Driving for the Horizon: New Android Automotive solution on cloud offers faster builds

The automotive industry is in the midst of a profound transformation, accelerating towards an era of software-defined vehicles (SDVs). This shift, however, presents significant challenges for manufacturers and suppliers alike. Their priority is making great vehicles, not great software, though the latter now contributes — and is increasingly a necessity — to achieve the former. These OEMs must find ways to bring greater efficiency and quality to their software delivery and establish new collaboration models, among other hurdles to achieving their visions for SDVs. 

To help meet this moment, we’ve created Horizon, a new open-source software factory for platform development with Android Automotive OS — and beyond. With Horizon, we aim to support the software transformation of the automotive industry and tackle its most pressing challenges by providing a standardized development toolchain so OEMs can generate value by focussing on building products and experiences.

In early deployments at a half-dozen automotive partners, we’ve already seen between 10x to 50x faster feedback for developers, leading to high-frequency releases and higher build quality. In this post we will outline how Horizon helps overcome the key impediments to automotive software transformation.

The Roadblocks to Innovation in Automotive Software Development

Today, traditional automotive manufacturers (OEMs) often approach software development from a hardware-centric perspective that lacks agility and oftentimes struggles to scale. This approach makes software lifecycle support burdensome and is often accompanied by inconsistent and unreliable tools, slowing down development. 

OEMs face exploding development costs, quality issues and slow innovation, making it difficult to keep pace with new market entrants and the increasing demand for advanced features. Furthermore, most customers expect frequent, high-quality over-the-air (OTA) software updates similar to what they receive on other devices such as on their smartphones, forcing most OEMs to mirror the consumer electronics experience. 

But a car is not a television or refrigerator or even a rolling computer, as many now describe them. Vehicles are made up of many separate, highly complex systems, which typically require the integration of numerous components from multiple suppliers who often provide “closed box” solutions. Even as vehicles have become more connected, and dependent on these connective systems for everything from basic to advanced operations, the vehicle platform has actually become harder, not easier, to integrate and innovate with. 

We knew there had to be a better way to keep up with the pace necessary to provide a great customer experience.

Introducing HORIZON: A Collaborative Path Forward

To tackle these pressing industry challenges, Google and Accenture have initiated Horizon. It is an open-source reference development platform designed to transform the automotive industry into a software-driven innovation market. 

Our vision for Horizon is enabling automakers and OEMs to greatly accelerate their time to market and increase the agility of their teams while significantly reducing development costs. Horizon provides a holistic platform for the future of automotive software, enabling OEMs to invest more in innovation rather than just integration.

Key Capabilities Driving Software Excellence

Horizon offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities, establishing a developer-centric, cloud-powered, and easy-to-adopt open industry standard for embedded software.

1. Software-First Development with AAOS

Horizon champions a virtual-first approach to product design, deeply integrating with Android Automotive OS (AAOS) to empower software-led development cycles. This involves the effective use of the vehicle hardware abstraction layer (VHAL), virtio, and high-fidelity cloud-based virtual devices like Cuttlefish, which can scale to thousands of instances on demand. This approach allows for scalable automated software regression tests, elastic direct developer testing strategies, and can be seen as the initial step towards creating a complete digital twin of the vehicle.

2. Streamlined Code-Build-Test Pipeline

Horizon aims to introduce a standard for the entire software development lifecycle:

• Code: It supports flexible and configurable code management using Gerrit, with the option to use GerritForge managed service via our Google Cloud Marketplace for productive deployments. With Gemini Code Assist, integrated in Cloud Workstations, you can supercharge development by leveraging code completion, bug identification, and test generation, while also aiding in explaining Android APIs.

• Build: The platform features a scaled build process that leverages intelligent cloud usage and dynamic scaling. Key to this is the caching for AAOS platform builds based on warmed-up environments and the integration of the optimized Android Build File System (ABFS), which can reduce build times by more than 95% and allow full builds from scratch in one to two minutes with up to 100% cache hits. Horizon supports a wide variety of build targets, including Android 14 and 15, Cuttlefish, AVD, Raspberry Pi devices, and the Google Pixel Tablet. Build environments are containerized, ensuring reproducibility.

• Test: Horizon enables scalable testing in Google Cloud with Android’s Compatibility Test Suite (CTS), utilizing Cuttlefish for virtualized runtime environments. Remote access to multiple physical build farms is facilitated by MTK Connect, which allows secure, low-latency interaction with hardware via a web browser, eliminating the need for hardware to be shipped to developers.

3. Cloud-Powered Infrastructure

Built on Google Cloud, Horizon ensures scalability and reliability. Deployment is simplified through tools like Terraform, GitOps and Helm charts, offering a plug-and-play toolchain and allowing for tracking the deployment of tools and applications to Kubernetes.

Unlocking Value for Auto OEMs and the Broader Industry

The Horizon reference platform delivers significant benefits for Auto OEMs:

• Reduced costs: Horizon offers a reduction in hardware-related development costs and an overall decrease in rising development expenses.

• Faster time to market: By accelerating development and enabling faster innovation cycles, Horizon helps OEMs reduce their time to market and feature cycle time.

• Increased quality and productivity: The platform enables stable quality and boosts team productivity by providing standardized toolsets and fostering more effective team collaboration.

• Enhanced customer experience: By enabling faster, more frequent and higher-quality builds, OEMs can change the way they develop vehicle software, thus offering enhanced customer experiences and unlocking new revenue streams through software-driven services.

• Strategic focus: Horizon underpins the belief that efficient software development platforms should not be a point of differentiation for OEMs; instead, their innovation should be focused on the product itself. This allows OEMs to devote more time and resources to software development with greater quality, efficiency, and flexibility.

• Robust ecosystem: To ensure scalable, secure, and future-ready deployments across diverse vehicle platforms, Horizon aims to foster collaboration between Google, integration partners, and platform adopters. While advancing the reference platform capabilities, Horizon also allows for tailored integration and compatibility with vehicle hardware, legacy systems and compliance standards.

The Horizon ecosystem

It’s been said that the best software is the one you don’t notice, so seamless and flawless is its functioning. This is especially true when it comes to the software-defined vehicle, where the focus should be on the road and the joy of the trip.

This is why we believe the platforms enabling efficient software development shouldn’t be differentiating for automakers — their vehicles should be. Like a solid set of tires or a good sound system, software is now essential, but it’s not the product itself. That is the full package put together by the combination of design, engineering, development, and production.

Because software development is now such an integral part of that process, we believe it should be an enabler, not a hindrance, for automakers. To that end, the Google Cloud, Android, and Accenture teams have continuously aimed to simplify access and the use of relevant toolchain components. The integration of OpenBSW and the Android Build File System (ABFS) are just the latest waypoints in a journey that started with GerritForge as providing a managed Gerrit offering, and continuing with additional partners in upcoming releases.

Please, join us on this journey. We invite you to become a part of the community to receive early insights, provide feedback, and actively participate in shaping the future direction of Horizon. You can also explore our open-source releases on Github to evaluate and customize the Horizon platform by deploying it in your Google Cloud environment and running reference workloads.

Horizon is a new dawn for the future of automotive software, though we can only get there together, through open collaboration and cloud-powered innovation. 

^{A special thanks to a village of Googlers and Accenture who delivered this, Mike Annau, Ulrich Gersch, Steve Basra, Taylor Santiago, Haamed Gheibi, James Brook, Ta’id Holmes, Sebastian Kunze, Philip Chen, Alistair Delva, Sam Lin, Femi Akinde, Casey Flynn, Milan Wiezorek, Marcel Gotza, Ram Krishnamoorthy, Achim Ramesohl, Olive Power, Christoph Horn, Liam Friel, Stefan Beer, Colm Murphy, Robert Colbert, Sarah Kern, Wojciech Kowalski, Wojciech Kobryn, Dave M. Smith, Konstantin Weber, Claudine Laukant, Lisa Unterhauser}

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^{Opening image created using Imagen 4 with the prompt: Generate a blog post header image for the following blog post, illustrating the concept of a software-defined vehicle .}