The SDV conversation nobody is having

If you spend any time in the software defined vehicle space, you will notice a pattern. The coverage is extraordinary in volume and remarkably consistent in focus. Architecture debates. The chipset wars. OTA pipeline design. Security considerations at the vehicle's software boundary. All of it matters. None of it is the most important question an OEM needs to answer. The most important question is this: when the vehicle becomes a software platform, what happens to the brand? This is not a soft question dressed up as strategy. It is the commercial question that will determine which automotive brands emerge from the SDV transition with stronger customer relationships, and which find that they have, inadvertently, built an extraordinarily capable technology product that nobody feels any particular loyalty to.

THE LOYALTY ARCHITECTURE PROBLEM

Traditional automotive brand loyalty is built in a particular way. It is built through the physical experience of the vehicle, the feel of the materials, the sound signature, and the way the car responds. It is reinforced through the ownership journey, the dealer relationship, the service experience, the sense of belonging to something. The software defined vehicle disrupts each of these mechanisms in ways that the industry has not yet fully confronted.

If the in-vehicle experience is increasingly delivered through software, then the brand's ability to differentiate through that experience is only as strong as its software capability and most automotive OEMs are not, by any honest assessment, competing on software capability with the companies that built the operating systems on customers' phones. This creates a strategic tension that I believe is the defining brand challenge of the SDV era: the connected vehicle experience that customers actually love is often not the OEM's own.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR STRATEGY

For OEMs, the SDV transition demands a genuinely new answer to an old question: what is our brand actually for?

In a world where the vehicle's software layer is increasingly commoditised, or ceded to third-party ecosystems, the premium automotive brand needs to find its differentiation in the layers that software cannot easily replicate: the physical, the emotional, the relational. And it needs to design its connected services strategy with a clear-eyed understanding of where it can genuinely win, and where it should partner rather than compete.

This is not a comfortable analysis for organisations that have spent years building connected service platforms at significant cost. But it is, I believe, the honest starting point for SDV brand strategy, and the question that too few advisory conversations are actually engaging with.

Alexandra Elliott is the founder of Alkemi Consult, a boutique strategic advisory specialising in software defined vehicle strategy and automotive brand experience. She was previously Head of Connected Product & Experience at a global luxury automotive OEM.