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Episode 97 · Deep tech · 58 min

Nobody owns the car's data yet

A lower-end car now carries 89 electronic control units and a high-end one up to 150, and every vehicle running Elektrobit's software would circle the equator 65 times if lined up bumper to bumper. Satish's argument is that the layer underneath has been standardised for twenty years so carmakers can compete on the experience above it — but the data pouring out of that experience, split between the OEM, the telecom operator and the cloud host, still has no owner.

Data & digitisation Deep tech & hardware Regulation & policy

Satish

Managing Director, India, Elektrobit · with Vishal Krishna

58:08

Said in this episode

▶ 15:13

89 → 150

Electronic control units in one car

89 is his figure for a lower-end vehicle; a high-end one runs 120 to 150 separate controllers — against the Maruti Esteem he stripped down 23 years ago, which had none.

▶ 6:21

65×

Equator laps by Elektrobit-run vehicles

Line up every vehicle running Elektrobit software one behind the other, he says, and it circles the equator roughly 65 times.

▶ 4:02

100s of millions

Lines of code in a modern car

Up from a few hundred lines in the sedan he dismantled 23 years ago, which had no controllers at all.

▶ 22:28

20 years

Age of the AUTOSAR standard

The middleware standard is celebrating twenty years, and is now extending itself from in-vehicle real-time and high-performance compute to what happens on the cloud.

▶ 48:47

15 years

How long an automotive chip must last

Against a middle-class Indian phone replaced every two to four — at most five — years; you cannot walk into a dealership and ask for different silicon.

▶ 40:23

2 hrs/day

Time he spends in a car in Bangalore

The commute figure that underwrites the whole living-room argument for in-car screens, calls and noise cancellation.

The brief

The argument in sixty seconds

Satish's claim is that the automotive industry solved the easier half of its software problem first. AUTOSAR, twenty years old this year, standardised the middleware — the non-differentiating layer he compares to an operating system — so that an airbag or a brake actuator never fails because of plumbing, and the carmaker can spend its money on what a driver actually feels. Elektrobit sells into both halves of that standard: classic for the real-time sensing and actuation, adaptive for the high-performance compute that decides whether to brake on your behalf when you haven't. It has shipped enough of it that the vehicles running its code would circle the equator 65 times. The architecture is consolidating too — 89 to 150 scattered controllers giving way to three or four domain 'kingdoms' that trade data among themselves, cutting network interfaces and wiring-harness weight. The unresolved half is ownership. One connected car implicates the OEM, a tier one, a telecom operator, a cloud host and an app startup, and Satish argues nobody has settled which of them owns your driving history — which matters because that same history will price your insurance renewal and your next car loan. He wants the debate held in public, with lawyers and policymakers in the room, before the industry's first fatal cyber incident forces it: his own team already breaks into customers' vehicles to demonstrate how easily the brakes or the steering can be disabled.

Worth your time if you are

Embedded engineers who never had to write a linker

Automotive product leads choosing platform over per-model builds

Policy and privacy people arguing over where car data should live

Two-wheeler EV founders shipping software over the air

Anyone who spends two hours a day inside a car

Episode map

Where the conversation travels

Every block is a chapter, coloured by what it's about. Click any of it to jump straight to that minute on YouTube.

Data & digitisationDeep tech & hardwareRegulation & policyMobility & EVProduct strategySaaS & enterprise

01Cold open: a car career by coincidence 0:00 Vishal opens on half a life spent in cars before Satish explains he landed in automotive by pure accident — an instrumentation engineer out of oil and gas, dropped into a department as its second employee — and stripped down a Maruti Esteem with no controllers and a few hundred lines of code to learn how a car works. 02AUTOSAR: cooperate on standards, compete above 5:37 The standard turns twenty this year, built on the tagline of cooperating on standards while competing on implementation, and it abstracted away the CAN, FlexRay and LIN plumbing that once forced embedded developers to write their own linkers. 03Differentiating and non-differentiating software 8:30 Elektrobit's frame is that middleware is a commodity that should never be the cause of a failure, so it is standardised across every ECU — from ABS to tyre-pressure monitoring — leaving the OEM to differentiate on the algorithms and the drive-by-wire feel above it. 04Classic, adaptive, and the price of the chip 11:40 Classic AUTOSAR handles real-time sensing and actuation while adaptive handles high-performance compute — the central system that decides to brake on the driver's behalf — and which one a carmaker can afford is set by the cost of the vehicle, since the chip's memory and clock speed determine how late an application can fire. 05Gateways give way to zonal kingdoms 15:15 The old body, powertrain and infotainment gateway architecture is being replaced by three or four high-performance domain controllers — Satish likens them to kingdoms with their own daimyo, exchanging data only when the engine module must speak to driver assistance — which cuts network interfaces and wiring-harness weight. 06Security on the wire and on the chip 19:35 A car open to the internet is by definition attackable, so Elektrobit splits defence between a Tel Aviv-based cyber-security subsidiary handling over-the-air attacks and a hardware security module on the chip that refuses attempts to reprogram it, alongside software-defined in-vehicle networking. 07Four players, one dataset, no owner 21:10 As compute drifts to the edge and the private cloud, a single connected car involves an OEM, a tier one, an Indian services company, a telecom operator and a cloud host — and between the carmaker, the telco and the hyperscaler, Satish says it is still not clear who owns the data. 08Your driving style, your insurance premium 24:40 Two drivers with the same model but different aggression today buy insurance on self-declared claims history; once vehicle data reaches insurers and banks, predictive maintenance will reprice both the premium and the EMI on the next car — and Satish notes his own car's data already sits on an OEM's partner cloud. 09Cookies, front-loading and the driving log 27:40 He spends the extra thirty seconds rejecting cookies on every site he visits and calls it front-loading — the automotive habit of paying in design to avoid paying in test — because a driving history that records the hill station you visit every second month is a different order of exposure from a browsing history. 10Localisation, spam calls and trolley problems 30:45 His private view is that vehicle data must be stored in India, and the escalation ladder is short: from insurance-renewal calls timed to the week, to a service station that knows your brake pads have 45 days left, to an attacker who can hasten that — before the conversation turns to autonomous driving's corner cases and who writes laws for machines. 11The Italian Job as a penetration test 35:00 The film's traffic-light hack is now routine reality — signals already read high-resolution plates — and Elektrobit runs intrusion testing that breaks into manufacturers' vehicles to disable brakes and steering, because Satish fears it otherwise takes a first fatal disaster to move the industry. 12Pillar to pillar: the living-room car 39:00 Digital Life Experiences means importing the home's digital comfort into the vehicle without the user configuring anything — pillar-to-pillar curved displays, rear-seat video, noise-cancelled calls, seat massage, and information tuned differently for driver, passenger and rear occupants — which is why he adds a P for personalisation to the CASE trends. 13Can a ₹5 lakh car afford this? 43:20 Per-model software cannot carry these features into a four- or five-lakh-rupee car, so Satish argues for a modular platform built once with features added or removed by model — and insists no OEM, however deep-pocketed, can build the whole stack in-house without engineering-services and solutions partners. 14The chip is where the power moved 47:10 Vertical integration has made the chipmaker the kingmaker — only one or two vendors can supply an autonomous stack end to end — leaving tier ones to choose between being systems players, software players or build-to-print assemblers in a low-margin CPG-style role, while a chip that must last fifteen years has to keep taking software updates. 15Talent, open source and Continental 50:10 India is heading toward the largest R&D centre in the group on the strength of a thirty-year IT talent base, a new co-working site is opening beyond Bangalore, the unregulated two-wheeler EV market is the target — possibly via the open-source Linux platform Elektrobit launched on the adaptive side — and Continental leaves the subsidiary independent enough that the two sometimes compete. 16Dogs, badminton and a 9 p.m. shutdown 53:20 Off duty he feeds and rehomes street dogs, plays weekend badminton, switches every device off between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. with a book and meaningless television, teaches his daughter physics against her mother's stricter line on marks, and misses Bombay mostly for its public transport.

Takeaways

Ideas to carry out of this hour

Standardise the boring layer or you will compete on it

AUTOSAR's founding tagline was cooperating on standards while competing on implementation, and its purpose was to abstract the hardest part of embedded work — the communication plumbing beneath the application — so that a developer writing an airbag algorithm never has to know whether a CAN, FlexRay or LIN bus sits below. Satish calls that layer non-differentiating, the automotive equivalent of an operating system, and argues middleware should never be the cause of a failure. Twenty-five years ago engineers wrote their own linkers and had to know where each piece of software was placed; the standard bought that time back and redirected it to the parts the driver actually notices.

▶ 6:35 ▶ 7:04 ▶ 9:09

The car's network is becoming three or four kingdoms

The legacy architecture chained gateways together — a body gateway for lights and tyres, another hiding the powertrain, another for infotainment — with sixty or seventy controllers all talking to each other and the pace suffering for it. The replacement is zonal or domain: one very high-performance chip per domain, typically four, covering body, safety, infotainment and powertrain or autonomous driving. Satish's analogy is feudal Japan, each domain running mostly on its own and exchanging data with the other three only when it must — and the payoff is fewer network interfaces, faster communication and a lighter wiring harness.

▶ 16:29 ▶ 16:45 ▶ 17:47

Nobody has decided who owns what your car knows

A connected vehicle implicates at least five parties: the OEM, a tier one whose system sits inside it, a cloud host, an Indian services company maintaining the software, and a telecom operator supplying the 4G or 5G link. Of those, Satish names the carmaker, the telco and the cloud host as the largest claimants, and says it is still not clear which of them owns the data. In countries where the auto industry is an extension of national reputation, the government becomes a fourth claimant — which is why he thinks the answer will differ by region rather than converge on one rule.

▶ 22:58 ▶ 23:43 ▶ 26:50

Your driving log will price your premium and your EMI

Two people can own the same model and drive it very differently, yet insurers currently reprice on declared claims, blind to the accident you had repaired outside the dealership. Once vehicle telemetry sits on a cloud that insurers and banks can reach, predictive maintenance stops being a service feature and becomes an underwriting input — affecting the renewal premium and the EMI on the next car. Satish frames it as an unavoidable question rather than a future one: as an end user he says he is not comfortable that his own car's data already sits on his OEM's partner cloud, but he has no choice.

▶ 24:46 ▶ 25:32 ▶ 27:28

Car cybersecurity is a safety problem, not an IT problem

Elektrobit runs intrusion testing that breaks into manufacturers' vehicles and shows them how easily the brakes or the steering can be disabled — done, Satish says, so the industry accepts the perils are real today rather than theoretical. The escalation is concrete: data leakage starts as irritating insurance calls, becomes a service station that knows your brake pads have 45 days left, and ends with somebody who can hasten that failure or trace a minister's car minute by minute. His worry is that it takes the first big fatal disaster to change the course of human history, and he suspects the next war need not involve missiles.

▶ 37:42 ▶ 38:06 ▶ 38:19

Add a P to CASE: personalisation is the product

The industry's four trends are connected, autonomous, shared and electrified; Satish insists on a fifth, personalisation, and calls it the most important. UI is pattern, he argues, and experience is what the car remembers about you — the seat and steering position and radio station that reset the moment your key fob unlocks the door. The ambition behind Digital Life Experiences is that whatever you enjoy digitally at home arrives seamlessly in the car without you configuring it, from pillar-to-pillar curved displays to a call taken on a big screen instead of a phone during the two hours a day a Bangalore commute consumes.

▶ 42:09 ▶ 42:24 ▶ 40:23

The chipmaker is the new kingmaker, and tier ones know it

Vertical integration has moved up the stack: only one or two vendors can supply both the chip and the full software stack for autonomous driving, which Satish says could tip into monopoly and already has tier ones competing with their own silicon suppliers. That leaves the tier one an identity question — systems provider, software player, or build-to-print assembler in the high-volume, thin-margin role a contract packer plays for a consumer-goods brand that keeps the IP. Underneath sits an unforgiving constraint: a phone gets replaced every two to five years, but a car's chip has to last fifteen while its software keeps updating, which is what makes software lifecycle management a business rather than a chore.

▶ 44:59 ▶ 46:00 ▶ 48:47

The numbers, drawn

What the episode measures

Every figure below was said on air — timestamps included, caveats kept.

Conversation share

portion of the hour spent on each theme

Data & digitisation24%

Deep tech & hardware21%

Regulation & policy13%

Mobility & EV12%

Product strategy12%

SaaS & enterprise7%

Computed from the chapter map of this episode.

Controllers in a car, then and now

ECUs per vehicle

As stated on air: the Maruti Esteem he stripped down had no controllers, though he says some models of that era had one or two; 89 is his figure for a lower-end car today and 120–150 for a high-end one, with the upper bound shown.▶ 15:28

The car's hardware outlives its software cycle

years

Timelines as stated on air: he asks how a chip can last fifteen years while its software is continuously updated, against a middle-class Indian phone cycle of two to four, maximum five, years.▶ 48:31

Worth keeping

Lines that stay

Deep down we are a startup that doesn't want to grow beyond the startup — but we are a German-headquartered automotive electronic software company.

— Satish ▶ 0:31

AUTOSAR was conceptualised with the idea of cooperating on standards but competing on implementation. That was the tagline.

— Satish ▶ 6:35

The three largest players, in my view, are the car manufacturer, the telecom provider and the cloud hosting company — and between the three of them it isn't clear yet who owns the data.

— Satish ▶ 23:58

Sometimes it takes the first big fatal disaster to change the course of human history. I hope we don't go there.

— Satish ▶ 38:06

We always talk about the four trends — connected, autonomous, shared, electrification. I always want to add a P: personalisation. That's the most important.

— Satish ▶ 42:24

Clips that travel

Short on time? Start here

Policy and privacy people arguing over where car data should live

Four players, and none of them owns the data

The episode's central unresolved question — edge and private clouds, five parties per vehicle, and why the answer will differ by country.

21:10 → 24:40 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip

Insurers and lenders sizing telematics

Your driving style, priced by your bank

The concrete use case: two drivers, one model, and telemetry that reprices the premium and the EMI once insurers and banks can see it.

24:40 → 27:40 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Anyone who assumes car hacking is a movie plot

From The Italian Job to a live brake hack

Traffic lights reading number plates, intrusion tests that disable brakes and steering, and the fatal-disaster warning behind them.

35:00 → 39:00 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip

Product and UX leads working on in-car experience

Pillar to pillar: the car as living room

Curved display prototyping, rear-seat video, driver-versus-passenger personalisation, and the argument for adding a P to CASE.

39:00 → 43:20 · 4 min ▶ Watch clip

Automotive product leads choosing platform over per-model builds

Why everyone is suddenly announcing a chipset

Vertical integration, the monopoly risk in autonomous silicon, and the identity crisis it forces on every tier-one supplier.

44:10 → 49:10 · 5 min ▶ Watch clip

Glossary

The jargon, unpacked

AUTOSAR

The automotive software standard, twenty years old this year, that standardises the middleware in a vehicle so applications need not know what communication bus or chip sits beneath them.

ECU

Electronic control unit — a microcontroller running one vehicle function, such as ABS, airbags or tyre-pressure monitoring; a lower-end car has around 89 of them and a high-end car up to 150.

Classic vs adaptive AUTOSAR

Classic covers real-time sensing and actuation that must happen immediately; adaptive covers high-performance compute, which can sit centrally or at the edge and need not be real time.

Zonal / domain architecture

Replacing a mesh of gateways and controllers with three or four high-performance domain chips — body, safety, infotainment, powertrain or autonomous — that exchange data between themselves, cutting interfaces and harness weight.

Non-differentiating software

Elektrobit's term for the commoditised layer between hardware and application — the part that should never cause a failure, and where no carmaker wins customers.

HSM (hardware security module)

On-chip security that blocks attempts to reprogram the controller — the in-silicon complement to over-the-air attack detection, described here as an antivirus at the hardware level.

Tier one

A supplier that sells complete systems to carmakers rather than components; the episode's identity question is whether tier ones become software players or thin-margin build-to-print assemblers.

CASE (plus P)

Connected, autonomous, shared and electrified — the industry's four-trend shorthand, to which Satish adds personalisation as the fifth and, he argues, the most important.

Connections

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EP 31 · Deep tech

Full transcript

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