Frost & Sullivan assesses impact of autonomous cars and EVs on test & measurement market

As the global automotive industry experiences a slump in sales from traditional automobiles, the sector is focusing on the development of autonomous cars and electric vehicles (EV), which present immense opportunities for the test and measurement industry. Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Autonomous Car and Electric Vehicle Growth Opportunities in the Test and Measurement Market, Forecast to 2025, finds that if solutions offered by pure-play test & measurement OEMs and third party testing and certification service providers are combined, the global autonomous car and EV test and measurement market is estimated to generate revenues of $1.6 billion by 2025, up from $1.2 billion in 2019.

Among four types of testing—advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), EV, infotainment, and connected car—ADAS is estimated to have the highest growth, reaching $659.9 million by 2025. This expansion can be attributed to the number of electronic control units (ECUs) and domain control units (DCUs) that are incorporated into a vehicle to make it fully autonomous and reduce its production time.

“There is a significant degree of overlap between infotainment, ADAS, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X); this overlap will increase as vehicle autonomy continues to grow, which will require testing methodologies such as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL),” said Rohan Joy Thomas, Industrial Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan.  “HIL simulates real-world traffic in the lab environment and validates the performance of software embedded inside the ECUs and DCUs against the stimuli.”

Thomas also noted the start-ups that continue to proliferate in the automotive industry pose a challenge to traditional automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in terms of innovation.

“Testing vendors and OEMs must collaborate to build testing platforms that are customized to the requirements of the particular OEMs,” said Thomas. “Additionally, test and measurement solution providers must focus on engineering testing equipment that can test cloud- and 5G-based autonomous car technologies.”

As autonomous vehicles gain traction, testing solutions that can assure the security of the fully autonomous car will also grow in popularity, presenting business prospects in the following areas:

• Upcoming ADAS and infotainment use-cases will further drive the use of Automotive Ethernet and the demand for solutions that can test the technology
• Testing vendors should implement solutions that can test levels of automotive applications and protect the autonomous vehicle with adequate cybersecurity.
• Testing vendors must provide testing expertise such as millimeter-wave testing, to validate 5G network for autonomous car use-cases, as well as for testing dedicated short-range communications (DSRC)
• With the rise of Feature-on-Demand, Automotive OEMs would want to monetize on features that their customers subscribe to. Testing vendors should partner with providers of a wide range of in-car services that passengers or drivers could subscribe to.

Autonomous Car and Electric Vehicle Growth Opportunities in the Test and Measurement Market, Forecast to 2025 is the latest addition to Frost & Sullivan’s Industrial research and analyses available through the Frost & Sullivan Leadership Council, which helps organizations identify a continuous flow of growth opportunities to succeed in an unpredictable future.