The Tesla Effect makes its way into Toyota’s Software Development Initiatives
Today, no company wants to be left behind in the race for technological prowess and the automotive industry is following the same trend. One of the best Japanese automobile companies, Toyota, is also taking the custom software development route in wake of the Tesla effect. With the assistance of its tech R&D arm, Woven Planet Holdings (headed by former Google engineer, James Kuffner), Toyota aims to claim a chunk of the smart car market and for all the right reasons.
According to Statista, the automotive software market was worth just over $13 billion in 2019, with a negative impact in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is expected to rake in close to $14 billion by 2024.
Before we jump into Toyota’s high-tech software initiatives, let’s take a brief look at how Elon Musk’s Tesla is influencing this industry.
The Tesla Effect
Tesla’s rocketing success is an amalgamation of Musk’s vision and the speedy innovations in Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs). While traditional automakers were making improvements to the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), Elon’s team was optimizing BEVs via custom software development efforts to improve car performance and reduce running costs.
Simply put, Tesla revolutionized the automotive industry by developing cars that look good, perform better, and provide an appealing vision for which buyers are willing to pay big bucks
Thanks to this revolution, Toyota is honing in on the long-term benefits of the software-first approach too. Let’s try and understand the automotive giant’s vision for its future car lineup.
Toyota to Boost its Custom Software Development efforts
Toyota’s move to hire a former Google engineer for Woven Planet Holdings is proof of their commitment to developing high-tech future cars and compete with the likes of Tesla. Under the supervision of Kuffner, Toyota has successfully managed to create a car operating system called Arene. With it, Over the Air (OTA) updates can be easily installed and it also serves as a platform for software development.
Tesla is a market leader in cutting-edge vehicle software, which controls almost all the essential operations of the car and it has been doing it for nearly a decade now. According to Elon Musk, their sophisticated software is available for licensing and can be engineered to work with other hardware. In response to a question regarding the use of Tesla software, James Kuffner shed light on Toyota’s custom software development capabilities.
“There are many choices, which is a good thing. We have a competitive product that can run on many different types of hardware, so maybe in the future, Arene can run on Tesla hardware.”
Conventional car manufacturers like Toyota no doubt, are experts when it comes to producing cars with state-of-the-art mechanical engineering & hardware performance. However, it will be a while before they catch up to Google’s and Tesla’s technological mastery and vehicle operating systems. Woven Planet Holding’s boss shared his concerns about this aspect and also talked about the future of Toyota in an Automotive News interview.
“Toyota has a long history of building excellent, reliable products and hardware, but building software is something that is a new capability for many traditional automakers. My mission is really to create a strong software center of excellence within the Toyota group at Toyota Research Institute — Advanced Development (TRI-AD). Working with our other partners and creating products that have both good hardware and software together.”
The creation of this new software development company and the onboarding of James Kuffner is a smart move. This may give the competition a run for their money in the near future. Guess we’ll have to wait and watch.
