{"id":13253,"date":"2026-05-08T09:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/?p=13253"},"modified":"2026-05-08T09:40:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:40:12","slug":"the-transition-to-software-defined-vehicles-transcript","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/the-transition-to-software-defined-vehicles-transcript\/","title":{"rendered":"The transition to software-defined vehicles &#8211; Transcript"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In this episode of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/podcasts\/category\/industry-forward\/\">The Industry Forward Podcast<\/a><\/em>, Royston Jones and Ryan Martin explore the drivers behind the shift toward software-defined vehicles and its impact on the automotive industry.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"embed-megaphone\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TLFIE3474110634\" width=\"100%\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><!-- Megaphone -->\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Hello, and welcome to <em>The Industry Forward Podcast<\/em>, where we explore key trends, transformative technologies, and real-world innovations that are reshaping fields from aerospace, industrial machinery, and semiconductors to pharmaceuticals and beyond. I&#8217;m Kate Eby and I&#8217;ll be your host for today&#8217;s episode. Today we&#8217;re exploring the automotive industry, specifically its transition toward electrification and software-defined vehicles. While the trends are nothing new, they&#8217;re now becoming standard requirements in today&#8217;s competitive market, which means that automotive manufacturers need new solutions to keep pace with these industry shifts. I&#8217;m excited to have two guests with me today. First is Royston Jones, Global Head of Automotive and Transportation here at Siemens. Welcome, Royston. Can you introduce yourself for our audience?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> Yeah, thanks very much, Kate. Yeah, my name&#8217;s Royston Jones. Yeah, I&#8217;ve been in simulation now nearly 40 years and 28 of them have been spent at Altair. So I&#8217;m part of the recent Siemens acquisition of Altair. Yeah, so I&#8217;m a real simulation practitioner and being at Altair, wrapping technologies like optimization and more recently AI around simulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Our second guest is Ryan Martin. Ryan&#8217;s a Senior Research Director at ABI and we&#8217;re excited to have him in studio today. Ryan, can you introduce yourself to our audience?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> Thanks, Kate. Great to be here. Ryan Martin speaking. I started and lead the industrial and manufacturing practice at ABI Research, which looks at change, innovation, and differentiation largely within the four walls of the factory. We look at both technologies and horizontally across vertical markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Welcome. All right, well, I think we have a lot to cover today, so why don&#8217;t we just dive right in? Let&#8217;s start with talking about the fact that there&#8217;s been this ongoing shift in the automotive industry towards software-defined vehicles. It&#8217;s not new and people are at all different stages across that. So what&#8217;s really going on and what&#8217;s driving this change?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> You&#8217;re right that software-defined is not new. It&#8217;s also not done yet. And I&#8217;d say we&#8217;re somewhere sort of in the middle of the journey, and there&#8217;s a few major drivers here and a few areas where we see it. First, certainly infotainment. That&#8217;s been happening for a long time. Also in the way of autonomy from self-parking to self-driving, lane assist. And an important driver for all of this is not just keeping folks busy and giving time back, but also safety is a huge driver. And so autonomy, entertainment and also electrification is underpinning a lot of this change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> And it takes a long time because it takes a long time, or it&#8217;s taking a long time because it takes a long time to get new vehicles to market. And there&#8217;s a lot of moving parts from the supply chain to getting these vehicles actually built and then distributed. And then they also have a long lifespan. And so vehicles are sort of a parallel with what we see in other markets as well, where products as a whole are becoming smart and connected. And now it&#8217;s not just ride quality, but also these smart and connected features that are differentiating the products. So it&#8217;s actually critical for the supplier ecosystem to really get on board and ensure they have software-defined offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Yeah, I&#8217;ll be honest, if I&#8217;m in a vehicle that I&#8217;ve rented that does not have adaptive cruise control, I&#8217;m so used to it that I am actually afraid to use cruise control in that vehicle because I&#8217;m worried I&#8217;ll forget that I need to slow down or brake. So maybe a little too dependent on some of those software-defined features that have not necessarily been rolled out given the long lifecycle of vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> Yeah, there&#8217;s a lot of nuance too. I mean, even things that just make your life easier as a driver, automatic headlights that automatically adjust. The high beams and low beams is one good example. That&#8217;s safety related. It&#8217;s also for convenience. And to actually enable those kinds of capabilities requires a lot of work on the back end for testing. It&#8217;s also new parts, which means new suppliers. And the vehicle manufacturers need to incorporate these new technologies in line in a lot of cases with their legacy manufacturing processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Royston, can you expand on that a little bit, especially this change from mechanically centric to more software and electronics?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, going back a few decades ago, I mean, it was all about the mechanical performance of the vehicle, the way it crashes, the noise within this sort of cabin. That was the focus. And I think particularly with the introduction of EVs, then these products started to fundamentally change. I mean, we&#8217;d see it out there in our own daily lives, particularly with smartphones, which obviously, loads of software processing loads and loads of data. Even your toothbrush was becoming electric. And again, with smart pressure sensors, piping data back up to the cloud so you can check how well you brush your teeth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> And that obviously then is echoed now in these remarkably complex smart products, which are now our vehicles. So I think there&#8217;s been a massive change. It&#8217;s all powered by data. Modern vehicles now have over 100 sensors, multiple CPUs. So yeah, these are really sophisticated products now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>I&#8217;ve heard you refer, Royston, in the past to getting in the driver&#8217;s seat as getting into the cockpit instead of the driver&#8217;s seat, which is an interesting change in the way we talk about vehicles. Can you expand on that a little bit?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> Well, maybe it&#8217;s my age, Kate, but you know, when I used to look at a car, then basically a lot of the decision in buying that car was just from an external view, either the styling or the color, but consumer preferences have now changed a lot. You want to get into the car and you basically are confronted with a really sophisticated user interface, almost like a cockpit where you&#8217;ve got a single screen or multiple screens. And that&#8217;s quite a factor now in selecting your vehicle. People want to connect their phones really quickly, wirelessly, and as you mentioned, they want the type of cruise control that you recently mentioned. So yeah, I think these buying decisions have basically changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>It&#8217;s really impressive how much has changed. I mean, from a personal user experience, for example, my car&#8217;s a few years old now. And so now all these new cars, your phone will connect wirelessly, right? You don&#8217;t have to plug it in. You don&#8217;t have to make sure everything&#8217;s set. And then recently I received a gift and it&#8217;s got a little camera instead of a mirror to put for my two-year-old daughter in the back of my car. But as soon as I plug that into the USB, it suddenly turns my car into a wireless interface. So now not only do I have wireless access to the camera behind me, but now my phone can wirelessly connect as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>So even that shift and some of the different pieces that come into play have a real impact on how sophisticated our vehicles are, which also I&#8217;m sure has a huge impact when it comes to automotive OEMs and their supply chain. So Ryan, could you talk a little bit about that and how things are changing, how this is impacting the supply chain as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> Change is really the name of the game here. And it&#8217;s really hard for OEMs and their suppliers, especially, to keep up with this change, because a lot of it is very customer-centric. And if the lead time for bringing a new vehicle to market is 3 to 5 years, and not only does there need to be adherence to regulatory environmental changes, but also changes in customer preference. So there was a bit of a head fake at one point with respect to electrification. And so everyone said, oh gosh, we got to fully convert our factories or figure out how to do EV in line with ICE, with internal combustion engine vehicles, and in trying to figure out the right product mix. And there&#8217;s so much complexity when you&#8217;re making a car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> The new Ford F-150, as one example, is produced every 56 seconds, and the average automobile has over 3,000 parts which are sourced from a global supplier network, which means millions of parts are delivered to factories every day just to make the cars that are driving on the road. And that&#8217;s the way it has been. So when you introduce change in the form of software-defined automation or autonomy, electrification, it really adds to the equation because the same OEMs are now needing to work with not just new suppliers, but new components. And because this is an industry that&#8217;s been around for a long time, available square footage, the floor space to actually produce these new products largely has remained unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> It takes a long time to build a new factory. So the task that these folks are, or that the industry is challenged with, is how do we do more with what we have already? And that&#8217;s a big challenge. What&#8217;s happening is there are companies in, like BYD is a great example of a company in China, which has accelerated their development and release of new vehicles. They brought down their cycle from three to four years to one and a half to two years by virtue of embracing new digital technologies in their production cycle, and that&#8217;s creating a ton of pressure for the traditional OEMs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> Yeah, I think just echoing what Ryan said, I mean, the automotive industry has always been a very globally fierce competitive industry. And now I think it&#8217;s gone up a few more notches over the last decade with the advent of EVs, lots of geopolitical type of events, pressure from China, heavy investment in the Middle East in EVs. It really has gone up a few more notches. And I think people want to buy new product. They don&#8217;t want to buy old product. You know, so consequently, getting fresh product out into market o you could take advantage of new technologies that we&#8217;ve mentioned, battery technologies, new connectivity, that&#8217;s really key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> So this drive to produce a car every 24 months or even sooner is there. And obviously the key to basically producing these products, because these products need to maintain their quality levels and they also need to have innovation because, you know, you don&#8217;t want your new car to be very similar to your old car. You know, you want a certain level of sort of refresh. And the key to all this is aggressive deployment of digital technology, which is, yeah, which is great because it&#8217;s been a long time coming. So now it&#8217;s here. So that&#8217;s great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Something you said there, Royce and I found really interesting, and that&#8217;s that people don&#8217;t want old product. Right? They want new product. But along those lines, most people, unless they lease, are not necessarily getting a new car every 24 months, as fast as these innovations are coming out. Right? A lot of people are still paying off their vehicle after two years. And so what role does software-defined or this trend have on keeping cars that are already in service still being able to be updated, right? In the past, your car had the features that your car had. But now, as we become more software-defined vehicles, how does that impact the way that OEMs can continue to add value through software updates?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> Well, I think Ryan alluded to it, that, I mean, I guess we&#8217;ll get on to over-the-air software being providing updates to certain vehicles. That will provide a certain amount of upgrade. But it depends where you are in your buying cycle. Maybe most company, most people would lease for three years. When they come out of that, they want to make sure that even if they like the same car, then there&#8217;s a refresh available. You know, I think that&#8217;s really important. So, making sure that you&#8217;re continuously releasing new products to capture market is really important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> Yeah, the ability to adapt to customer preferences is significant and also profound when it comes to the role of software in having adaptable products. And also it can go the wrong way too. So an example of it going the right way would be many years ago, Tesla installed hardware to enable autonomous driving, but it was a software upgrade that they didn&#8217;t even announce at first. But then people who had these vehicles were able to get new features pushed over the air with time. Now, a lot of those features are actually premium features that you pay for. So that&#8217;s maybe an example of it, generally speaking, going well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ryan Martin:<\/strong> Another automaker at one point, elected to charge for features such as heated seats as a recurring cost, and that was not well received. So that&#8217;s not available, but it was something they considered doing. What this speaks to is the role of software to enable flexibility for customers to obtain the features and capabilities that they want sort of on demand. And it also reflects the role of software making vehicles more valuable with time, which has really been countered to the entire model for the automotive industry. You assume that as soon as you drive a vehicle off the lot, its value decreases. And maybe that&#8217;s true on paper, but what software does is it means that the product can become more valuable to the user over time, and that&#8217;s more of an intrinsic value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Royston Jones:<\/strong> Again, I think the key thing is that technology is accelerating so quickly that, two years in this domain now is a long time, considering the types of battery technologies, how quickly that is changing. So if you can capitalize on the battery technology, the new battery technology, new chemistry, then potentially you&#8217;re going to get an increase in range of that particular vehicle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Kate Eby: <\/strong>Those were such insightful points from both of you. It&#8217;s always inspiring to hear firsthand just how much technology is transforming industries like automotive. Unfortunately, we&#8217;re out of time for today. So thank you, Ryan and Royston, for joining us to share your expertise. And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We hope you found today&#8217;s conversation valuable and can&#8217;t wait to have you back with us as we continue exploring the exciting future of these industries. I&#8217;m Kate Eby, and we&#8217;ll see you next time on <em><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/podcasts\/category\/industry-forward\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/podcasts\/category\/industry-forward\/\">The Industry Forward Podcast<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Siemens Digital Industries Software<\/strong>\u00a0helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens <a href=\"https:\/\/xcelerator.siemens.com\/global\/en.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Xcelerator<\/a> business platform. Siemens\u2019 software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today\u2019s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries.\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.siemens.com\/software\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Siemens Digital Industries Software<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 Accelerating transformation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this episode of The Industry Forward Podcast, Royston Jones and Ryan Martin explore the drivers behind the shift toward&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87014,"featured_media":13254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,194,11,2,8374,13761],"industry":[120],"product":[],"coauthors":[10345],"class_list":["post-13253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-cars-of-the-future","tag-digital-transformation","tag-digital-twin","tag-digitalization","tag-siemens-xcelerator","tag-software-defined-vehicle","industry-automotive-transportation"],"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2026\/05\/SINAMICS-S220-Automotive-Milieu-_medium.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87014"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13255,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13253\/revisions\/13255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13253"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=13253"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=13253"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/thought-leadership\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}