Modern technology empowers every major industry. The automotive sector has witnessed remarkable technological feats in the last few decades with the latest addition of AI-powered electric vehicles (EVs).
The EV industry is booming. Last year, Elon Musk’s EV company Tesla generated around $5.5 billion in profit–continues to grow in 2022. This year alone, the global automotive industry will put 25 million electric cars on the road. By 2030, this number will increase to a staggering 125 million EVs.
The automotive industry is not just about metal and mechanics anymore. Besides state-of-the-art hardware, major electric vehicle components are powered by robust software programs.
In EVs, software applications are required for releasing new features, regular upgrades, maintenance, and repair. Therefore, modern vehicle manufacturers need to build software that is not just quicker and better but also safer. Generally, software programs governed by DevOps practices ensure better development, deployment, communication, and security. EV manufacturers adopt the same software practices.
Why use DevOps for Electric Vehicles?
Electric vehicles are operated with minimal mechanical systems and powerful custom-built software applications. However, EV software programs can be vulnerable to serious security concerns. Recently, 25 Tesla cars were remotely hacked after exploiting the security vulnerability of TeslaMate, a famous Tesla data logging tool. Therefore, electric vehicle manufacturing needs to be more vigilant towards enhancing software security.
DevOps practices encourage software developers working in the EV sector to enable quick and reliable delivery of EV features and updates. Smart auto manufacturing companies that follow the DevOps approach can observe the following improvements:
- High product quality
- Robust experimentation
- Enhanced software pipeline efficiency
- Reduced maintenance downtime
- Reduced delivery time
- Decreased development cost
- Improved customer satisfaction
What Automotive Industry Challenges Can DevOps Help Overcome?
With the soaring purchase of electric vehicles, new challenges are frequently emerging from the automotive industry. Some of the challenges concerning EV security and end-user safety include:
Data Misuse, Privacy, and Security Threat
Software-driven vehicles produce and collect a huge amount of data related to driving speed, route, previous trips, search history, audio instructions, music playlists, location, and even credit card information to provide a personalized and safe driving experience.Cyber attacks allow intruders to steal this user information, raising privacy issues and consumer mistrust. DevSecOps prioritizes security within DevOps-enabled software systems by constant monitoring and detection of potential threats.
Complex Infrastructure and Design
Modern EVs work with various sensors and embedded devices to sense surroundings. EV manufacturers need complex testing environments to validate their performance and reliability. The configuration and maintenance of such complicated software infrastructures increase the time and cost of product delivery. Furthermore, deploying software updates frequently with an inappropriate infrastructure adds bugs and errors, leading to disastrous consequences. Integrating cloud technology with DevOps practices can help build, maintain and test complex applications cost-effectively.
Continuous Deployment
EV software requirements keep evolving both during and after product release. For instance, if new road safety regulations are introduced, they must be incorporated into the existing system. Automotive manufacturers must upgrade their systems on the fly with minimum downtime. DevOps is an agile practice that allows EV companies to track and implement changing requirements at each product development phase, resulting in quicker deployment.
Use Cases of DevOps In the Automotive Sector
Let’s look at some practical implementations of DevOps in the EV industry:
- Tesla uses DevOps to deliver most of its microservices using Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration. Tesla’s Over the Air (OTA) wireless software updates use DevOps to fix bugs quickly and deliver new features more frequently.
- Jaguar engineers adopted DevOps practices to increase the throughput of their infotainment system. They started off by building a server, incorporating continuous integration and testing to put all the pieces of Land Rover software together, and automated the build and deployment process using Docker containers. As a result, they reduced the build to delivery time of new features from six weeks to only an hour and delivered the same infotainment system for nine different vehicles.
- The Connected Cars Platform team at Mercedes has built an automated and secure DevOps pipeline based on containers and Kubernetes orchestration. All development, testing, and deployment processes are governed by an automated Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, which speeds up software releases from months to weeks.
Harness the Potential of Electric Vehicles With harpoon
The increasing demand for electric vehicles requires manufacturers to play a significant role in building elegant software solutions. DevOps principles enable EV companies to deliver high-level performance from their software products while adapting to the ever-changing business requirements.
harpoon helps EV companies to accelerate and secure their software programs by implementing its specialized No Code DevOps and DevSecOps software. To experience this seamless integration, book a demo today.
