The Garage Podcast from Sonatus brings you conversations with thought leaders from around the vehicle technology space discussing far-reaching topics about software innovation in vehicles.
These episodes will include industry experts, whether from Sonatus, or from our amazing partners across the industry, all of whom will share their Ideas and their outlook for the most important topics in vehicle technology. Episodes span from more technical topics, to business evolution, and market trends. Join us and learn about the future of vehicle in The Garage.
Overview:
JOHN: Welcome to The Garage. We're recording live from CES 2025 in Las Vegas with LHP. Let's go!
JOHN: Welcome to The Garage. I'm John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer with Sonatus. We're recording live at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. And we're so pleased today to welcome our friends from LHP.
Meet James Roberts and Ronaldo Castillo
We have two guests today. Usually, we only have one. We have two guests today. Starting first on my left side is James Roberts. James, tell us about yourself. And also our second guest is Ronaldo Castillo. We'll get to you in a moment. Start with you, James. Tell us about yourself.
JAMES: Yeah. So, I’m James Roberts. I’m the President of the Analytics and IoT division for LHP. I've been here nine years now. Before that, worked as a consultant for other companies and worked for Cummins before LHP.
JOHN: That's great. And, Ronaldo, tell us about you.
RONALDO: So, I've been— I’m Ronaldo Castillo. I'm a software engineering manager. I've been with LHP for about almost eight years now. I mostly support the functional safety aspects of our business. And, before that, I did spend about ten years in the aerospace industry, also working with safety critical systems.
JOHN: And aerospace is so safety-centric. That’s great. So, we have to start with our guests. We like to get to know our know our guests. Tell us a fun fact about you, James. What's your fun fact?
JAMES: Yeah. Hard to come up with a fun fact. I think the thing that I have most fun with is I have twins, a boy, and girl. And, they turn nine, so I actually signed my offer at LHP the day they were born in the hospital. So, that's kind of my fun fact. Talk about a career move when you have twins.
JOHN: That is a fun fact. And you'll never forget the day you signed.
JAMES: Correct. Yeah, exactly.
JOHN: I have a similar experience. I'll tell you about it in a second. And how about you?
RONALDO: Fun fact about me is that, when Covid hit— me always in my career, being a traveler, even for business, I felt a little bit too trapped during Covid that I had to, you know, sell my home take off and go on the road and live the nomad life for almost a year.
JOHN: That's exciting. That's so exciting. We kind of joked about doing that. We didn't have the guts to do it, but that was exciting. So, I always try to have a fun fact to match my guests. I think my fun fact is - my wife was a few weeks away from having our baby, our only daughter, and I was supposed to be on a business trip to Asia. And the doctor's like, oh I don’t know, it's hard to say…
JAMES: Maybe don’t go?
JOHN: Maybe don’t go. And the— I would have been on the plane back when the baby was born, and I would have never forgiven myself. So, I didn't go on the trip and I was there.
JAMES: Yup.
JOHN: But it was— came that close to missing it, a catastrophe. But it's exciting.
About LHP
JOHN: Well, listen. So, LHP is an important partner for Sonatus. And I’d love you to tell us about your company. Maybe start with you, James. Tell us about your company.
JAMES: Yeah. So, LHP, we’ve been around 20 years, 5-6 hundred employees right now, but we have multiple business units. We have the engineering solutions business, which you're going to get into, some of the functional safety work. But we do a lot of advanced engineering, software engineering for the whole V, right? So, we have big customers, OEMs, Tier 1s. A lot of advanced software solutions for them, embedded software, and really help our customers through that journey, right? Integrators, custom code, and things like that. And then obviously I represent the analytics and IoT group. And so, we said, you know, we have engineers creating all this information and data with our customers who would, you know, ten years ago didn't have a group to do anything with it. So, we help all of our customers synthesize that information, do the data engineering, the data architecture, feedback loops back into the vehicle or whatever we're working on. And so, our group partners a lot with Engineering Solutions Group, which you're going to hear a lot about today. But it's a good partnership, and, you know, really compatible between the two.
JOHN: That's great.
JAMES: And then we also have a large staffing wing, for our customers that want, you know, staffing solutions or just engineering consulting services. So yeah, anything from projects to consulting, functional safety, you know, I'm sure we're missing some stuff, but, you know, a lot of things that we can help from small to big.
JOHN: That's great. And Ronaldo how about you tell us about your part of the business.
RONALDO: So, we mostly focus on the engineering solutions. We have, part of our group focuses on consulting. We do turnkey software development. And we also do help our OEMs and Tier 1s do, you know, some integration services as well. We are also focused on testing on the testing side as well. Across all of those aspects, functional safety is always at the forefront of what we do. And, yup, that's our engineering solutions in a nutshell.
JOHN: That's great. And it's so nice to meet you both. And welcome to the show.
JAMES: Thank you.
Functional Safety 101
JOHN: So, Ronaldo, I know you're an expert in functional safety and that's one of the things we've worked together with LHP on. Can you tell our guests a little bit about functional safety - what it means and why it's so important?
RONALDO: Yeah. That's actually one of my favorite questions to answer. So functional safety, I think, you know, whether we're talking about the automotive industry, aerospace, medical - when it comes to safety, it actually boils down into three main components. You have your culture and processes that you have to establish in an organization. You have your analysis and development, and then you also have the test side. In general, functional safety goes across the board on these… on these areas to measure the rigor, the robustness of your standards and your processes for your development lifecycle across the entire V. In order to mitigate unreasonable risk that might be exposed that can lead to some sort of like, catastrophic events in your designs and your requirements, and integration of your systems and software in vehicles.
Sonatus and LHP: Building Functional Safety
JOHN: Okay. I mean it's— safety is so important. Many of our customers, and this is what brought us to work with you, many of our customers have asked us about, well, I love your products at Sonatus, but I'm wondering if I put that into my vehicle, is that going to affect functional safety? And so, we really wanted to work with you to understand and reassure our customers that they would be able to integrate that in important ways. So, maybe you can talk about the way we began working together in the project we did together with LHP.
RONALDO: Yeah. Exactly that. Trying to understand, first of all, your — Sonatus’s — goals. Working with the team, getting to know the team. We, one of the first things that we suggested is that we get into a starter package or workshop type of setting where we made sure that we understood what the safety culture is all about, starting from the very top. What kind of infrastructure for safety development you need to have established in an organization. And, very importantly, speaking the same terminology. Understanding the concepts of safety. What it means to do some sort of analysis in order to put forward your designs. But, more importantly, we work together with Sonatus to ensure that we first identify what the problem statement was.
JOHN: Right.
RONALDO: What were the use cases and the features that Sonatus was targeting with the product that we were certifying. The Automator in this case.
JOHN: Right.
RONALDO: And ensuring that we first understood that it was well defined. We worked very, very collaboratively with Sonatus. And we had a really good team dynamic to establish that baseline of features first.
JOHN: It's great. And I think it's so important that, you talked about a lot of things there, it’s important that it’s not just a technical thing, it's also a mindset as well. It's a nomenclature. It's making sure all of those things are in lockstep so that the things are designed from the beginning with safety in mind. Is that about right?
RONALDO: Correct.
Automator Safety Interlock
JOHN: Yeah. And so we worked together on a project around Automator. Our Automator product, if our guests don't know, is around orchestration. It allows us to take a vehicle and do what I like to say is “if-this-then-that” functionality. You might have that in your house. You know, when someone rings the doorbell, turn on the lights in the back, or, you know, whatever. But in vehicles that really doesn't exist today. So, our Automator product allows OEMs to take action, whether that's providing a warning to a driver, calling some home automation routine, or anywhere in between. We're showing an example out here at the show for commercial fleet management where a commercial fleet manager could use that kind of infrastructure to notify them when it's approaching the yard or something like that. But the question that came up was, well, how can I do that and be functionally safe? And so that's what we worked together with you on so that— and coming up with an infrastructure that solves that problem. But I think we came up with a really clever approach that's not only achieving the goal, technically, but it's also, I think, easy for the OEMs to understand and be confident that it's a safe solution. Do you want to talk a little bit about the solution we came up with?
RONALDO: Yeah. Specifically, we're talking here about the— and we first selected the Automator, or Sonatus selected the Automator as the product to find a solution— safety solution around. And so, the ultimate component that we developed was the safety interlock for the Automator. So, the way to think about this product is it's a supervisor that monitors the action request coming in from the Automator. And the safety component is in charge of ensuring that any action requests that are going through the system to the vehicle are being prescreened basically…
JOHN: Right.
RONALDO: …to ensure that their action is already pre-qualified from a predefined list.
JOHN: Right. Is this a situation in which this is a safe thing to do or not a safe thing to do?
RONALDO: Correct.
JOHN: So, what makes the Automator Safety Interlock unique?
RONALDO: So, I guess, one of the unique features is that, first of all, I think it's a first of its kind when it comes to safety, especially in the SDV world. And, additionally, it's— what we've ended up building here, it's a framework. It's a product that was developed under an “element out of context”, with assumptions, with use cases that Sonatus and LHP worked on defining. And now that we've completed the product, it has so much more potential for expansion, you know, with more safety capabilities depending on the OEMs’ or the Tier 1s’ requirements. And just building on top of the ASI for expanded safety features.
JOHN: Yeah, that’s right. We wrote a blog jointly with you talking about the capabilities and digging into some of the details for safety experts. We can post a link to the blog on our— on the link to this episode.
RONALDO: Yep.
ISO26262 ASIL-D
JOHN: We're so pleased that, after working with you throughout 2024 for many, many months on this functional safety journey with you, we recently, in December, achieved safety certification to the ISO26262 ASIL-D level, which is such an important achievement to allow OEMs to put this into their vehicles. Can you talk about what ASIL-D enables?
RONALDO: Yeah. ASIL-D, what you get with making sure that your software is basically at the highest level of safety and integrity. What that really means is that this— the software has been vetted, assessed, analyzed, to ensure that, if for some reason there is a malfunction in the system, that there are safeguards in place in your design, in your software, in your system to ensure that there are mitigation in the safety mechanisms of your software component. And there's a safe state that you can get into to ensure that the vehicle doesn't end up in some sort of a catastrophic event where, you know, you can cause fatal injuries.
JOHN: It's important. It's important. And the example we're showing on the floor here, just right across out the window from us right now, is, in our Automator product, how we can use this product during a drive to cause actions to happen, for example, configuration actions, you know, setting off-road mode and things like that. Well, obviously, a lot of those things are perfectly safe to do, but you want to make sure that there are safeguards in place so that when the driver, or perhaps the OEM, requests a change, that it's done in a safe environment. So we're really excited to be able to show that off. We have a great demonstration here at the show. And for the people who aren't coming to the show, we'd be happy to show them that afterwards. We're really pleased to work with you.
RONALDO: Yeah. Same here. Thank you.
Shifting to SDV
JOHN: So, James, I know you work with so many OEMs on integration projects and so on. And today, you know, here at the booth and in general, Sonatus is really focusing on software defined vehicles and providing the right infrastructure to enable this— the shift to SDV. I'm wondering, what do you see are some of the opportunities and challenges for people who are working to shift to SDV?
JAMES: Yeah. I mean, I think it's summed up by - SDV is easy for new entrants, right? When, they're starting from scratch, you can build that into your processes, into your vehicle. But for some of the legacy automakers, with legacy code bases, established processes, established culture, that shift is a little more difficult, right? And so that's where we try to help. Where your products can help, as well, as more, you know, OEMs, automakers, Tier 1s come into that process, we can help them in that journey to get to that SDV, and really get that software defined vehicle off the ground for them.
JOHN: Yeah. That's great. I mean, we see so much opportunity for OEMs because every OEM really wants to shift and they realize they need to shift to SDV. People ask me, oh, is SDV gonna happen? SDV is going to happen. It's only a question of whether you're going to be a leader or whether you're going to be a follower in SDV. So we're really trying to help work with leaders and help work with companies that want to be leaders to do that shift.
JAMES: Yep.
JOHN: Our infrastructure— one of the things that we're so pleased about is our infrastructure doesn't take away all the differentiation. We're providing a lot of almost middleware, if you think about it, that lets OEMs and even Tier 1 suppliers innovate on top so they can still do things that are unique to them, but they don't have to go all the way to the low level to get it done.
JAMES: Correct. And I think that's what makes our partnership work so well, right? Is - we kind of go deep into that integration level, but we have you guys as a perfect middleware opportunity for our, you know, joint customers, hopefully in the future. And we can really provide those engineering services at a depth and then also as a scale that you guys can bring as well.
What’s Next?
JOHN: I mean, that’s a perfect segue to say, what's next for LHP and Sonatus? You know, what should we be doing better together in the future?
JAMES: Yeah, I think we're going to collaborate closely. You know, obviously we have an analytics group that can help on some of the data collected for individual groups. If they want to do specialized use cases or data science or, you know, how they're going to use their AI, we have the depth of our engineering group, which I think is going to get deeper as you guys expand your workforce. You know, hopefully we're in there, you know, with those customers saying, where do you need that expertise? You know, that migration from legacy to SDV or just net new. Do you need the arms and legs and the consulting power and engineering power to, you know, really get their use cases moved forward?
JOHN: Well, that's great. Look, maybe we're going to have you back on the podcast to talk about data. There's a whole section of the booth looking at vehicle data.
JAMES: Yep.
JOHN: But as we work— do more with you on that kind of thing, maybe we'll have you back as an analytics guest next time.
JAMES: Sure, thank you.
JOHN: James, thank you for joining us. Ronaldo, thank you for joining us.
RONALDO: Thank you.
JOHN: Thank you for watching. This is a live episode from CES 2025, and look for more episodes from CES soon. If you like what you're seeing, please like and subscribe to hear about them when they publish. We look forward to seeing you again very soon.