Jatin Thaker is NXP’s Segment Director for Automotive LED Drivers and Matrix Controllers.
His is a business management responsibility. His office is in Nijmegen, Netherlands. NXP’s large Automotive Business Unit comprises Advanced Analogue (including the LED activities), Infotainment and Driver Assistance, Micro Controllers, and Sensors. Mr. Thaker kindly granted DVN an exclusive interview:
DVN: What will be the main trends for the automotive industry in the coming years?
Jatin Thaker: Clearly the two most important, partly disruptive trends for the automotive industry, will be Electrical Vehicles (EV) and Autonomous Vehicles (AV). In general, I perceive the speed of introduction of EVs to be faster than AVs due to several reasons.
– EVs especially in dense population areas like Asia will become a need for environmental reasons. In Europe and US, the trend will be driven by the mindset of people to adopt this as an innovative, environmental friendly technology.
– AVs would need a longer time frame for introduction. A lot of technical, but especially regulatory issues have to be resolved. Society will be confronted with mixed traffic of non-autonomous, semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles. The key question is, which regulatory rules do we follow for such differentiated traffic situations?