By: Sarah Tatsis, SVP, BlackBerry IVY Platform Development

The future of automotive transportation will be defined by two domains: the driving function and the in-car user experience. 2022 will see:

• The Rise of Killer App(s) – A series of applications that support and complement each other emerge over the next couple of years and it will drive a big shift in vehicle purchase decisions for both consumers and commercial fleets alike.There’s a good chance that we’ll see several versions of level 2, 3, and 4 automation, along with several mapping, battery management, and experience applications to support them. Differing laws, automotive offerings, and personal preference will drive much of this and ultimately which applications achieve critical mass.

• War for Talent – With Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) coalescing around the software-defined vehicle, and driven by the requirement to become all electric, the war for top tech talent will heat up. App, cloud and embedded developers will all be in high demand as automakers look for the individuals that will enable them to build out their software architectures at scale and abstract away the hardware (allowing for standardization across various makes, models and brands).

• The Rush to Electrification – As governments around the world have stuck by their mandates from the Paris Agreement, automakers are trying to get ahead of the regulation. We will see all electric vehicles become more accessible, affordable, and prevalent; and as gas prices rise, we will see consumer and fleet demand for electric vehicles increase.

• Data Deluge – There will continue to be no shortage of data that can be pulled off the vehicle, however the ever-present challenge that often gets overlooked is the considerable connectivity and storage costs, particularly if you don’t have a purpose for the data. Having the ability to run machine learning models and process data on the edge (inside the vehicle) is going to become increasingly important so that OEMs don’t have to send all that data up to the cloud and incur additional fees. Dynamically pulling data at key moments in time is the way the industry is headed. For instance, say a fleet of vehicles is stuck in traffic and each one of them is continually sending info up to the cloud. Ultimately OEMs want to be able to send a message down to all of vehicles that says, only send me a message once the situation has changed (so that they don’t incur the additional fees that accompany the constant pinging of the same update). Think of it as the evolution of the ‘Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet’ refrain that all most parents are familiar with.

• Vehicle Health Monitoring – With the average new car containing more than 100 million lines of code and some of the most complex software ever deployed by automakers, the need for a holistic view into the overall health and security posture of a vehicle’s entire code base throughout its full lifecycle is critical. Just as enterprises rolled out Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solutions for desktops, laptops and mobile devices, further down the road we’ll see OEMs and fleet managers look to do the same with holistic vehicle health monitoring solutions to enhance the overall safety and security of what is the ultimate ‘end point’. Automakers will continue to seek out ways to identity vehicles, drivers, and passengers, adopting Zero Trust-like security frameworks based on biometric and two-factor authentication. We’re also likely to see regulators hone in on this as people increasingly have important financials information tied to their car, thus making it a more lucrative and attractive attack target to malicious actors.