There’s an electrical mess under the hood of modern vehicles that’s reducing performance and increasing costs. They’re called electronic control units, or ECU’s, which operate most of the technology stuffed in our cars and trucks.
“A modern car will have 100 to 150 of these little ECUs, these little domain controllers, and it’s like an awful field of weeds,” declared R.J. Scaringe, founder and CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian. “Each of these ECUs is its own hardware stack has its own little island of software. So the layers of abstraction between the actual code and the manufacturer are two to three levels across 100 or 150 different control different controllers, and that's a mess. It's hard to manage.”
But fewer than ten newer Chinese automakers have figured out a different way to manage the myriad systems more efficiently and that’s become a major competitive advantage, Scaringe asserted during a meeting Monday with members of the Automotive Press Association at Rivian’s Plymouth, Michigan facility.
“Rather than having this distributed set of many, many ECUs, let's have a centralized compute platform where we own, obviously, the whole computer, but importantly, we own the whole software stack. So we own the operating system, the real time operating system. We're in the applications layers. We own the middleware layer,” explained Scaringe.
Indeed Rivan has adopted the centralized platform concept in its vehicles and cashed in through a lucrative licensing deal with Volkswagen.
“It was actually that software platform I just described that we licensed to Volkswagen for $5.8 billion and the reason for that licensing deal is they need a solution quickly, to have a technology that's competitive against the Chinese alternatives.”
Besides cleaning up what Scaringe described as a field of weeds, the practical result of replacing scores of ECUs with a centralized computing system is a huge difference in the ability to improve and update a vehicles’ functionality or change the sequence of events such as the order of lights, activation of security systems, turning on music
“So if you want to change that sequence, the exercise is like a mind numbing process of coordinating amongst 15 different companies, whereas in a Rivian, I could change the sequence of events this morning.”
Aside from improved functionality and performance, swapping ECUs for a centralized system, Scaringe points to saving “many thousands of dollars by removing this heap of unnecessary ECUs.”
In addition, by bringing the technology inside the company, rather than outsourcing ECUs, suppliers no longer have outsized control over a vehicle program, Scaringe asserts.
That also means by relying less on suppliers, the company becomes more immunized against import tariffs since a large number of ECUs and related components are built outside the United States, he pointed out.
Scaringe laid out this scenario as he explained the rollout of Rivian’s latest model, the R2, a smaller SUV than the existing R1 with a smaller starting price at $45,000.
It will be built at the automaker’s plant in Normal, Illinois which was expanded by two-million square feet to accommodate production of the R2 scheduled to begin “the first part of next year,” Scaringe said.
The company also broke ground last month on a new assembly plant in Social Circle, Georgia, schedule to begin production in 2028 with direct employment estimated to reach 7,500 by 2030.
Despite the elimination of the federal tax credit for electric vehicles at the end of September and a selling pace slower than the industry had hoped, Scaringe believes the influx of new and compelling models will help convert more consumers to EVs.
As for Rivian’s future,” I've never been more confident in the company than I am today,” declared Scaringe. “We've got this product about to launch. It is insanely good.”