Customize, integrate, deploy in weeks: TomTom’s new in-vehicle navigation application

Today, TomTom announced a new product for the carmaking industry: Automotive Navigation Application. Designed for the burgeoning market of software-defined vehicles that are produced in ever-shorter time frames, the application promises to enable carmakers to go from drawing board to dashboard and build a fully functional and integrated navigation solution in a matter of weeks.

Eva Jennings, TomTom Senior Product Manager IVI, adds: “There’s competitive pressure to move from a four-year production cycle to 18–24 months for a vehicle. So, we’re promising a navigation application that can be integrated in the IVI within 12 weeks.”

[Read press release: TomTom unveils next generation Automotive Navigation Application]

With a fast changing and dynamic industry as the backdrop, the Automotive Navigation Application makes a lot of sense. Mike Schoofs, TomTom Chief Revenue Officer, explains, “[The industry] is moving at a fast pace.” Electrification, automation and consumer expectations related to the in-vehicle experience are all creating a perfect storm, leaving carmakers with many technical decisions to make and costs to keep in check, and less and less time to build them.

What's more, startup car brands are quickly entering the market and changing the game, making cars in much shorter production cycles than has historically been the case. “They can embrace the software-defined vehicle, automated driving and the end-user experience of their cars from the beginning, producing vehicles in months rather than years” Schoofs says. “Traditional automakers must embrace these things, but they also need to move on from combustion engines, typical hardware and years long production cycles to focus on software and shorter production cycles that are months long.”

Today, to be competitive as a carmaker, freshness and speed to market are everything. But there are challenges to overcome.

Watch the video to learn more:

Overcoming integration

Andrei Basangiu, TomTom Staff Engineer, specializes in integrating navigation software into vehicles. He's dedicated much of the past ten years to working with the world's biggest carmakers to help them understand the needs and requirements of TomTom's navigation solutions, while also getting to grips with their vehicle platforms.

“I’ve been working in the automotive industry since 2008 on system integration, and began working on navigation systems at TomTom in 2016. We’ve done a lot of custom integration for multiple OEMs and many vehicles in that time,” Basangiu says.

In most cases, integrating a navigation solution with a vehicle’s IVI platform takes a lot of time, he says. And this is where vehicle production can stall, and can become costly, if it's not carefully managed.

“Navigation integration is all about handling input, output and resource configuration. The input is all the vehicle data that the navigation application needs to run. Output is the opposite, it’s where the navigation system sends information back to the vehicle’s platform. Resource configuration is all about managing the security policies and permissions that all need to come together for the navigation application to work,” Basangiu explains.

While the specialist technical work to do the integration and connect various vehicle systems to the navigation system and vice versa takes time, to get to this point, both parties must also engage in open dialogue, sharing technical insight and expertise — which also takes a lot of time, effort and flexibility.

The bigger issue, however, is that Basangiu and his colleagues often have to solve similar integration problems multiple times when working on custom solutions.

“When doing custom integration for a vehicle manufacturer, typically the requirements of the infotainment system for their vehicles are very similar. That means integrations, especially custom ones, end up solving the same integration problems over and over again, with a few slight differences.”

To solve this problem, TomTom created the Vehicle Integration Library, which is packaged as part of the Automotive Navigation Application. This library is based on decades of experience TomTom has gathered by integrating navigation solutions into many hundreds of vehicles — experience gained by the likes of Basangiu and his colleagues.

“The Vehicle Integration Library is a distillation of all the knowledge we’ve gained and the solutions we’ve built when building custom navigation integrations on vehicle manufacturer platforms,” Basangiu says.

In simple terms, the Vehicle Integration Library is a resource of pre-built, standardized components that connect all the different aspects of the navigation system to other parts of the vehicle and allow them to communicate.

For example, a carmaker building an EV can use the library components to connect the battery management system to inform range and route calculations based on the battery’s state of charge. There are also components that allow the navigation application to communicate back to the vehicle, such as reporting the distance or travel time to charging destinations, so the battery management system can precondition the battery for optimal charging speeds.

Customization and keeping it fresh

A couple of decades ago, just having inbuilt navigation was enough to elevate the in-vehicle experience to new levels of richness. A high-end luxury, usually offered as an expensive additional option, navigation could make a vehicle feel far more premium compared to the competition. However, as navigation technologies have proliferated and as costs have come down, it is now expected as standard. As a result, carmakers face the difficult task of finding other ways to differentiate their vehicles and enrich their cockpit experiences.

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Every car is designed to provide a unique experience for the driver, and OEMs need a solution that can be easily customized and integrated into the experience of their vehicles.

Gianluca Brugnoli

TomTom VP, UX Design

Quick and easy integration is paramount for engineering competitiveness, but when it comes to being competitive inside the vehicle, ease of use, customization and freshness of the experience are key. “We understand how important this is, and that’s why we designed our product to be adaptable and easy to align with every automaker’s brand identity and design language,” Gianluca Brugnoli, TomTom VP UX Design, says.

To make this possible, TomTom has built a ready to go user interface based on standard technology like Android and Jetpack Compose to streamline the design to code process. The application also comes with a dedicated UX library — a collection of Figma templates, including elements of theming and appearance, like colors, fonts and icons — which can easily be manipulated and customized to suit the vehicle and brand.

“From the user experience point of view, the application is designed to follow the best consumer standards. It will look familiar to drivers, they will be able to easily understand it and use it from the first second without hesitation,” Brugnoli adds.

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We also enable automakers to add their own branding and customize the application, its look and feel, and make it their own, to consistently offer a truly great driver and in-car experience.

Eva Jennings

TomTom Senior Product Manager IVI

Being able to tailor the navigation application’s appearance to their brand and the individual personality of each vehicle — and keep it fresh through over-the-air updates — ensures carmakers can continually delight their drivers and make their vehicles unique and distinct. Couple that with deep integration between vehicle platform and navigation system, and you have a driving experience that can be second to none.

How to get started

If you’re a carmaker and want to get started with TomTom Automotive Navigation Application, there’s nothing to hold you back.

To start testing the application, head over to the developer portal, where you can read all the application’s supporting documentation, download its APKs and start concepting in no time at all.