Insights
Insights
Articles on in-vehicle E/E architecture, the ASG protocol, and the move to the software-defined vehicle.
Writing from ASG on in-vehicle E/E architecture and the protocol, where we have been, and the Hello, Auto! series.
Articles
- The missing element of an autopilot A Level 4 or 5 autopilot can generate a correct motion vector and still be defeated by the asynchronous link between it and the vehicle. Revised 2026
- The physics of the automobile The car was once the cutting edge of applied physics. Its electrical architecture has not kept pace, and that is where the next step is. Revised 2026
Pieces we write and publish ourselves. More will be added here.
Events
All events →- Conference World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference Visits to Li Auto, Xiaomi, Pony.ai and WeRide, and a keynote at the WICV Application Ecosystem Forum.
- Trade mission SMMT trade mission to the USA Six direct OEM meetings at the Southern Automotive Conference, visits to CU-ICAR and SCTAC, and a BMW plant tour.
- Trade mission DBT trade mission to China ASG on the UK Department for Business and Trade delegation to two of China's automotive centres.
- Summit Automotive E/E Systems Summit ASG presented as an alternative lower-level E/E architecture to the room.
Hello, Auto! Series
Our weekly column on the engineering, strategy and economics of the software-defined vehicle. Every edition also runs on LinkedIn.
- The missing failure mode in brake-by-wire's fail-safe logic A brake-by-wire safety case is only as good as its fault model: what the GM eBoost investigation reveals about detecting by-wire failures in real time. 2 September 2026
- A nanosecond is thirty centimetres: automotive time synchronisation has become a safety function As radar goes coherent and compute goes central, the in-vehicle network's shared clock stops being housekeeping metadata and becomes part of the measurement. 26 August 2026
- Redundancy isn't the hard part of steer-by-wire: arbitration is Duplicated steering sensors and actuators are the easy part; the real-time logic that arbitrates between them is where fail-operational steer-by-wire is won or lost. 19 August 2026
- The missing volt in the copper-to-aluminium wiring story Aluminium vehicle wiring is an economics story on the surface and a voltage-budget story underneath; 48-volt zonal architecture is what actually moves the line. 12 August 2026
- One chip, two brains: the silicon fix for central compute's single point of failure Collapsing a car's ECUs onto one central computer removes the redundancy a distributed E/E architecture gave for free; the safety island is how the industry puts it back. 5 August 2026
- The 202-millisecond ceiling: why a robotaxi's human backup runs into the same physics as its autopilot A robotaxi's remote human backup is bound by the same perception-to-actuation latency budget as the autopilot it is meant to catch, and the crash record shows it. 29 July 2026
- The statistic that made robotaxis look safe is the same one hiding their worst failures A crashes-per-million-miles average is built to describe the ordinary mile; the correlated, high-consequence failures that draw regulators cluster in the miles it cannot see. 22 July 2026
- The real constraint on the software-defined vehicle isn't software Record electronics recalls, the sprint to zonal architecture and the copper-to-aluminium wiring shift share one root cause: the timing of the in-vehicle network underneath. 15 July 2026