Welcome back to the final edition of SBD Automotive’s daily correspondence from CES 2025. If you missed our first two dispatches, you can read them here and here. Oh, and don’t forget to check out our announcement about 4S Mobility!
Today, after a collective 140+ hours of time across our team attending CES this year (still not enough time to see everything!), we will be highlighting some hidden gems from the expo hall, awarding some superlatives, and assessing how prominent trends from 2024 are faring this year. Let’s dig in!
Superlatives: Who Deserves the Hype?
Most Impactful: Nvidia Cosmos
Without question, we felt that Nvidia’s announcement of the Cosmos suite of world foundation models serve as a major equalizer in the race for autonomy and robotics. By pursuing “physical AI” through the training of the WFM through real-world physical dynamics data and driving data from Uber, Cosmos eliminates a major cost to companies seeking tools to help with the prediction and modeling of the physical environment. That is not to say that Cosmos solves autonomy; rather, it lowers the barrier to entry to SAE L3+ for automakers, and Nvidia’s announced partnership with Toyota, Continental and Aurora reinforce this point.
With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicting that automated vehicles would be the first trillion-dollar robotics industry, the autonomy hype train remains firmly on the tracks with Mr. Huang as the conductor.
Honorable Mentions: Intel Automotive (SoCs), Honda 0-Series EVs, BlackBerry/Vector/TTech Auto
Most 4S (Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Seamless): Suzuki Motor Company
OK, so technically Suzuki didn’t actually announce anything at CES. But their booth resonated very strongly with our team. While CES is often about the biggest, flashiest, and best technology, Suzuki took a different path and used the opportunity to talk about the “impact of the small” with their fundamental philosophy of sho-sho-kei-tan-bi (小・少・軽・短・美), or “Smaller, Fewer, Lighter, Shorter, Beauty”. Too often, we turn to technology to solve problems because in addition to solving a problem we also create economic opportunity, and sometimes the best, simplest solution eliminates opportunity for those with pre-existing interests. In automotive, this philosophy has spiraled out of control to create an environment where vehicle complexity creates unusable, expensive nightmares that remain inaccessible to large swaths of potential car buyers.
Adjusting product and design philosophies to incorporate some of Suzuki’s principles could serve everyone well and could help to make roads safer (by making cars smaller), improve the sustainability of mobility (but reducing the carbon footprint of mobility), and improve seamlessness (by eliminating bloatware and low-value features).
Honorable Mentions: HaaS Alert, Volvo Trucks (sustainability-centric keynote), Toyota (Woven City phase 1 completion), Bosch/SiriusXM Connect wrong-way driver alert
Most Surprising: Oshkosh Corporation
Oshkosh wowed the SBD Automotive team in their CES debut through its application of autonomy and electrification technology to purpose-built vehicles such as front-loader trucks, airport cargo handling vehicles, construction vehicles, military equipment, delivery vehicles, and emergency vehicles.
Thanks to the work of companies like Nvidia, Mobileye, Aurora, AWS, Microsoft and others, autonomy has never been more accessible, and tools that allow companies like Oshkosh (and John Deere) to create autonomy solutions for specific operational design domains like airport tarmacs represents an uncapitalized opportunity for contract manufacturers.
While Kia blew the doors open on purpose-built vehicles (PBVs) at CES 2024, Oshkosh – who is effectively PBV royalty – may create even more impact than global automakers by quickly deploying autonomous, electric vehicle solutions in everyday heavy-machine contexts.
Honorable Mentions: Zeekr (autonomy stack), Intel Automotive (SoCs), NXP (TTechAuto acquisition), Sony Honda Mobility (AFEELA reservations & pricing), HERE Technologies (multiple customer wins & AWS deal)
Spotlight: Who’s Flying Under the Radar?
We also like to spotlight a few smaller companies that may not have the biggest booths, largest marketing budget, or extensive press, but nonetheless have surprised and delighted us either through innovation or practical solutions. Below are three companies we think you shouldn’t miss before CES 2025 is over.
Ottawa Infotainment
When we talk about innovation lowering barriers to entry, companies like Ottawa Infotainment are exactly what we mean. This smaller Canadian company has developed a turn-key, low-cost infotainment domain controller that’s perfectly suited for smaller OEMs or those developing infotainment solutions for more niche markets such as marine, construction, farming, and RVs. By leveraging off-the-shelf SoC components, Ottawa Infotainment has built a customizable, accessible solution that can be rapidly adapted to almost any mobility context, helping mobility companies accelerate their own technology roadmap.
Ambarella
While Ambarella has been around since 2004, the AI vision semiconductor company has increasingly developed IP for automated driving SoCs, including vision and radar processing. Ambarella emphasizes the power efficiency of its SoCs, and the company offers 3 ECUs in partnership with Continental that enable L2 to L4 autonomy, similar to Mobileye.
Component-level suppliers like Ambarella allow OEMs to design and build their own compute solutions, an increasingly attractive proposition to OEMs that seek to tightly control cost, fragmentation, and efficiency in their compute stack – but expanding competition from Nvidia, Intel, and Mobileye could challenge Ambarella’s growth story.
Earlier in 2024, Ambarella announced design wins with multiple automotive companies (many of whom are Chinese), including Leapmotor, LG Electronics, Lotus, Neusoft Reach, and SANY Group.
Profilence
A Swedish software company, Profilence demonstrated its vehicle software QA suite at CES 2025. QA Suite integrates with companies’ testing data sources, including devices in the field, with hardware-in-loop, and with software-in-loop, and aggregates this data into one dashboard that prioritizes identified quality issues, assesses quality trends, and provides data for determining root cause of common quality issues.
Our UX team found this demonstration to be particular compelling due to the increasing number of software stability issues and experience-impacting bugs found in newer model launches in recent years. Tools that can help automakers better aggregate and action QA results and metadata may allow OEMs to enable more robust test suites, accelerated by AI-enabled simulations, that should result in a higher quality product shipping to market on job one.
At CES, Profilence announced a deepening of their relationship with Rightware, a major in-vehicle HMI toolchain provider.
Stock Prices: How 2024’s Core Themes Changed in 2025
We’ve attended CES for well over a decade, giving us a unique, data-driven perspective on how megatrends at the show have evolved over time. We’ll dig into this in more detail in our CES Premium Event Report (more details at the end of this wrap-up).
For today, we pulled out some of the key trends identified in our 2024 CES report and assessed if the “stock” in each trend has increased, decreased, or stayed the same this year. Importantly, if we note a trend is decreasing, that does NOT mean that it’s not relevant to the industry at large – it just means that it took a back seat at this year’s CES.
Indeed, some of the biggest themes from last year have taken a clear step back in their prominence this year as all eyes seem to be on autonomy and software-defined vehicles. We’ve also seen new trends emerge this year, including multiple demonstrations of augmented reality heads-up displays (AR-HUD), including BMW’s flashy new iDrive system.
But we can’t spoil all the fun here – be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to be one of the first to access our free CES Flash Report on January 17th that will detail all of the core new themes from CES 2025. Our paid subscribers will receive a much more comprehensive version of this report on January 24th, including photos and videos from every keynote, press conference, and automotive-related booth at the show.
While our team will still be in Las Vegas for another day or two searching every nook and cranny of Tech West, Tech East, and everywhere in-between to make sure we haven’t missed a single scoop, this is our last daily wrap-up for this year. Please keep an eye on our LinkedIn for more “snackable” updates from our field team, and we’ll see you back in the Sin City in 2026!