Qualcomm’s push into automotive is gaining momentum as the industry revs up its digital journey. The company’s Snapdragon Digital Chassis cloud-connected automotive platforms power hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road today, rapidly establishing themselves as the industry standard. Serving as the building blocks for connected and automated features, they are designed to address the evolution of vehicles from products defined by hardware to those defined by software.
“This is truly redefining the modern automobile,” says Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s General Manager of the Automotive Business.
The digital lifestyle
Duggal has been with Qualcomm since the 1990s and helped guide its evolution into automotive. The company, best known for its mobile chipsets, is also active in computing and IoT. With the move towards software-defined vehicles (SDVs), automotive is poised to play an increasingly important role. Qualcomm currently has a US$45bn automotive order pipeline and expects its automotive business to generate US$8bn in revenues by 2029.
As Duggal tells Automotive World, it’s all about anticipating industry trends: “We build platforms that meet the needs of our customers and end consumers. With more complex technology integrated into the vehicle, cars are moving towards centralised compute architecture, which means greater integration. Vehicles are increasingly defined through software. The beauty with this is that design is continually updated over the vehicle’s lifetime.”
Driving this trend is the move to incorporate the vehicle into the consumer’s digital lifestyle. Seamless integration with smartphones, wearable devices, and connected home technology is becoming not just desired in a new vehicle but expected. “From a consumer perspective, the car is an extension of their digital life,” Duggal observes. “We spend a considerable amount of time in the car. People want to carry out their usual activities there, get work done, make memories. They want it to be an asset that has value. Because of this, the digital aspect is becoming increasingly important.”
A big part of Qualcomm’s focus is on understanding exactly what digital lifestyle experiences consumers want in the car and enabling them. The company is currently working closely with automotive partners on this. “Part of the challenge is that auto industry hasn’t traditionally thought about cars in this way,” he says. “The product is starting to evolve, and everyone is trying to figure out what that means. Some automakers are adapting very rapidly, others are on a more incremental path, but the change is happening.”
AI excitement builds
Qualcomm doesn’t provide the digital experiences but rather the foundations on which automakers can build their brand-specific UX offering. Snapdragon Digital Chassis includes the Cockpit platform, Car-to-Cloud, Auto Connectivity and the Ride platform, as well as the recently added Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite. These two most recent additions target advanced digital experiences and automated driving capabilities, respectively, and are designed to facilitate the industry transition towards SDVs.
“We are building software that we can develop in the cloud and deploy at the edge in a continuous manner,” Duggal explains. “If somebody thinks of a new feature, they will test it out in the cloud and push an update, similar to what happens on a laptop computer.”
Google is just one of the technology partners with which Qualcomm is working to make it easier for automakers to meet SDV requirements. In October 2024, the two companies announced a new collaboration, bringing together technologies from the Snapdragon Digital Chassis, Android Automotive OS, and Google Cloud to produce a new standardised reference platform for AI-powered cockpit solutions.
Qualcomm is positioning itself as a connected computing company for the emerging era of AI processing. The partnership with Google specifically looks to deploy Google AI to create in-car experiences based on generative AI (GenAI), a form of AI that can produce content based on inputs. That could take the form of an intuitive voice assistant, an immersive map experience, real-time updates that anticipate driver needs, etc. All of these will be powered by Snapdragon heterogeneous edge AI system-on-chips.
“I’m very excited about AI,” enthuses Duggal. “It is such a valuable tool. Over the last year and a half, developments within GenAI have allowed humans to consume information that a machine produces.” As an example, he points to how a user can provide a simple command to the car such as ‘tell me how to change a tyre.’ The AI takes into account context and knows what sort of car to which the person refers. It then searches the car’s user manual and can intelligently provide the exact information requested. Such functionality represents a huge step up from simply supplying a list of search results.
Connecting data to action
This is just the tip of the iceberg with AI capabilities within the vehicle. “It comes down to connecting data to information to action,” says Duggal.
Imagine a hot day in which two individuals are sitting inside a vehicle for a certain length of time. The car can detect their presence, the high temperature inside and outside, and the fact that they have been sitting there for several minutes. “It should ask itself, ‘What potential actions could I offer to the people sitting inside?’” The obvious one is to suggest lowering the cabin temperature.
“These are all things that are very possible as you start to connect the dots, but it is not how a car has traditionally been designed,” Duggal says. Compounding this is the level of fundamental complexity within the automotive sector, particularly compared to other software-defined products like phones and computers: “A phone is either Android or Apple. A computer could be a Mac or a PC. However, there are hundreds of car platforms, and because every automaker wants to make their own brand imprint, you need a variety of players to come together over time.”
The industry is also facing a skills shortage. “There is not enough of the right type of skillset within automakers, which shapes what a company does in-house and what it relies on others to do,” says Duggal. Many have been turning to Qualcomm in their journey towards greater automotive intelligence and the SDV. In fact, Chief Executive Christiano Amon claims that the Digital Chassis can be found in vehicles from “virtually every automaker.”
As Duggal concludes, “Given the pace at which technology is changing and automakers are thinking of new experiences, this platform sets things up for what’s to come both for automated driving and the digital car.” If all goes to plan, the coming years will see Snapdragon ignite new digital experiences and capabilities in the transition to a software-defined future.
