Driving Into the Digital Fast Lane

What if you could customize and update your car’s features and operations as quickly, securely and easily as you can for your smartphone? That vision drives Apex.AI, a CES 2024 exhibitor that’s innovating software designed to simplify connection to consumer-ready electric and autonomous vehicles. This company is breaking new ground as an enabler of the software-defined vehicle. Apex.AI President, CEO and Co-Founder Jan Becker observes that the software-defined vehicle is similar to smartphones in that the operating-system and app updates are quickly, simply and securely executed without a system redesign or costly trip to the dealer. Summarizing the Apex.AI vision in this episode of CES Tech Talk, Becker offers insights that include these: The OS for a smartphone employs a software development kit (SDK) that contains all the functionality common to apps for downloading data, creating a virtual keyboard and so on. Apex.AI has developed an SDK for software-defined vehicles. With Apex.AI, developers have a toolbox of pre-configured software with a modular, predefined and pre-certified design. They can use these to more quickly and easily implement a wide range of builds. Today’s cars include hundreds of small computers that essentially perform one task such as controlling the lights or radio. This architecture slows innovation, forcing update cycles that can last a year. In the future, a central core will control these features, as is the case with smartphones. Apex.AI software enables that central architecture. Apex.AI will demonstrate the future of software-defined vehicles, and how its software will enable them, at booth 6810 in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall. A press conference is also planned.