Smarter cars

One of the interesting parts of my role is reviewing all the press releases we get from car companies and OE Equipment suppliers to the industry, such as Bosch, ZF and others, looking at the current and future technology for cars.
The driving force around this is the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV), where a significant amount of the functionality is now in the software which links to an array of sensors and then to the physical components such as brakes, dampers and steering. This going forward will mean that new functionality can be added just via software updates, rather than requiring physical changes. This also makes car development simpler as it becomes much easier to model the vehicle digitally before having to produce a physical test vehicle.
As with other things, AI is entering the mix to make driving both easier and safer by taking out some of the unpredictability of human drivers and also to improve the inherent safety of the vehicle on the road. This issue we have a look at some new developments to the ZF Chassis 2 programme where they are building AI road sense to allow the vehicle to adjust to road conditions, such as snow, gravel, mud, etc., without any driver input (so essentially an automated version of some of the terrain dials on high end 4WD vehicles).
The only worry is that some day our cars might be smarter than us!