Automotive technology is the software, sensors and computers that run a modern car. Imagine sitting in a new car in India. The speedometer is a screen. A touchscreen in the middle shows maps, music and the reversing camera. If a crash is about to happen, the car brakes by itself. From your phone, you can unlock the car or switch on its air conditioning before you reach it. Software controls all of this.
Not every car has all of these. A basic car may have only a small screen and a reversing camera. A costly one may have everything described below. But in every price band the direction is the same: more of what a car does is decided by software.
This scene has four parts.
The first is the digital cockpit. It is everything in front of the driver: the screen behind the steering wheel, the central touchscreen, the voice assistant and a camera that watches the driver. These used to be separate boxes. More and more, one computer runs all of them.
The second is autonomous driving and ADAS. Cameras, radar and lidar measure what is around the car. Software then recognises other vehicles and people, and decides when to brake or steer. Driver assistance helps a driver who is still driving. Autonomous driving software drives with no one at the wheel. How much the car does by itself is described by the levels of autonomy.
The third is connected cars. A connected car has its own SIM card. It sends data to the carmaker's cloud, and the carmaker sends software updates back, as a phone company would update a phone.
The fourth is automotive components. The carmaker designs, assembles and sells the car, but suppliers make most of its parts. These suppliers are called Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers. They make the wiring, the brakes, the airbags and the motors. The buyer pays one price for the whole car, so the carmaker decides which supplier's part goes in.
Behind all four parts is one idea. A car has dozens of small computers, each called an electronic control unit (ECU). Carmakers now want software, not hardware, to define what the car does and how it changes over the years. A car built this way is called a software-defined vehicle.
Indian roads shape this work. They are crowded with scooters, trucks, auto-rickshaws and cattle, so driving software that was trained on roads in other countries needs retraining here. Every new car model must also meet Indian rules before it is sold, and the Bharat NCAP programme gives cars a star rating for safety, which is one reason more cars now carry safety electronics. Many carmakers and suppliers run large engineering centres in India, where a good part of the cockpit and connected-car software is written.