Volkswagen announces plan for car operating system vw.OS 2025

On June 18, local time in Europe, Volkswagen announced that by 2025, all new models will use the vw.OS car operating system and the car cloud service jointly developed by Volkswagen and Microsoft.

To achieve this goal, Volkswagen has established a special Car.Software department within the company. The department will recruit 5,000 people to carry out related research and development, and plans to increase the software developed internally by Volkswagen from the current less than 10% to more than 60%.

The first model equipped with the vw.OS operating system is the pure electric car ID.3, which will be officially delivered in 2020 and will usher in the wave of electrification and digitalization of Volkswagen. As a complete vehicle manufacturing group, why does Volkswagen independently develop an automotive operating system?

There may be two considerations: one is the demand for intelligent cars, and the other is the demand for new business models. However, as a car company, the challenge of making its own operating system is how to do it well and how to connect with external services.

01 Why promote vw.OS

Volkswagen has many brands and models. According to traditional model design, Volkswagen currently has up to 70 control units with operating software from 200 different suppliers that need to be integrated into Volkswagen brand vehicles. These different systems have similar functions, such as infotainment and navigation.

According to Volkswagen's plan, the new software platform is designed to provide core functions for all brands, thereby simplifying Volkswagen's car manufacturing. This includes all Volkswagen models, including small cars to top-of-the-line Bugatti. Driving the same software platform is a core part of Volkswagen's 2025 strategy, which aims to adapt to the needs of electrification and automation.

In February 2019, Volkswagen announced the establishment of a new department "Digital Car&Service", which will be headed by Christian Senger. At the same time, Christian Senger became a member of the Volkswagen board of directors, which shows the importance of this department.

In terms of structure, the Car.software department should be under the Digital Car&Service and managed by Christian Senger. Before taking charge of the Digital Car&Service department, Christian Senger was the head of e-Mobility, and Volkswagen's electrification platform MEB was the product of his management.

From the perspective of the intelligent trend of automobiles, automobile design is facing new demands for adapting to intelligence, and needs to start from the electronic and electrical architecture to provide a hardware foundation for intelligence. However, the previous model of multiple systems in automobile design working independently has greatly affected the implementation of automobile intelligence.

Tesla's automotive electronic and electrical architecture is designed for intelligence, and combined with the operating system developed by Tesla, Tesla can easily improve its user experience, including interactive experience and vehicle performance experience, through OTA. This also provides a foundation for Tesla's future business model.

One of the prerequisites for Volkswagen to promote vw.OS is that Volkswagen must also redesign its electronic and electrical architecture to adapt to the needs of automotive intelligence. The redesigned electronic and electrical architecture cannot have many independent software systems like previous models, so a new system is needed to achieve vehicle control.

Although Volkswagen has not explained what vw.OS is and what functions it will have, considering its status as a vehicle manufacturer, vw.OS should be best at vehicle hardware, including how to control the vehicle's sensing components, control components, and decision-making components.

Unlike other car companies that cooperate with technology companies to promote in-vehicle operating systems, the vw.OS car operating system led by Volkswagen is believed to have better performance in the underlying interaction of the car. Otherwise, there is no need for vw.OS to exist.

02 How to connect services

The difficulty of success for an operating system does not lie in whether it can be made, but in whether it can form an ecosystem. For a car company, it is not easy to form its own ecosystem because of the number of users. Even Volkswagen, the world's largest car company, sells more than 10 million cars a year, but this level is still too small for the Internet.

Volkswagen is also aware of this problem, and the solution is to promote ODP, which connects vehicles, customers and services based on cloud technology. The role of ODP is to ensure that external partners in the Volkswagen ecosystem can be connected to the IT architecture of Atmospheric Automotive.

This is crucial for vw.OS. Without ODP, there is no way for the outside world to uniformly access information from the car's IT architecture, thereby providing users with a good interactive experience. Of course, without vw.OS, there is no way for users to have a better control experience over the vehicle.

As for Volkswagen's vw.OS, it is a car operating system dominated by Volkswagen, so it must not have a larger user base and a larger developer base than the car operating systems launched by technology companies. Tesla's operating system also faces such a problem. For example, Google's Android Automotive OS has millions of Android developers who can develop programs for Android Automotive OS.

Of course, when it comes to calling the underlying data of the car, Android Automotive OS is certainly not as convenient as vw.OS, and it requires the full cooperation of car companies. This is also a problem with Android Automotive OS. The difficulty of solving this problem is directly linked to the attitude of car companies. This is a game process.

More importantly, with the advent of 5G, the era of the Internet of Everything is about to begin, and smart cars will inevitably interact with other smart devices, which requires an underlying operating system. For example, Huawei's Yu Chengdong said that Huawei's operating system will connect mobile phones, computers, tablets, TVs, cars and wearable devices, which is the real operating system for the era of the Internet of Everything.

Obviously, vw.OS does not have such a gene. The current Android Automotive OS may not have such a capability either, but the industry believes that the next system will have such a capability. In comparison, do you think it is more difficult for Android Automotive OS to compete with car companies, or for vw.OS to build its own ecosystem?

The vw.OS operating system is Volkswagen's weapon to welcome the arrival of automotive intelligence. However, in order for this weapon to play a better role, it needs to cooperate with other partners. Otherwise, it may still be an excuse for standing still.

Volkswagen has taken a brave step forward for car companies. What are other car companies waiting for? Either they choose to cooperate with technology companies, such as Polestar, Volvo and Google to use Android Automotive OS, or they develop their own operating systems. These actions cannot be delayed.