Sandy Munro did a deep dive Rivian's hardware and software a few weeks ago with their lead engineers. He actually did a series of videos talking about all aspec

Sandy Munro did a deep dive Rivian's hardware and software a few weeks ago with their lead engineers. He actually did a series of videos talking about all aspects of all the changes they did in their latest vehicle architecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DC5AIXX1VA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DC5AIXX1VA In short, Rivian reduced the number of control units from 17 to just 7. Software components are allocated to the an available unit. So, most stuff in the vehicle no longer has dedicated processors but simply gets allocated to share hardware with all the other systems. Doing that means less wires are needed, less thing can go wrong, etc. And it all gets over the air updates. They develop most stuff in house; so they are not dependent on suppliers providing software for their hardware. So, that means it's easier to change things, to update things, etc. without having to deal with suppliers. I assume, they are talking about bringing similar changes to VW. Same OS, same kind of processing units, probably a lot of the modules, etc. So when VW talks about a software defined car, that's what they mean.