In context: Over the final several years, some of the most intriguing developments to come out of CES take been car related. From information-rich cockpit experiences to promises of assisted and autonomous driving, much of the headline-generating news from the last few shows has centered on the automobile. In fact, many have argued that the motorcar industry is morphing into the next large segment of the tech business.

Companies like the Intel's Mobileye, graphics giant Nvidia, and Qualcomm are all using CES 2022 to announce their newest offerings for the automotive industry, as well as important new partnerships with car makers and automotive suppliers.

In the example of Qualcomm, Snapdragon Ride Vision brings a new degree of simplicity and focus to automakers looking to offer prophylactic-focused, computer-vision powered ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) capabilities to a broader range of cars, while the Snapdragon Digital Chassis taps into the demand for completeness and flexibility in advanced automotive computing solutions.

Digital Chassis provides a framework that can combine the company's Snapdragon Ride assisted and autonomous driving platform, Snapdragon Cockpit for multi-screen infotainment, Snapdragon Motorcar Connectivity for 5G and 4G LTE external connections as well as WiFi and Bluetooth internal connections, and Snapdragon Auto-to-Deject services to enable new functionality and concern models for continued cars.

While Qualcomm introduced many of these offerings earlier, with Digital Chassis it's adding the software that permit the pieces to easily integrate and interoperate. For car companies looking to find a technology partner for a complete, connected, digital auto feel, Digital Chassis looks to exist an intriguing and potentially attractive option.

Modernistic cars are enormously complex beasts, and as many automakers and suppliers have learned over the concluding few years, adding multiple, advanced applied science offerings into the mix is proving to be more challenging than many initially expected. So, any efforts to simplify the process past essentially "pre-integrating" various pieces (not merely Qualcomm'due south, but its software partners' equally well) can be considered a positive step forward. This is particularly true for newer auto companies that have a modernistic, complete auto system arroyo to design and manufacturing.

At the same time, as auto industry veterans and close manufacture watchers understand, the componentized way that many cars from traditional automakers are designed and built tin make it difficult for this kind of complete solution to work—despite its potential elegance from a pure engineering perspective.

That's why Qualcomm is offering the flexibility of letting car makers mix and match different sub-elements of the Digital Chassis framework and then that, for example, a motorcar maker could use a Qualcomm solution ADAS, simply a different vendor's solution for infotainment.

To that stop, Qualcomm has also added more open interfaces to its various services as office of the Digital Chassis effort to enable more customization options. This as well allows carmakers to, for case, use their own custom-developed driving stack software or leverage the software that Qualcomm provides.

In addition, with the broadening of its motorcar-to-cloud services options—non to mention its 20-year+ history of telematics and other connectivity solutions to motorcar makers via its modem business organisation—Qualcomm hopes to create service-based business models. The thought is to allow carmakers to generate revenues afterward the car has been sold for things like feature upgrades, new content services, etc., that consumers would pay for, potentially providing a new acquirement stream for all parties involved.

On the partner side, Qualcomm recently introduced a deal with BMW to power several of the Digital Chassis capabilities starting with the 2025 model year, and at CES, the company appear new efforts with Volvo, equally well as expanded piece of work with Honda, Renault, GM, Tier one supplier Alps and several Chinese carmakers.

Qualcomm too announced the debut of Snapdragon Ride Vision, expected to exist in vehicle production past 2024. Powered by a new 4nm-based Snapdragon SoC and partner Arriver's computer vision software, Snapdragon Ride Vision is positioned in part as a competitor to Mobileye'due south offerings.

It tin can be paired with widely bachelor cameras to create a simple, yet very functional, system to bring critical safety-related features to even entry level cars. It can also be scaled up to provide semi-autonomous Level 2 and 3 driving capabilities when paired with Qualcomm's existing Snapdragon Bulldoze SoC and Bulldoze Accelerators, along with additional sensing technologies like radar and lidar.

Solutions similar Snapdragon Ride Vision are focused on cardinal functional safety benefits that consumers really want—such as automatic braking, object detection and avoidance, lane keeping and lane changing, automated highway driving, driver monitoring, etc.

One of the challenges that has plagued the car industry'due south implementation of potentially game-changing fully autonomous driving technologies is that many early on efforts that received a great bargain of attention were essentially trying to eddy the sea. They grossly overpromised and underdelivered on what they could practice, and that has led to both dramatically longer timelines and significantly revised expectations for autonomous cars.

Even if those early efforts did work, information technology turns out they were promising capabilities that a big majority of consumers didn't even want. Solutions like Snapdragon Ride Vision, on the other hand, are focused on central functional safety benefits that consumers really desire—such equally automatic braking, object detection and avoidance, lane keeping and lane changing, automated highway driving, driver monitoring, etc. In add-on, these can be scaled up to more practical and more than technologically realistic levels of autonomous driving for those who want to explore them.

Snapdragon Ride Vision Organisation offers open software interfaces via the Snapdragon Ride SDK and gives automakers, or their suppliers, the ability to customize to their unique needs and preferences. For automakers that want to be able to extend the value and uniqueness of their brand into a car'southward digital feel, this is crucial.

Taken together, the Snapdragon Digital Chassis and Ride Vision offerings highlight the continued evolution of Qualcomm's efforts for the automotive manufacture. Though many still think of the company equally mobile device focused, information technology'south clear that Qualcomm's vision of mobility is expanding to a much broader world.

Bob O'Donnell is the founder and chief annotator of TECHnalysis Inquiry, LLC a applied science consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market place inquiry services to the engineering science industry and professional fiscal community. You tin follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.