According to a Roland Berger study, the cost of software in cars will explode.
The car is increasingly becoming a piece of hardware that software needs. Be it the assistance systems, the sensors or even autonomous driving. This and more is already being controlled by software today and this trend has not yet come to an end.
But software poses problems for the automotive industry. On the one hand, there is a lack of skilled workers and these have to be shared with many other industries that also want to integrate software into their product. On the other hand, according to a recent study by the consulting firm Roland Berger, spending on software is set to increase drastically.
By the end of this decade, the costs for the auto industry are expected to increase from the current 26 billion US dollars (as of 2021) to 59 billion by 2030. This doubling is accompanied by a price increase of six percent per year.
Berger already sees a solution for the cost increase. The cost must be saved in the design. The credo must change: away from the integration of technology and software in existing vehicles and towards the priority for software. The concept is called “Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV)” and at the center is a software platform. According to the Berger study, this would reduce annual costs by around 16 billion US dollars.
However, one must invest in the restructuring. These development costs add up to around seven billion US dollars. alone in test area eleven billion US dollars could be saved in this way. Further savings relate to software maintenance and, of course, integration.
For this, however, the industry would also have to agree on standards for vehicle architecture and the use of open source software.