Walk through any modern city and you’ll notice something odd. Cars keep getting safer and smarter, yet crossing the road doesn’t always feel safer. Crumple zones, airbags and robust crash structures have protected people inside vehicles remarkably well. Outside the vehicle, though, pedestrians and cyclists still carry a frightening amount of risk. That gap is exactly where simulation and AI are starting to make a difference. Instead of relying only on physical crash tests and limited real-world trials, engineers are building virtual worlds full of cars, cyclists and people on foot, then stress-testing them with thousands of situations that would be impossible – or illegal – to try on public roads. This shift is reshaping how pedestrian safety is designed, tested and improved. Here’s how it’s happening and why it matters. From crash labs to virtual streets For a long time, carmakers used simulation mainly to fine-tune how a vehicle behaves in a crash . Digital models helped them d...
Open a modern EV’s frunk and you’ll miss the familiar chaos of belts and manifolds. Pop the dash instead and you’ll find Ethernet switches, GPUs, container runtimes, and a central brain juggling dozens of real-time tasks. The balance of power in the auto industry is moving—away from pistons and toward code. The short version: differentiation now lives in software, data, and AI . Hardware still matters, but the moat is shifting to architectures that can ship features continuously, prove safety, and scale across trims and regions. Why this shift is happening now Market gravity. EV sales smashed records in 2024 (~17 million globally) and are set to pass a quarter of all car sales in 2025, with 2030 projections around 39 million passenger EVs. That concentrates value in electronics, compute, and software lifecycles rather than mechanical complexity. IEA BloombergNEF Regulatory gravity. UN R155 (cybersecurity) and R156 (softw...