What is a Software Defined Vehicle?

Working in Experience Design in the Automotive industry for many years I've realized that only few designers and engineers understand the full scope and complexity of the platform they're working on. They are mostly concerned with the screens in the cabin while there's so much more going on "under the hood". The electric/electronic architecture (E/E) of modern cars has been in a major transformation. In particular EV platforms have called for a fundamentally new approach to the E/E architecture that includes electric drive train, intelligent battery management, centralized compute power and the infortainment, ADAS and comfort features that drivers and passengers have control over the UI. On top, the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) is part of a digital ecosystem that integrates with the customer's entertainment, social media and smart home accounts and is constantly kept up-to-date with over-the-air software updates (OTA) like a smart phone.

I wanted to visualize the complexity of the different systems in a comprehensive yet simple way so that non-experts don't have a hard time grasping the full scope of the SDV.

Going into 3D and creating info graphics and an animation that show the different layers of the SDV architecture seemed to me the best way of achieving this goal. Two decades of experience with Cinema4D and leveraging the power & quality of Redshift made it easy to go from first hand sketch to production quality in a matter of a few days.