BMW seeking partners for open-source car software platform
motorauthority.com
motorauthority.com
If my assessment is correct, they're missing a simpler and better opportunity here: the ability to standardize physical/electrical interfaces for these subsystems.
It will be great that they can save 15% (maybe) of their development costs on their nav system interface, but they're still going to be behind the curve when it comes to innovation in this growing space. For example, if the latest craze in in car entertainment were to be a docking station for your Game Boy, they're no further ahead than they were. If the standards were open, the aftermarket could sell a device that would plug in to the harness and integrate seamlessly.
The iPod was a lesson here, and I'm not convinced that anyone sees it as an instance of a generic class of problem -- only a technology that they had to eventually figure out how to cooperate with.
Obviously, it'd be a hard pill to swallow-- just dropping beta software into your shiny new BMW.
So if two BMWs from different product generations could share mostly the same API, standardized protocols, etc., well then we could test stuff with the old E46 before dropping it into the new E92...
The reason I'm thinking of them using the navigation system is because you'll need a bigger screen to make the whole app thing work.
As far as compatibility between generations I wouldn't worry too much about that. Most likely on top of an API they'd release an emulator.
Phase one: http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/articleId=1099...
Legacy form factor mules with advanced technology in them.
Phase two: Performance tuning shops often pick up early versions of cars to start testing, looking for saleable mods, and adapting their lines to the new products. I would expect we'd start seeing reflashes for systems within a few months of a vehicle release
Phase three: As platform N depreciates and platform N+1 goes into production, N-class cars start falling into the hands of people more willing to cut them open and hack (track/hobby cars). If N and N+1 run the same code (project/source level, not binaries), features could be committed by individual hackers and could be picked up by manufacturers as desired.
Of course this is all predicated on this release being a real, public, open source project. If their desire/intent is to create an open source platform so that 2-5 manufacturers can share IP, it's possible that we'll never see the infrastructure to flash things ourselves, in which case this is all a big fat stinky dead end. :/
We're going to be authoring our own software. We'll open source it once we're done, but we're not going to let partnerships slow us down in this phase.