Improving Technology Through Collaboration w/ Tim Yerdon

Welcome to Reimagined Mobility Podcast series. I'm here with Tim. Tim, you have a tremendous experience in this industry from lots of different angles and in lots of different technologies and companies, and right now you're doing a lot of different consulting work. So maybe explain to our viewers and listeners, where have you been and what are you doing currently? And then let's jump in and together we imagine mobility. Well, thank you for the kind words and thank you for having me.

And table is a great great to just have these discussions and dialogs because, you know, this is the fun part of these jobs. But to be kind of an interesting history, interesting past, a long, long time ago when manufacturing was in vogue, I actually started my career in Ford Electronics back when they actually had proper electronics doing manufacturing. And, you know, that led into the spinoff called Visteon that many are going to be familiar with.

It had a variety of divisions and roles and to make a long story short, there and a variety of increasing levels of jobs, but ultimately became the R&D director across all those different pieces of portfolio from electronics and interior and exterior lighting and chassis and and on and on and glass. We had sort of climate controlled thermal management, which is really rose to the occasion of world battery electric vehicles and thermal management around that sites that.

But at the end of the day that Visteon portfolio just became electronics and software which is kind of where I started anyways. And then I kind of made the pivot to the business and marketing side really growing into a, you know, ultimately a chief marketing and communications officer. So everything from product marketing to benefit emails to investor relations and doing the quarterly earnings calls as a public company. So very proud.

In the time I was there, we had, I think 11 or 12 straight quarters, you know, improving margin improvement, revenue growth. And, you know, those are those are big, big, big things to accomplish in a public company at that size and then ultimately left there, started my own thing and started a job with Ford at the time, which that consulting opportunity actually led to a full time position, which I wasn't really interested in taking. But the mission was so cool.

Just a little startup inside of Ford called Team Medicine, which really incubated the Mustang Mach-E, the F-150, Lightning and the Transit, which you see on the road today that are all award winning vehicles and really helping set the tone for them as a company and then then ultimately back to the consulting side. So yeah, so engineering, manufacturing, marketing, investor relations. So, you know, lots of different trades, probably master of none, but just keeps things exciting.

So let's jump into one area that I think that you touched upon, and you certainly had lots of years of experience in there, Software and electronics, Right. If you if you listen to the news, if you listen to the industry, if you listen to experts and you listen to engineers, not every engineer, but that's what I'm getting to. Everything is about software.

The software defined vehicle over the air upgrades, customizing your interior to touch, to feel the lighting, whatever it is, it's all software, software, software, software. And personally, not a software guy, but a hardware electronics guy, at least by degree. And what was like, this is all great, but why were the hardware that still allows this to do? I understand the capability of software has grown so much, right?

But I mean, we can't minimize how far chips have kind of we're talking about Qualcomm's chips. We're talking about an Nvidia or MOBILEYE, all those companies that are making these chips ever so more powerful and ever so smaller. Right. But from your perspective, what is this balance? Is it is it a total imbalance right now of how the industry talks about software and sort of, let's say, almost ignores the hardware? Is it the proper balance?

Is it about to come up again and be truly on equal footing, or is it actually are we just about ready to realize we got the software figured out? But our compute platforms are nowhere near near where they need to be and suddenly that will come up again. Give me your perspective. You know, I think I think every year, every customer, every OEM, you know, usually obviously starts with that. Miss, what did they want for the vehicle platform? Everything's a mess, quite honestly.

You know, whether it's the software, the hardware, the thing that most people often forget about, how am I going to do over the year updates down the road? And if you really take a step back and you and you think, okay, is it a new vehicle, is it a refreshed vehicle, what electrical architecture it might dealing with reusing old modules? Is it new modules that are all over the year updatable?

And then, you know that that consolidation or non consolidation of those hardware platforms, which, you know, in the industry many have called domain consolidation into these high performance compute platforms. When that can happen, that obviously helps reduce complexity, increases speed, reduce it, increases reliability as well, by the way.

But when you can do that and then you can get these software stacks more containable versus trying to deal with it across 50, 80, 100 easy use a vehicle that then reduces that burden on the software teams to a certain extent. Maybe that Burns condensed in a ways, but how do you then take that that complexity reduction and then apply it down that eco or down that lifecycle? So back to what I mentioned about the over-the-air updates.

You know, many OEM struggled today doing that because they're living in a bifurcated world, have a folio of vehicles that still have 100 SKUs that they're trying to go to every supplier in the world that provides those products to get their software update, integrate that into their into their stack, to be able to push it out on an OTA versus their complexity just gets much simpler in the future when you can get to this generation to generation three record vehicle architecture.

So and then the hitting that's underneath that is, you know, you're you're chip manufacturers, whether you know their initiatives and then the expertise and videos of the world bringing to the table what's affordable for that platform. You can get some really screaming associates but it it doesn't mean you can afford it for a million vehicles going across the road Every otherwise every every one of our laptops with all have high end graphics processors.

And there would be a question I know obviously automotive is very price sensitive, but my my biggest push and takeaway and learnings over the last 5 to 10 years is reduce the hardware complexity, reduce the software complexity. Then you can reduce the service complexity on the back end, whether it's updating things, fixing glitches, adding new features.

You know, I think all of us, especially any of us that are engineers by trade, we love to create, we love to add new, but we also have to constantly, you know, reduce and make better, reduce and make better.

We do something better. I think that's a good point you're going to get already when somewhere where I want to go next. I heard the CEO of Ford Farley, Mr. Farley talked about I think he was on a podcast tour or somewhere.

I think I saw it at least on line, how he feels this company is struggling, getting this already update order update thing going, how he struggles of making all those different software components and control launches that you could you alluded to to really come together and from a systems perspective, really work seamless, right? Like I like to say. So an integration challenge.

And he said and the reason that is this as opposed to some others that he mentioned that do the majority of their software development all in-house to the complete vehicle he still or Ford is still going to traditional or out of whatever a vista on an EDL whatever even Mike right you and I both have worked with with on the supply base for the majority of our careers. I think I don't need to say you and I both see the advantage of why this should come to a supplier.

But now that you're more in the consulting space and kind of work for an OEM too. So you've seen both sides. And as you mentioned, it's a mess everywhere. And that's just a bottom line is because the vehicle is getting more and more complex by the minute. How do you see that statement that he made? Do you really see that as long as you do everything in-house, it's going to be much better.

It's going to be much faster because you don't have this integration mess or not really because you're missing out the advantages you're getting going to the suppliers and to domain knowledge and core court capability step. They have share a little bit your perspective on that. Yeah, I'll give you maybe two answers. You know, one is the infamous you know, somebody is in baseball terms, somebody is out in the outfield getting ready to catch the ball going. I got it, I got it,

I got it. And all the sudden the little kid looks over his head is like, I don't got it. So I think there's a little bit of that. They want all strive to have that control. You don't have to have that expertise in-house to do everything everyone wants. You know, they want to be like, you know, some of the startups that are that are in vogue, but they're a long ways from getting there. So the second part to that answer is what phase?

And obviously that's the stuff that's rolling off the assembly lines today with multiple 50, 60, 80 echoes mostly on these vehicles. You know, they're they're doing what they can. They're managing it with their supply base. And then the second phase of that part, too, is, you know, there is what there is today. Then as they transition, how do those relationships change with the supply base?

And we used to when I was at Vista on where you get a purchase order, you build this product, be inclusive, the hardware, the software, all the service work, everything, all package. Now it's all right. I might just buy the software stack for you from a for a digital cluster and I'm going to build out the manufacturing separately. So you may you can you can quote on the manufacturing by, you know, flacks or somebody else or somebody in China might also have angle on it as well.

So I think there's a a separation of obviously the hardware software side moving forward. So that's a piece. And and part of that isn't just separating where they can do it in-house or out of house, but it's a mindset to start to do that separation. So then there's flexibility. Do I want to buy that software stack from of tier one, A, B or C, or do I want to do it myself? And with the ultimate ambition to do a lot of this themselves.

But as we all know, you know, in the world of software, whether you're you're running in vehicle embedded technology, whether you're running a DINO or whatever it is or whatever, there's always little proprietary pieces in there that are intellectual property that every supplier owns, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. So they have to be protected, you know, So it's it's a fine balance. I think that desire is there.

But even if you skate to the ambitions of most OEMs, which is do everything in-house, I think they're still going to be, you know, a little kid on the baseball field thinking that they're going to catch that fly ball and they're not going to be able to catch all the flight boards. And when that happens, how is the supply base there? In a very friendly, non-confrontational way there to say, okay, how many people you need?

I can, you know, can we be there to help you fix the fix the mass, make sure you meet your startup production dates. And and that's the challenge because many of us know the end outcome because you've been in the industries long enough, but you have to let it kind of take its natural progression until that failure mode, so to speak, takes place. And then you just have to be there to help fix it.

So that's yeah, I love being in this consulting world because I can, I can be very frank on that, being on the OEM side and not being isolated. So it's, you know, being in the middle of all this and having lived on both sides, that's a lot of what I see, you know, staff and runners up and up and down.

It'll slide and it'll change. Give it 15, 20 years at all. Sure. I see we're doing too much inside, but send it back out. I've seen that cycle twice, certainly around May.

I've seen that myself and and I think if you go back right, if you go back whatever, how many years when when auto czar first was brought up, which is sort of this, hey, let's all get together and figure out how can we separate the hardware from the software, that we can take anybody's software and plug it in and run on the on the base software. But we're not dependent on, you know, this the arm to give me everything, but I can create more competition, more flexibility.

Yeah, I think that's still the case today. We're still pushing this, but I'm still challenging the viewpoint at times and how important that is and how much money we're really spending on developing orders are compliant ecosystems that I didn't see. Frankly, not as much used as I would have thought it would be used by now, because again, so many OEMs, maybe less in this country, but certainly in Europe, I would say continue to push those, Right?

Yeah, I thought I mean, that's got to be a ten year period or something like that and maybe it's longer that time and you lose track of time. But I really thought that would have progressed more than not. And I don't know if it's just push back by, you know, engineering and engineering manager levels or complexity. I it's not really complexity. It is what it is, but it's, you know, it's, it's the willingness to implement and stick to it.

And I've seen it on the in-vehicle infotainment side as well. If you're familiar with Geneva Consortium, which is now called Visa. And you know, they've been pushing for years to try to standardize bits and chunks of software stack in that domain and, you know, mixed, you know, kind of mixed reviews of what people will accept and not accept because really and customers don't want to do it all themselves.

And and I, I think they are now getting more momentum over the last 2 to 5 years, but only because the tech companies have come in that a lot of, you know, Google, you know, Android and Apple, it's you know, even Amazon's dipping their toe into different things, especially with the voice technology. But it's it's only been since that. And no those are all standard products by the way even though we're applying them to auto, it's not like we're recreating it every time to bring it into auto.

And you know, your apps, you know, you hear about some of the electric vehicles that you could watch YouTube on if we know your charging station are doing that. But you know, that app in there is it's very little difference than what you have on your on your mobile device or your phone or anywhere else on your on your desk. But it's out. And that's a form of standardization versus a, you know, you know, automotive manufacturer or tier one just trying to develop everything bespoke.

So those days they're they're slow. Some things are going away. But the way it's been a lot slower than I thought you know you got a lot more commonality now. So you you talked about the beginning a little bit on how you let's call you the father of automotive technology at CBS. Okay. Of what you've done, you've seen a lot. And you guys certainly at Visteon, I remember being at some of those tents at CES specifically and seeing your stuff.

I always remember the cool clusters and the advanced technologies you have there. Some of the center stacks you guys did. Let's talk about a little bit interior, right? So stuff that a consumer sees and uses and touches because right now we sort of talked about the base, the foundation of again of software into hardware, of a vehicle, of the technology.

What have you seen over the last three years that that somewhat surprised as you an example would be to me how fast in China, for example, they have really focused on the let's call it infotainment or display phase in a vehicle. Right? It used to be small, a cluster in the center stack. Now it's sort of almost everywhere touch and all sorts of functions. To me, surprising how fast at the same time, exciting how fast China has come, for example, or at least to China OEMs.

You haven't been in the space for, again, 20 plus years. What has surprised you the most about the consumer facing stuff inside the vehicle? Yeah, the you know, I think there's a few things. One, the you know, when you sit in these vehicles, the fidelity of the graphics, the crispness, I mean, you know, hands off to the hats, off to the design teams that have Donner's and many of those design teams, you know, the leaders of those design organizations are in this, but they live the transition.

20 years ago, they were sculpting clay and putting mechanical parts into an instrument panel, and they've all had to pivot their game from very physical to digital. So they've been, you know, many of them have been hired and grown up in a digital world. But for the most part, a lot of them grew up in the physical clay modeling world. So to to get to the level that we're at. But I you know, the thing that that has had to happen is it's no longer design studio, electronics people, software people.

It all has to be dovetail together. You really have to have this, you know, these these agile teams that really work to rapidly improve. And it's not just in viral digital technology, it's similar anywhere, period of software to make these rapid improvements. But when you're looking at these vehicles like you mentioned, that are now sometimes, you know, pillar to pillar displays, sometimes 40 to 52 inches wide, that's a lot of real estate to put digital content.

And, you know, some of those some of their content is obviously for driving some of it in stationary mode, especially in battery electric vehicles. But getting that right, getting it connected and tied to what consumers expect in their kind of traditional consumer electronics world. It's tough. That's a tough business. You know, we have a hard enough time, or at least I have a hard enough time getting my electronics and connectivity to work at all, let alone in the car.

So you know that there's just so much work to get all these things literally firing together. And it's just a ginormous systems and cheery challenge. I mentioned that word earlier, but it's just there's so many things that have to happen for the consumer and everybody focuses on a car. But it's not just the car we have to design from day one.

And at the trifecta of the car, the cloud and the motor contract, they still hit a start button on your mobile app and you're still waiting ten, 15 seconds for your car to start. By the time you walk to it, you just start it yourself. So these are the things that you have to solve from day one. You have to have all three of those ecosystems singing in harmony together, you know, to get these features and functions working appropriately and to make customers happy.

You know, the digital fidelity, the amount of displays, the amount of content and what they get. And, you know, I get passion about this, but it's like we all buy these laptops and you go to Dell and you click 100,000 features that you want because I got to have all this stuff. And then after three months you use like 20% of it and then the same as in the car, right?

Yeah, Yeah. I have a friend that's retired military who works for one of the airlines and bought a large SUV, and he's like, he goes, It's been six months and I'm still find a new stuff on this, you know, because I'll never learn all of it and yeah, that's the way it is which is in some ways good.

Yeah yeah, yeah. I think you're making a good point, right? Systems engineering has become over the last, I would say, 3 to 5 years in our business high demand. Right. Because again of the complexity not only in, in battery electric vehicle or consumer electronics, how we integrate exactly as you say, seamlessly. Right. Because if I click on an app today it comes up and ponder is if I now use my smartphone to turn my car on and it takes 15 seconds, I'm like all that junk to work, right?

We have high expectations and a lot of this stuff can be addressed from the beginning, as you mentioned, with with the proper systems engineering. So let's maybe two more questions for you, Tim, before we wrap up here. One, what is it that you're looking for when you reimagine mobility with with all the things we've talked about today or maybe something else in the mobility space, what what do you look forward to in the next five years seeing happening?

Is it that we're all going electric, that we're going to tournament's in five years? Like we already said we would be by now in 2017? What is it that you're looking for? What excites you? What do you see not only reimagining it but the reimagined piece also becoming a reality? And what excites you?

You know, I think taking you know, we talked about all this technology and complexity, but making it it's simple for the user at the end of the day, you know, boiling this complex, which is really what engineering an engineers job is to do, whether you're software, hardware or what have you, is take the complex and then boil it down to something that's usable. And we talk about user experience, we talk about my human machine interfaces, but really making things simple that customers can use.

Because if we if we don't have a good experience in a product and you see that with, you know, this thing all the time, if it's not a good experience, somebody moves on to the other product. The form factor, the shape, the technology even is the same. It's a touch screen. It's usually 6 to 7 inches and diagonal and has a camera, it has this and that. But if the experience isn't good, don't move on to the other.

So to me, continuing to to reduce the complexity, maintain a high level, you know, customer experience those to me are, you know, the never ending Holy grail because, you know, even though you're trying to accomplish that, you're constantly from above getting bombarded with new, new technology is new features.

You know, we haven't even talked about the exterior side of the vehicle with all the ADAS technology coming in and then all the certification and integration of that technology, that's a whole nother another world, you know, with. So to me, you know, the magic wand, Holy Grail is making all that just so good. Everybody loves it and they don't complain. True. That's very much true. I mean, when I dealt with infotainment systems, I don't know, about ten years ago. Right. We've we've looked at all

these systems. We've tested a lot of them. We helped develop some of them. And I always said, I've seen the ones that are jam packed with technology, but a very lacked a basic intuitively behind it. And what to do or had a hard time working right took forever to boot up. But then you have the ones that people say, Yeah, it's fairly simple, but I have to say yes, but it works and it works all the time and it's intuitive. So I think that's that's your point completely.

You know, that's the same thing, right? I mean, my third piece to that is, you know, we we talked about certain OEMs wanting to take more control. I think at the end of the day, whether know where you no matter where you are in the ecosystem, whether you're out to a tier, a tier two and tier two or three consulting upwards service providers for whatever you may be, we can't lose the ability to collaborate. There's a lot of companies, I collaborate.

We can't just say you collaborate, you need to do collaboration. You know, we talked about the Googles, the Apples, Amazons. It's all about collaboration and bringing technology and just different form factor ecosystem. And, you know, I have seen that ability be lost industry, you know, people talk about it, but when it comes to practice of actually collaboration riches, you're not going to always get what you want. You can't be it's like a negotiation. It can't be a one sided discussion.

That's only one side sappy. It's not going to work. It's that both sides are happier. It's probably still not going to work. So you got to have a little bit of happiness on both sides, even on the collaboration side. And I think, you know, I fear the industry as we transition to this new world, is a site that we still need to collaborate, whether it's there, you know, wherever you are in the ecosystem, going up or down or sideways. Yeah, continue to do that. That decision.

Yeah, that's very good point. All right. Final question for you, Tim. What's the next car you're going to buy and why? Cool. Yeah, that's a that's a good question. Right? I've been very fortunate to really to drive a lot of vehicles and Yeah, and different with different technologies but I am still a sedan person.

I know that I'm a performance today embarrassing and that's really what I love and I love manual I'm always I'm a car person at heart you know I just I look at some of the vehicles I'm driving today that I won't mention because they just don't give that emotional spark that I hey, I was just on my way for the other day that, you know, I miss hopping in one of the old cars I had that I never bought, but it was a new old car that I thought on a Sunday night and just driving into, you know, back

row country roads and having fun. And I just that's that's what I get back. And and I can do that with electrified vehicles. But it just I'm I love it. It's the future. It's it's you know what pays many of my bills. I just don't have all the emotion that I you know I've driven a plaid that's that's up there, you know. But but it's really, you know, it's the whole experience. It's not just the speed of performance. It's down the package.

So I know it's kind of a non answer to it, but it's like you're an answer now. Again, it's an honest answer. It's good because I think too many people, you know, just say, it's got to be an elite. Don't tell me what society wants you to do. Say again, This is about what do you feel? Again, we're the emotion attached. For some people, it's it's the electric. You know, the tour can be instant power and all that for others is like, Now I still like to fear the dealership thing.

I like to shift myself. It's not a perfect answer, and it's changing a little bit, too. I you know, I've got an 18 year old that just went off to college, still wants a car. You know, we're constantly looking. But his his focus is rear wheel drives, manual, lightweight. You know, he's looking at for, you know, grade six Toyota vehicles, you know, small Subarus want me at 20 year old Miata.

And when you try to find these vehicles with less than 100,000 miles, I mean, you wouldn't believe the pricing. I mean, you know, 15, 20 grand for some of these things. And that's just it's crazy. The used car market for some reason, I call them the niche vehicles that nobody cared about five years ago that just went through the roots. Yeah. Yeah, but but but that's what puts smiles on people's face.

And I think the industry as as power density gets better, these are the vehicles that we need to create in the electrified world, that it isn't a Ford or SUV that's really quick and fast and heavy, by the way. But now we have some more lightweight, agile fighting vehicles that, you know, a young professional can afford to buy that. Now that's really up to me. So anyways, that's perfect. Good, good answer. Good wrap up. Thank you so much, Tim, for your insight.

And together with me here, re-imagine mobility, how we see it coming, what have we seen, what's today and where we're going. Thank you so much for your time tonight. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Take care.