The key to Jaguar’s infotainment system

Chris Hill, Head of Systems Engineering of Infotainment at Jaguar Land Rover, explains how he achieved designing the infotainment system for Jaguar’s new battery electric vehicle I-Pace at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018

Hill began his presentation showing a demonstration of Jaguar’s new battery electric vehicle, I-Pace, which is to be launched next month.

“I’m really excited to be talking about I-Pace and the DevOps methodologies which we’ve been following within infotainment (the centre screen of the vehicle),” Hill told his attendees.

Interestingly, I-Pace is the first battery-electric powered vehicle Jaguar has designed to date. It goes from 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, has a range of 298 miles, and “looks sexy”.

Despite this, “Dev and Ops aren’t sexy”, according to Hill. This is because of change within enterprises being hard work and qualities needing respect, such as inspiration, persistence and an attitude of continuous improvement.

Jaguar’s engineering dominance

“I-Pace is a game changer for the business, proving Jaguar’s engineering dominance, and turning it into something that can be mass-produced,” said Hill.

“We asked ourselves how can we change the game from the infotainment perspective to I-Pace? So, we implemented software over the year and made sure that it’s not interrupting peoples daily lives.”

Hill admitted that, when implementing infotainment, the feedback bots took 4-6 weeks, so it was hard to pick what was wrong.

“This is why we had thousands of contributors partaking, who came in bursts,” he revealed.

“This was tricky because everyone had a different idea of how to do things, and if the application fits within the ecosystem, or not.”

Safety-critical features

Nevertheless, feedback went from 4-6 weeks to 30 minutes – automating processes around burst merge requests and creating it to be simple so everyone knows how its build system works.

“The infotainment isn’t thought as a safety-critical device but it has safety-critical features such as parking beeps, reversed cameras and battery usage which shows deficiency and how much range is left,” revealed Hill.

To date, Jaguar has delivered an infotainment system for 9 of its different vehicles; it is 1 of 40 embedded devices in the 604,000 vehicles they sold last year.

“The infotainment system was my secret weapon to not only provide a tremendous amount of value to the customer, but also to our development environment,” Hill continued.

He also noted that, at Jaguar Land Rover, they deploy software up to 50-70 times a day per vehicle!

Written by Leah Alger

More
articles