Despite the omicron variant, despite the production crisis, despite the difficulties in getting entire teams across borders, a significant part of the automotive industry is found at the global high-tech show, the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) of Las Vegas, which opens to the press on Monday, January 3. The major car manufacturers have come to pledge their allegiance to the world of start-ups, artificial intelligence and algorithms, marking with this gesture their ever-growing dependence on the software industry.
Certainly, with five exhibitors, the presence of world-class manufacturers this year is modest. The giants Toyota, Volkswagen, Renault-Nissan are absent, and the CES from 2017 to 2020 were more flamboyant automotive “Tech” meetings than today. However, this 2022 vintage (2021 was held in digital version only) sees the arrival of exhibitors such as Stellantis or Hyundai, who had shunned major world shows in recent years. Also present are the leading American manufacturer, General Motors, and top-of-the-range automotive champions BMW and Mercedes, not to mention a few start-ups dreaming of being Tesla in the 2020s (Fisker, VinFast, etc.).
But it is above all the major automotive suppliers that make CES in Las Vegas a virtual car show. With the exception of the French Faurecia and the Japanese Aisin, the top 10 major suppliers in the industry made the trip to Nevada: Bosch, Continental, ZF, Magna, Denso, Hyundai Mobis… On the French side, Valeo comes to present its electric motor technologies developed in its joint venture with Siemens, its third-generation long-range lidar (laser scanner) and an all-new near-vision lidar, all essential objects for advanced autonomous driving.
A figure is circulating in the middle: a modern airplane would contain 17 million lines of computer code when a car would contain 70 to 100 million.
“Software and applications already represent – for certain models of certain brands – more than half of the value of the vehicle, explains Laurent Petizon, Managing Director for France of the consulting firm AlixPartners. In ten years, 50%, this will be an average level for the entire automotive industry, the equivalent of what we know today in aeronautics. “ And again … A figure is circulating in the middle: a modern airplane would contain 17 million lines of computer code when a car would contain 70 to 100 million.
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