Qualcomm uses a Maserati Ghibli to demonstrate its automotive electronics platform including a massive central touchscreen powered by a modular Snapdragon 820A processor (image credit: Sam Abuelsamid)
During the 2016 Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., in May, there were countless news reports of the bright orange Maserati Ghibli that Qualcomm was showing off. Those reports all focused on the fact that the car was running Android on a huge central touch screen display that looked like it had been pulled straight out of a Tesla. While this was cool to see, those reports all missed what was arguably the far more important part of this car, the installation of the Qualcomm chip powering it all.
This week, Qualcomm brought that same car to Detroit where it was displayed at the TU-Automotive conference. The conference revolved largely around issues related to connected vehicles including hardware, software and services. The infotainment system that Qualcomm installed in this car does indeed run on the same version of Android that powers current flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Nexus 6P.
But Qualcomm doesn’t make Android, Google does. Qualcomm designs and builds the chips that drive a large proportion of the world’s Android (and Windows) smartphones. It’s current state-of-art chip, the Snapdragon 820 is what powers the interface systems in this Maserati. This certainly isn’t the first chip designed for a phone to power an automotive system. The Tesla Model S and several Honda vehicles among others use the Nvidia Tegra 3.
What’s different is that Qualcomm hasn’t soldered the chip into a control unit buried somewhere in the inaccessible guts of the car. Instead, there is a special port in the center console that can accept a module containing the processor and cellular radio chips that connect this car to the cloud. If an automaker used a setup like this in production, the module could be easily swapped out every few years to accept one with a higher performance chip, more storage capacity or new wireless technology like 5G.