Soft things about Hard things

The title is a play on Hard thing about Hard things by Ben Horowitz a book which talks about the hard aspects of growing and running a business especially a startup. Great book to know about the not so romantic side of running a business.

One of the important things he talks about is hiring.

What does a software engineer do at Ather, an organisation which is building hardware products? A question which I am asked multiple times.

Obviously building autonomous vehicles is the only reason why an automotive company would need a software engineer, because for everything else you have those complicated linkage mechanisms which make the rest of the vehicle work. Right?

Not quite. While this may be true for a large portion of gasoline-powered two-wheelers, it doesn’t hold true for electric vehicles. To begin with, the software is actually essential to make electric vehicles work. All the critical systems on the vehicle have to have a piece of code to perform basic functions. Almost no component on the vehicle is without a piece of code.

All of this is just to build a dumb vehicle which just takes you from point A to point B. No connected or intelligence involved. But what we are building isn’t just an electric vehicle and that’s where a lot of unique things start coming in.

Peripherals controls

Every single piece of peripheral on our vehicle is controlled by software — light, horn, key, speakers. It’s what powers an auto switch off of the indicator when we make a turn, or enables one of our latest features, guide-me-home lights. Do you know, we changed the sound of our indicator lamps a few months ago through an OTA upgrade?

Connected

There are 46 sensors on the vehicle — each of these sensors talks to the cloud to provide us with real-time information.

What do we do with this data? The data has helped us solve for each of the bugs on the vehicle at a pace which would have never been possible even if we had 100 engineers debugging. We store time series data to provide a shorter service turnaround time, diagnose issues faster, offer features like predictive maintenance and ride statistics. This also gives us data to iterate on our products faster and goes a long way for making rapid product development possible.

Rich User Interface

But what about our UI, phone app and navigation? That should be easy, every other company has these nowadays. Well here’s the challenge — we built our UI on top of an embedded platform and it interacts with the vehicle. This is a very different architecture than a typical mobile or web app because it directly interacts with the vehicle and changes things like ride mode and peripherals.

Navigation would have been simpler, but Google is still working on how to give an Android certification to a two-wheeler. So we went ahead and figured a solution for ourselves — we built our own navigation on top of basic Google Maps. All of the rich UI and custom navigation was built by a team of no larger than 5 people. The application development engineer gets to own a big part of the software and be responsible to deliver the best customer experiences.

OTA (over-the-air) upgrades:

All these features cannot be built on day one, it is also interesting if you can actually change the features based on customer’s feedback. It wasn’t possible in a two wheeler until now.

All the control units on our vehicles can be upgrades via an OTA update. Our latest upgrades gave our customers new features, improving user experience, diagnosing and fixing bugs.

Performing OTA on a vehicle full of embedded systems is tricky as you have a hardware with limited resources and you are directly updating a microcontroller. The challenges are just endless and that is what makes it interesting to work in an environment which is heavily constrained on resources.

Why are intelligence and connectivity important?

At Ather, we are not just building electric vehicles, we are building intelligent vehicles. 

The market will soon have many offerings of electric vehicles, but our native software integration will differentiate Ather from any other competitor. It will help us create unique experience and capability for both Consumers and Businesses.

In the new era of mobility, we are seeing a fundamental shift in the auto products — a change that is driven as much by software as by mechanical/electrical. The new forms of ownership make a strong case for native software integration making these vehicles the obvious choice of sustainable and smart future.

Is Ather for me?

Your talent can solve lots of problems, some are about instant gratification and some are about solving fundamental problems. By the nature of it, fundamental problems aren’t about instant gratification, they are about creating an impact which takes time are tougher in nature and hence hard to replicate.

What Ather has to offer is the unique opportunity to work on a physical product which sits on the intersection of mechanical, electronics, software and intelligence. Have you ever thought about how vibrations or sunlight can affect your algorithms? Have you had a scenario where your code was not working because the earthing of the house wasn’t good. These are the sort of unique nature of problems our engineers solve. It doesn’t excite everyone, but there are few who won’t stop drooling over it.

To put it simply ask yourself, what excites you more? working on JARVIS or Lt. Commander Data

If you would like to be a part of the team that is pushing the envelope on how vehicles are designed and built, check out the openings in our software team here.