Consumer electronics know-how helping automakers

LAS VEGAS -- Dragging his finger around in circles on a demo vehicle display screen, Rightware COO Tero Koivu creates a tornado of lizard-green light pixels that swirls as he explains his business. A moment later, a purple Lamborghini appears on the screen in stunning video game-like clarity.

"We're not designing the vehicle displays of the future," Koivu said. "That's the automaker's job. We're providing the tools to let the automaker create their designs faster."

Visitors to this week's CES show here could be forgiven for blurring the identities of the high-definition TV screen producers, makers of colorful cameras and Internet communications devices and car parts manufacturers all crowded together cheek-by-jowl in and around the Las Vegas Convention Center. For the large number of auto suppliers participating in the show, associating themselves with new-era consumer electronics is exactly why they're there.

Rightware, a company from Helsinki with roots in the cellphone and video game industries, loosely calls itself a software company. But Koivu closes one eye and cocks his head to suggest that it's more complicated than that.

"We develop tools," he said. The company's boilerplate description for itself reads: "Rightware provides tools and services for development of advanced digital user interfaces to more than 40 auto brands."

Prying their names out of Koivu isn't easy. But the company's fingerprints might be found on display screens inside upcoming models from Audi and Ford.

What Rightware and other nontraditional suppliers are now offering the auto industry is the ability to free itself up to tap into the Internet, into an expanding galaxy of phone apps and cloud data to do things such as show a vehicle's fuel economy in a more reader-friendly way, or take the huge amount of sensor data that will be coming into autonomous vehicles and convert it into cockpit visuals that make immediate sense to the passengers.

The display might present road condition information more vividly or create a navigation map that looks more like what a driver might see outside the windshield.

Koivu's demo screen suddenly opens a glowing blue map of the surrounding Las Vegas landscape, with its hills and mountains rising into three dimensions and the city's roads weaving through them in vivid illumination, as if viewed from a starfighter as it swoops down for battle.

But it's not just about looks.

Rightware is opening vehicle screens in the same way that cellphones can tap into thousands of available apps.

For an automaker's system designer, the tools offer a boost in productivity. Until now, every screen image had to be created by the designer, and each image required software engineers to translate it into coding. Now, the imagery can be installed quickly.

"What used to take 60 designers three years to do, 10 people can do now in less than a year," Koivu said. "You don't have to be a coder to do the design. There are real gains in productivity to be realized."

That has implications for time to market, he points out.

But that acceleration can have two different benefits. It can help an automaker design and develop a styling update or a new model faster, allowing it to get an idea into showrooms before the competition.

Or, the executive adds, it can enable a vehicle project to wait until later in the normal development cycle to lock into a graphics package.

That will be more important in the years ahead, as consumer electronics companies come to market with newer and newer visual looks — a clear advantage they have long held over automakers, which can take three to six years to deliver a new look to showrooms.