Overview
People’s lives are more-and-more ‘on-line’ and they want that life to continue when they get in their car. In-vehicle infotainment is all about bringing that connected experience into the car and is a market currently experiencing explosive growth (expected to exceed $70 billion in 2012).
Three key factors driving the growth of IVI:
- Customer demand; people want to continue their connected lives when they are in their car.
- Regulations; new regulations (such as eCall in Europe) are providing an encouraging regulatory environment for car connectivity initiatives.
- Technology. Enabling technologies such as high-bandwidth cellular networks and location-base-services are now widely mature.
All these factors are driving the growth of IVI systems. By 2020 Electronic and In-Vehicle Services will be the main cost component (40%) of the vehicle.
The Challenge
The exciting growth in the capabilities of IVI systems comes with similar growth in the complexities of the underlying software. As of today over 50 percent of fault calls to manufacturers are related to software.
So car manufacturers are now large software companiesfocused on improving their software development processes, testing, continuous integration, source code management, and so on. The car industry is more accustomed than most to re-inventing itself, but becoming a large software company so quickly is indeed a significant challenge.
Several industry initiatives have been launched to address this complexity through greater platformization (e.g. GenIVI and MirrorLink), but whilst these show great long term promise, in the short-term they create more uncertainty about the future for OEMs.
The Solution
eggPlant is well suited to anyone developing an IVI solution:
- eggPlant is a proven tool for testing IVI systems (see video below).
- eggPlant is non-invasive which is essential for testing regulated IVI systems.
- eggPlant is technology agnostic, i.e. it works with any operating system or user interface technology, e.g. Windows CE, Linux, QNX, Android, Flash, and so on. So whatever technology choices you make, or change, eggPlant will support you.
- eggPlant does not require software development skills. This means it can be easily used by existing (manual) test teams which means your time-to-benefit is much faster.
Demonstration
Click on the video below to see eggPlant testing a real IVI system:
