CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Suraj Nair, Director of Technology and COE Leader (IOT & Telematics).
- Connected cars have witnessed an increasing demand in the market over the past few years. What is Quest Global’s focus currently on the automotive software development process to ensure parity with the changing choices of the primary consumer of modern vehicles?
Quest Global has been working with global automotive OEMs, Tier 1s and Tier 2s of various sizes and capacities for over 25 years. We have significant presence at our customer locations and, as a result, have a continuous pulse on evolving market demands in the automotive segment. Our presence also helps us appreciate the dynamics of the market as we see our customers constantly needing to re-invent themselves to best meet their customer needs. Our customers rely on us to provide the technology expertise necessary to pivot and transform faster to address the market. Our teams of highly technical and passionate onsite and offsite engineers work closely with our customers to help solve their hardest problems. Moreover, our expertise in the Hi-Tech space, working on components and products in the consumer segment, helps us understand expectations among the new generation of customers – the Millennials and Gen Z.
Our presence in the Hi-Tech and Automotive sectors provides us with a holistic perspective of the market and the associated technology. Our presence in the Hi-Tech vertical helps us acquire a good understanding of changing consumer behaviour and how consumers want to interact with products. Additionally, we are at the forefront of technology adoption thanks to our partnerships with leading technology providers and the work we do for our customers across industry segments (building next-gen technology solutions from chip to cloud to end consumer mobile devices). Both these perspectives help in placing us as a partner in the truest sense of the word, for our automotive customers.
- Why is there a sudden surge in the demand for more connected and smart cars?
There has been a generational shift in consumer expectations when deciding to buy a car. In the past, the focus was on elements like the power train, mileage and others, before deciding to purchase a car. Today, consumers focus on technology elements in the car; they want vehicles to offer the same digital experience as smart phones, home assistants and other consumer electronic devices. They also expect to be offered new experiences during the ownership of the car – with an option to subscribe to features of choice and move on to something new later on.
Moreover, consumers benefit from a significant amount of cognitive load being taken care of when platforms learn their habits and set up experiences accordingly. Additionally, enhanced safety and security becomes a crucial aspect and connected cars enable assisted driving capabilities and quickest assistance in the case of an event, by connecting to first responders automatically with all necessary data to manage the event.
- What is Quest Global’s take on safety features in connected cars to reduce the impact of an event?
The one constant that has been a demand through generations of car ownership is the need for enhanced safety. Leaving aside the mechanical design elements of the car, there is increasing technology in the car focused on achieving a safe driving experience. Technology elements in the car are built to prevent vehicle incidents in the first place (for example ADAS), but in case there is an incident, the focus is on reducing the impact, providing necessary data to minimize turn-around-time for the response.
The move towards higher levels of ADAS is crucial in improving the safety experience, as sensors can “view” things beyond the direct line of sight of users, and features enable quicker response to potential collisions than a human response. Also, in-car systems to monitor the driver and determine fatigue and distraction helps in preventing incidents.
Connected Platforms enable software inside the car to be continuously upgraded thus reducing faulty operations that might compromise the driving experience. Sensor data streamed into a connected platform enables AI features in the platform to detect failing components and connect the service centre with the consumer – to prevent potential compromises. Data from connected platforms enable OEMs to keep improving their safety features based on component condition monitoring based on hours and hours of actual driving across varied road conditions.
Additionally, connected platforms enable orchestrating across multiple third-party responders (Medical, Roadside Assistance etc.) to reach help at the spot in case of an incident. Companion applications in smart phone and in-car connectivity enable consumers to exclusively reach out to call-centre personnel for help.
- What are the solutions Quest Global is working on that provide easy access to personalized infotainment and HMI to cater to its modern-age customers?
At present Quest Global is working on a range of consumer devices and semiconductor solutions for automotive, and infotainment systems, in both embedded and applications space. Having gained extensive understanding of modern-age customer expectations, we have developed an Android Automotive based next-generation infotainment solution, in-house, which has all the features that a new-age consumer would expect, including new generation user interface designs that extend interactions from cockpit to smart phone.
The solution also incorporates features like personalization, for instance, user-specific content being served based on identifying the customer in the digital cockpit and knowledge of past behaviour. In collaboration with some of the world’s leading Hi-Tech and Automotive players, we are working on developing edge and cloud based AI/ML solutions for use cases around vision analytics, predictive maintenance etc. and cloud-based platform solutions across the major vendors.
- What kind of technology is Quest Global using for privacy-conscious users?
We understand privacy regulations across markets and value user privacy. We believe it is important that users explicitly understand the details of the data obtained and how it used in offering the service in the vehicle. In our solutions to customers, we ensure discussions around incorporating relevant interfaces for opt-in and opt-out of services based on consumer choice. We focus early on our designs to identify customer sensitive data as part of data design and evaluate necessary handling. We are also conscious of regulations in regions of deployment and hence incorporate relevant design constructs for enable ecosystem players to exercise their right around data handling per regional regulations.
From technology perspective, we are invested in DevSecOps to enable continuous adherence to data privacy rules and look for security gaps as part of code build to ensure compliance throughout. With increasing edge capabilities, a lot of customer sensitive processing shall happen on the edge in the car – and we are adopting cloud native technologies for the edge to enable some of those services. Federated Learning is another trend that we see as relevant to our customers where training happens locally, and results are aggregated across devices centrally with the customer data not leaving the device.
