Pioneering the Connected Vehicle Cockpit Using AWS IoT Services with Visteon

Based in Michigan, Visteon provides in-vehicle technology to automakers around the globe, helping them bring digital products to drivers quickly without it requiring millions of dollars in development costs.

Since introducing the industry’s first on-board domain controller in 2018, Visteon has experienced exponential growth—with the third quarter of 2023 marking 18 consecutive quarters in which it has outperformed the market. The domain controller, Visteon SmartCore, consolidates a vehicle’s electronic control units (ECUs). The ECUs use software, graphics processors, and CPUs powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. To securely connect vehicles to the cloud, Visteon uses AWS IoT Core, which lets companies connect billions of IoT devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure.

Using AWS IoT Core and other AWS services, Visteon can help automakers provide value for customers and address their own challenges. For example, to update or repair on-board software, automakers typically spend millions of dollars on widespread service recalls. Instead, Visteon wants to provide wirelessly delivered—over-the-air (OTA)—updates. “This could help reduce warranty cost, manage some regulatory issues, and handle new cybersecurity threats,” says Sivakumar.

To develop their connected vehicle solutions, small internal teams within Visteon iterate in independent AWS environments using built-in security features that incorporate industry standards. “We work like a startup, creating quick prototypes by expanding on available AWS services based on user requirements,” says Pradeep Balakrishnan, Visteon’s senior engineering manager. “Our productivity increases, and we deliver innovative products faster.” Alongside AWS solutions architects and technical account managers, Visteon operates in line with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud.

In 2022, Visteon unveiled plans for its AllGo App Store, which features preloaded popular apps for navigation, parking, infotainment, and other functions. To store files from app developers, Visteon uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. In fact, Visteon uses Amazon S3 for all of its object storage, including differential images and binary software images that are important for OTA updates.

For the OTA update feature, Visteon assigns a unique identity to each vehicle using AWS IoT Core’s device registry. Using AWS IoT Device Management—which helps register, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale—Visteon groups devices to receive automatic updates according to specific criteria. The automaker sets the speed of deployment as well as campaign start and end dates using Jobs, a feature of AWS IoT Device Management, which defines a set of remote operations that can be sent to and run on one or more devices connected to AWS IoT Core. “We can point to every vehicle that’s available with the automaker and monitor the state of each campaign and every detail seamlessly in the cloud,” Balakrishnan says.

Additionally, Visteon built a subscription management system that lets users subscribe to weather or traffic updates or other third-party services from inside the vehicle. In effect, the system acts as an authorization provider, managing details such as payments and expiration dates. A North American automaker has already made the system a feature in its cars, thus giving Visteon an additional revenue source. Visteon is also developing a state-of-the-art vehicle security mode called Scout, which streams video from a vehicle’s camera to the owner’s mobile device for remote video monitoring. The solution uses Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, which makes it simple to securely stream video from connected devices to AWS for analytics, machine learning, playback, and other processing.

Using AWS services, Visteon continues to position itself as an innovator in the automotive industry, with plans to widely release its OTA update services and app store by 2025. It also is working on new use cases focused on vehicle analytics and remote commands.

“AWS is constantly thinking about automotive problems and how to use the power of the cloud to accelerate automotive transformation,” says Sivakumar. “Using AWS IoT Core and other services helps us innovate with a company that has strong automotive intellect.”