How is the automotive value chain ‘stacking up’?

Ben Davies
4 min readDec 15, 2020

This article discusses:

  • Exponential growth in technology.
  • Value chains and vertical integration.
  • ‘Stacking’ of the value chain.
  • Areas of disruption that are reshaping the value chain.
  • Summary.
Nissan GTR — Photo by Jonathan Gallegos

Exponential growth in technology is impacting the Automotive industry.

What do we mean by ‘exponential growth in technology’?

Three exponential laws:

  • Moore’s law: Every 18 months, your computer will have twice as much power to process information.
  • Butters’ law: The amount of data communicated through a single optical fiber doubles every nine months.
  • Kryder’s law: The amount of data stored per centimeter square of a hard drive will double every 16 or 17 months.

Click here to check out some visual references of these laws.

What does this mean for the automotive industry?

More than 40% of a vehicle’s architecture is now electronics, featuring over 100 million lines of code. This is set to rise to 300 million by 2030. Cars in the 1980s had only 50K lines of code…

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Ben Davies
Ben Davies

Written by Ben Davies

A continuous learner with interests in technology and new ways of working.

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