panel discussed the automotive industry’s response to recall trends and the impact of recalls on the supply chain, safety, and financial valuations. For those who could not make it, here's a quick recap from Sibros' part of the discussion around software related recalls and solutions.

The acceleration of the software-defined vehicle to enable electrification and autonomous capabilities leads to more in-vehicle code. With this increase comes an opportunity to add more features to a vehicle, but also poses an additional risk of many software-related issues that can arise. 2019 saw near record-setting highs in the number of software related recalls and remedies, more than any other year.

More software means more updates in any machine, device or car. Software can also prevent hardware recalls (not all but quite a few). If software updates can fix defects (for both software and their components alike) why are updates not being deployed to prevent recalls before they begin, as evidenced by the data?

There are several reasons for this, here are just a few:

1. Vehicle complexity (+/- 100 ECUs)

2. The vehicle is a safety critical system

3. Software and hardware combinations = potentially millions

Reason number three above is an ever-growing challenge we see happening more often inside the walls of so many OEMs. With so many combinations of software and hardware, software inventory management and logistics is a complexity that must be effectively controlled. This factor alone results in longer times to fix software related defects, even when software bugs are already known.

Our perspective?

In order to tame software related defects and recalls, vehicles must be equipped with embedded software and cloud connectivity that goes beyond the connected car as we know it today (maps and apps). This means the ability to deploy OTA software updates to every ECU in the vehicle and gather the right data back out of that vehicle for live diagnostics and preventative maintenance.

When OEMs work to create their own software update and data collection platforms they forego the opportunity to focus their energy on building unique connected vehicle services on already existing platforms.

So What's Needed?

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To obtain more information or details surrounding this topic that we presented during this summit, contact us.

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