October 25th, 2021: Tesla market cap reached 1.01 Trillions, equivalent to the next 10 biggest automakers in the world. All that, not defining them as an Automotive, but a Software Company. Had the Automotive OEMs and Tier-1s not realized how important software is becoming in the modern vehicle, at that point they understood that by hard.

What Tesla did, apart from all EV technology, factory models, etc, was putting the software at the center and building the organization around it. In that sense, Tesla was the precursor of SDV: Software Defined Vehicles, a term the Automotive industry created, in analogy to software defined radios.

In this theater talk, Vinicius Zein will cover the drivers for the changes in the automotive industry, the main goals the carmakers are pursuing, the pillars of SDV and the challenges they are facing. He will also cover the changes in the automotive electronics, moving from a fully distributed to a zonal and central computer architecture, the so called Vehicle OS (what is definitely not only an operating system, but a set of tools, a SW framework and eventually 2 or 3 different OS), examples of SW stacks being used in the cars, as well as two big open source initiatives the automotive industry is looking at.