How Grape Up Empowers the Automotive Industry to Build a Software-Defined Vehicle

The automotive industry is transforming rapidly toward a software-driven market. Automotive manufacturers build software development teams, adopt new technologies, and focus on delivering advanced vehicle software. The change that is happening in the auto industry can be illustrated by its icon – a software-defined vehicle.

Automotive companies, on their way to implementing the SDV concept and delivering software-defined vehicles, collaborate with tech consulting partners, proficient in delivering innovative products. Here comes Grape Up, automotive software development and technology consulting company, enabling top automotive enterprises to transform their organizations into software-centric companies.

What is a Software-defined vehicle?

Once competing in performance and design, now the automobile industry goes further and focuses on software development. As a result, all the most influential brands are competing in delivering software-defined vehicles to large-scale production.

SDV is a vehicle designed, prototyped, and build with software solutions in mind. Automotive applications are no longer fancy gadgets. Software systems and sets of available apps become a key competitive advantage and increase the role of software development at every level of vehicle production. Like never before, software impact customer experience and ensure connectivity to the entire infrastructure, the network of connected vehicles, and the whole digital world.

Automotive software development services

Today’s vehicles need to be connected, provide entertainment services, deliver new features and functionalities on demand, and ensure tailored user experience. To ensure that end-users get their services, automobile manufacturers have to build solid software foundations. While the automobile industry started to gain software development skills, establish effective software development processes, and implement agile development, it became obvious, that vehicle manufacturers need help.

The transition in automotive wouldn’t be possible without companies like Grape Up. Experts in software architecture, cloud-native development, cloud services, and artificial intelligence technologies support automotive enterprises and help them establish new industry standards for automotive innovation. Successful collaboration with automotive enterprises wouldn’t be possible without understanding software complexity, electronic architecture, pillars of functional safety, the ecosystem for motor vehicles, and the car hardware development process.

Grape Up provides support at every level of software development life cycle management. Starting with understanding the business context and analyzing the tech stack, leading R&D and design projects, to developing, productionizing, and maintaining automotive software solutions.

Experienced automotive software engineers and product owners

Automotive enterprises need both consulting the general way of prototyping innovative solutions and supporting software development. Proved successful approach to delivering software in the automotive industry comes to not only ensuring the quality of software code (which is fundamental) but also to mentoring and effective project management. Teams that succeed not only with building motor vehicle software with consultants’ help but are fluent in collecting in-house expertise have easy access to knowledge and technology transfer.

Nowadays software development refers not only to application development but goes further. Consultants supporting automotive teams are proficient in understanding tech stacks, operating systems, software development tools, cloud-based services, agile methods, continuous improvement approach but also business context.

Focus on strategic areas of the automotive industry

Working with the top automotive brands, Grape Up has outlined strategic areas necessary to deliver software-defined vehicles to the end-users. The company ensures help at every stage of software development, from R&D projects to software upgrades and system maintenance.

Automotive cloud

To build a powerful software development process, every company has to design a safe and resilient infrastructure to handle growing traffic and an increasing number of connected services. Such an environment needs to take into account system complexity, system integration, and running on the edge and in the cloud.

Grape Up enables automotive enterprises to build and develop automotive cloud solutions leveraging top cloud services and SaaS providers, including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba, and Kubernetes.

Connected cars

The future of automotive is in electric and connected cars, providing customers with autonomous driving tools. Grape Up helps auto companies build solutions allowing for seamless connectivity with infrastructure, other vehicles, and the entire digital world. The company supports its customers in leveraging the Digital Twin concept, IoT, and V2X technologies.

Connected cars improve customer experience and allow to explore new business models and increase upselling. Modern car software can rely on continuous delivery of over-the-air updates, so customers can get a personalized and tailored experience. For the automotive industry that translates into new business opportunities and data that can be changed into insights that accelerate the development of key features and innovative solutions (like automated driving systems).

Shared mobility

Another groundbreaking change in mobility – the shift from ownership toward access on-demand is fueled by software. Ridesharing, carpooling, networks of public bikes, food delivery, and all these solutions change urban areas. Younger generations don’t need to own a vehicle for transportation, they just need mobile apps to gain access to vehicles and services that make their life easier.

Grape Up works with OEMs to develop advanced connected systems ensuring continuous integration with the public networks of vehicles. Also, insurance companies rely on Grape Up to build solutions allowing for leveraging telematics data to provide insurance offerings for these mobility services.

Big data

As vehicles have become the unlimited source of data, automotive enterprises leverage Big Data solutions to increase customer satisfaction and provide improvements with the following software updates. Data generated and collected by vehicles can be easily turned into actionable insights that enable vehicle companies to enhance their production, transform customer experience, and build competitive advantage.

Grape Up empowers automotive teams to build advanced analytics systems and make their organizations data-driven. By building data streaming platforms, vehicle companies can improve internal operations and monetize gained data.

Artificial intelligence

AI is taking the following industries by storm. In automotive, AI-powered solutions change supply chain management, make production more effective, and reduce various costs. Cars of the future leverage machine learning, MLOps, deep neural networks, data science, and many more. All to make vehicles smarter, more autonomous, and more supportive.

Grape Up provides a dedicated team of Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to help automotive enterprises build predictive maintenance, augmented testing, and IoT solutions.

Software delivery approaches for agile teams

Delivery of excellent software development depends on the tech stack, chosen frameworks (in this case often scaled agile framework), used tools, and software engineering expertise. But to make it all works, a software company (and all automotive brands want to be one) needs to implement and improve the outstanding way of software development. Grape Up works with enterprises also to ensure that every software development cycle will translate into first-class solutions.

By being an end-to-end driving force and providing product ownership, Grape Up empowers automotive enterprises to deliver software-defined vehicles. Along with mentoring and consulting approach, Grape Up ensures collaboration with a cross-functional team.