Disruption in the automotive industry continues to move at a fast pace, driven by heavy investment in self-driving cars and high hopes. With global market revenue expected to exceed $125 billion by 2027, autonomous vehicles will need dedicated technology systems in the coming years. From wireless networking to artificial intelligence, the flocks of cars coming online comes with a myriad of technological obstacles.

“… There are so many new systems in the car now that generate data or consume data,” said Oded Sagee, senior director of product marketing at Western Digital Corp. His company is forging a path to the digital transformation by looking for the use case for contemporary car makers. “How is this going to look in the future? Who’s going to define it? Who’s going to buy it? Who’s going to pay for it? It has become more and more complex. Happily, storage is the center of all this.”

Sagee spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicles event in Milpitas, California. They discussed data storage in the autonomous vehicle space. (* Disclosure below.)

Finding affordable solutions

Within the evolving autonomous vehicle ecosystem, companies are seeing a new level of investment, expense and data flow. From sensors  to AI algorithms, car companies have a lot to juggle, according to Sagee.

“For them, storage is currently an afterthought,” he said of car makers. “They’re saying, ‘Once we meet mass production, we’ll just go and buy some storage and everything’s going to be fine.”

But storage requirements are very different in the autonomous car space. Driverless cars move through areas with no connectivity, temperature variation and low data latency, so storage is significantly impacted. Temperature is a key issue for self-driving vehicle data storage. Because vehicles move between hot and cold temperatures, the challenge is to keep data accurate and safe from corruption.

“For us to figure out … the temperature range that the car — through its lifetime — is going to go through, and make sure that we meet the use case, that’s a big one,” Sagee said.

Planning for the recording of data in all use cases is essential, as Sagee points out that these cars continuously record data. “How much do you need to record?” he asked.

Western Digital plans to continue educating the autonomous vehicle ecosystem about storage use cases. “If we don’t design the future storage solutions today … people are going to pay much more for storage just to make a basic use case work,” Sagee stated. If the storage issue is addressed now, however, an affordable solution is possible in five to seven years, he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicles event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicles event. Neither Western Digital Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE