With every quarter bringing a new set of product reveals, strategy updates, new acquisitions, investments and more, sifting through the sheer volume of announcements shared over this short time, while also assessing their potential impacts on the future of automotive, can quickly become a difficult task.
Cutting through the noise and delivering the key highlights from the past three months are our Quarterly Wrap-Ups. Delivered at the end of each financial quarter, this complimentary report series provides a clear, focused, overview of the latest news and trends across key automotive domains. Further insights and analysis of these trends from our industry experts underscores their impacts and implications both across the broader automotive industry and beyond. In this Insight, we will explore some of the most interesting trends covered in the Q3 2024 edition of our Quarterly Wrap-Up series, while exploring a major, SBD Exclusive trend in the field of EV charging infrastructure.
Learn about EV charging infrastructure and maturity in the 2024 HERE-SBD EV Index
Spearheading our latest quarterly wrap-up is an SBD Exclusive deep dive into the 2024 HERE-SBD EV Index, complete with expert insights into the impact of its results on the future of EV charging infrastructure across Europe, the USA, and (new for 2024) India.
Following the inaugural 2023 HERE-SBD EV Index, we teamed up with HERE Technologies once more to develop an even deeper, more comprehensive analysis of EV charging infrastructure growth across three major regions. Building on last year’s index, which focused on EV market and charging infrastructure maturity on multiple dimensions from 2020 to 2022, this year’s HERE-SBD Index assesses the development of charging infrastructure across the U.S. and Europe, and India, on a state-by-state, country-by-country, basis between 2023 and 2024.
Co-led by our EV Domain Principal, Robert Fisher, this assessment unearthed several interesting takeaways on the evolution of EV charging structure within each of these regions. Europe, for example, emerged as the frontrunner in the 2024 index with a 115% growth rate in its charging EV infrastructure since 2023. At the same time, it found that 24 European countries achieved a satisfactory ratio between the number of EVs and the number of public chargers, with Norway presenting the highest market share in the region, and Denmark scoring the highest number of charging stations per road length. However, in countries like Spain and the Netherlands that saw a drop in their EV index, our experts concluded that strong incentives, steady investment, and government support for EV charging infrastructure could help accelerate EV adoption in those countries.
The index also revealed that while the USA’s charging infrastructure showed promising growth in some states, there was room for improvement in others. Here, the region’s public charging power had grown by 82% since 2023, though only four states met a satisfactory EV-to-public charger ratio. The number of public chargers in the region similarly grew by 29%, with Delaware, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas leading this growth while Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, and Nebraska fell behind in the number of charging stations per road length. Responding to these results, our experts highlighted how the slower rate of EV adoption in the U.S. presents an obstacle in the expansion of its charging infrastructure. Ultimately, for this infrastructure to succeed, it must grow in tandem with EV adoption rather than ahead of it.
In addition to Europe and the U.S., the 2024 HERE-SBD EV Index newly explores India – which is today electrifying its public transport system while OEMs in the region are pursuing the electrification of their two- and three-wheeler vehicles. Leading the India index was Chandigarh, with our experts attributing its performance to the city’s ZEV Deployment Plan, which offers substantial incentives for new EV purchases and the development of new EV charging infrastructure. A closer look at this index reveals the state of Rajasthan to have achieved the highest BEV penetration at 0.049%. Looking ahead, our EV experts felt that the active participation of government policies in these electrification activities, paired with heightened infrastructure adoption, could see India’s EV market enter the global top 10 by 2030.
While supporting the development of the 2024 Index, Robert elaborated further on its key findings in The State of Global EV Charging and the Role of AI – a dedicated webinar event hosted by HERE Technologies. This complimentary, 60-minute webinar saw Robert discuss these findings and their implications with Andrei C. Iordache, HERE’s Director of Automotive Industry Solutions, who highlighted the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies within vehicle electrification. The full recording of the webinar event can be viewed HERE.
A Closer Look at the Top Trends in Q3 2024
Generative AI enters the vehicle
Having taken several industries by storm, generative AI is now making its way into automotive. Within the last quarter, there has been an increase in the number of OEMs integrating AI into their new vehicles, with many utilizing it to expand the functionality and scope of their proprietary, in-vehicle, voice assistants.
Kia, for example, integrated a heavily modified version of ChatGPT into the voice assistant offered alongside its new EV3 model. This combination resulted in an AI-based virtual personal assistant that can plan trips, control various vehicle functions, and access in-vehicle apps at the user’s request. Stellantis similarly announced plans to integrate ChatGPT into its vehicles, though took a different approach in doing so. In partnership with SoundHound, a voice AI company, the corporation will integrate SoundHound’s Chat AI voice assistant into vehicles offered by its Alfa Romeo and Citroen brands across several European markets. The assistant itself gathers patterns and recognizes human speech, while utilizing generative AI to facilitate more natural and informative conversations.
SAE L4 activities begin to pick up
Despite the minor setbacks it is experiencing in the U.S., amidst ongoing robotaxi crash investigations in the region, the autonomous vehicle industry is broadly gaining momentum as many of its key players advance their solutions toward mass deployment. In Q3, this trend was most noticeable in China – where new entrants underscored the competitiveness of the L4 landscape, while its more prominent incumbents came closer to large-scale deployment.
One of these incumbents was Mercedes-Benz, who recently received a permit to test its SAE L4 autonomous driving technology in Beijing, becoming the first non-Chinese auto brand to have gained this approval. Using this permit, the OEM confirmed plans to conduct L4 testing in Beijing, using two S-Class sedans equipped with a vast sensor suite (that includes LiDAR, millimeter-wave radar, and cameras) as test vehicles.
Domestic autonomous vehicle companies in China made similar progress across the last quarter. Pony.ai, a Chinese-American autonomous technology company, announced a new joint venture with Toyota China and GAC Toyota with a total investment exceeding RMB 1 billion ($140.5 million). Aiming to promote the large-scale production of L4 autonomous vehicles, the JV will initially seek to launch Pony.ai’s 4S vehicles in the Chinese market before connecting them to the company’s robotaxi operating platform – facilitating the launch of unmanned robotaxi services in China’s biggest cities.
More SDV alliances announced
In recent years, new vehicles have increasingly come to be defined by the software they utilize. With this movement already disrupting value chains, the transition to software-defined vehicles (SDVs) will continue to facilitate opportunities for new players and encourage legacy OEMs to rethink their business operations. In the race to lead this transition, SDV-focused partnerships are being formed across the global automotive industry, while OEMs and suppliers renew their R&D investments to find alternatives to tightly coupled E/E platforms.
The past quarter showed a notable uptick in the number of global automakers pursuing the SDV, shown most notably in the announcement of a new SDV alliance between Hyundai, Kia, and Samsung. Through this alliance, the OEMs will develop new technologies capable of linking their future SDVs with smartphones through ‘SmartThings’, Samsung’s IoT platform. Together, the companies will also look to create an open ecosystem, developing services that enable convenient mobility experiences by leveraging shared vehicle data.
A similar commitment to the SDV was recently made by the BMW Group, who joined the Eclipse Foundation SDV Working Group. This group aims to facilitate global collaboration on open-source software technologies for modern vehicles, citing the amount of code used in contemporary computing operating systems today exceeding the amount used in today’s vehicles. BMW’s involvement with the group will see the OEM’s Software Factory, a unit within its development division, actively contribute to the Working Group’s projects.
Next Steps
Even with the wide range of trends and topics discussed in this article, the trends highlighted above are just 3 of 10 that are broken down and analyzed by our industry experts in the latest Quarterly Wrap-Up. Spanning more than 40 slides, and available as a complimentary report, our Q3 2024 Wrap-Up covers new updates on the services being enabled by 5G, electrification targets, cybersecurity legislation, and much more. Each entry in the Quarterly Wrap-Up series offers relevant insights into the latest updates, new technologies, and notable activities that have impacted key automotive domains in the last three months.
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