Rewriting the rules of the road

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Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech. Welcome to the X Tech Podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE
Hello and welcome to XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Foerster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry. I’m delighted to be working with Fox Agency as the host for the X Tech podcast and as a curator for the X Tech community. Now today I’m really excited to be joined by Robert Brown. He’s the Global Head of Automotive at the BSI Group. Welcome, Robert.

Robert Brown
Thanks Debbie, Nice to meet you.

Debbie Forster MBE
Lovely. Okay, so Robert, before we dive into what could be Alphabet soup, lots of letters I needed to learn to get ready for today, but you’ll be gentle with me on the letters. But I love to get to know people as humans and I think the audience does too. Robert, you know, how did you get into tech? Was this something you always knew was going to happen?

Robert Brown
The straightforward answer to that would probably be no. So I’m of that sort of age range that when I got into manufacturing tech was sort of way off. So, you know, if I go back to my first car, it would have been about 1982 was a Austin Mini. Not even a, you know, a Rover Mini like they are today, an Austin Mini. And I spent lots of time improving the car. You know, if it broke down, you’d lift the bonnet or the hood.

Debbie Forster MBE
Yeah, the old days when you could reach in and there were parts…

Robert Brown
Absolutely, change the spark plugs, adjust the carburettor, all that sort of good stuff. Yeah. So, when that was like 80s 90s sort of time and then.

Debbie Forster MBE
So what took you into automotive then, into that job?

Robert Brown
Yeah, well, a bit of a weird way I think if someone say, did you plan to get to where you are today? I would say no. But obviously you make decisions in life, and you go left or right, so that’s where you end up. Yeah. So my first full time job was in a spring manufacturer in Redditch in the UK. Lots of you think about springs, where the springs go. We think, you know, an ice, you know, internal combustion engine. Well, valve springs in the engine for a start. And probably about 70% of our business was for Ford Motor Company. Yeah, Ford. So in those years in the UK, Ford really big in the UK.

And yes, I was there for a couple of years and got involved with lots of systems at that time, you know, quality was just taking a grip and Ford had this quality award called Ford Q1 which had lots of requirements on the supplier, what they should do, what tools and techniques they should use, like the one to manage variation and look at assessing variation in manufacturing, something called SPC, Statistical Process Control. So there’s the first three letter acronym we’re going to use. So, I did a lot of work in those systems and I went to college and I was doing a city and guilds in quality management, and I was approached by the lecturer afterwards. He said, well I’m just working on this new company in Redditch and other spring manufacturers. They’re after a quality lead. You know, give this guy a shout.

So I rang the guy, he gave me a message that, you know, the chief executive of that organisation and they offered me a job. But it was a big, huge American owned corporation. Two plants in Canada, two in Mexico, 13 in North America, one in the UK, which was the company I previously worked for. They bought them in the end, two in Japan and it was like 95% of the business was purely automotive. Pressings, springs, wire forms, all predominantly for GM and people like that. Yeah, quality systems evolved and I evolved with it and the techniques.

Debbie Forster MBE
Robert, it was inevitable. Yeah, it was inevitable, wasn’t it? If you were interested in sort of making stuff and then more importantly making sure the processes and systems made stuff. Right. Resistance was ultimately futile. You were going to end up in tech. And look, you hinted that at the start. When we talk about cars we all know that tech is transforming it and I mean some were arguing it’s a tipping point. I mean what would you say? Do we still have cars that are industrial manufactured? Was it an internal combustion engine? What would you describe? Where are we now?

Robert Brown
Yeah, I think tipping point is probably a good place to start. If you think about countries and their commitment to net zero and the targets, 2030, 2040 or whatever it is, you know, the internal combustion engine is almost, you know, it’s almost prehistoric now but at some point it will because it’s going to be replaced by electric vehicles and autonomous and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, some articles I read saying we’re about there, some articles that said just gone over the precipice. I’ve just come back from China in April this year and if you look at the vehicles on the road there, it’s just unbelievable.

Debbie Forster MBE
And you know, but even if we talk about, so yes, software, device vehicles and if we talk about electric cars, they are tech with wheels but even internal combustion, even our good old fashioned put petrol in the tank cars, the software involved in that is still now tremendous. So really tech is cutting across and you could argue as an industry, it is a different kind of tech industry. Would you agree? Disagree?

Robert Brown
Oh, totally agree. Yeah. If you think about, you know, if you just think about the development of model updates or new models and introductions, they’ve gone from almost two, three years in lead time to, you know, months in lead time because of the whole sort of technology around design and doing the design on the CAD and everything on your computer and you can run simulations so you know, how all the fit and function of everything works there and how the vehicle performs. Yeah, it’s far away. I mean you’ve gone from days where it was sort of like dark on manufacturing facility, go into a modern manufacturing facility assembling cars, you could eat off the floor. And the technology is just amazing. Absolutely amazing

Debbie Forster MBE
Yeah. And that must mean it’s because it is more tech and all the things that you’re saying that can be done more quickly, the disruption must be huge. Even in terms of getting into automotive industry that, you know, companies, organisations that could never have thought of suddenly becoming an automotive company can now do that in relatively ease and quickly.

Robert Brown
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I’m come from the traditional background of, you know, Ford, GM and you know, Chrysler and BMW and all those sort of Honda, Nissan to work with under Nissan to a number of years in the supply chain. But yeah, if you just think about, and you can’t get away from it, you think about China and how they’re, that they’ve got to be classed as the leading country in terms of EV manufacturer. Huawei are now making vehicles, Google are making vehicles. There’s an organisation in China called Xiaomi, massive mobile phone manufacturers and they decided in 2021 that they were going to commit to producing an electric vehicle and then less than three years later they’re in the market producing a EV car that sells very well in China.

It’s not, you know, it’s not a global one yet, you know, the bit behind BYD, which obviously the world’s leading one, but to go from nothing to there’s the car mass produced in less than three years.

Debbie Forster MBE
And that’s. And you’d hardly describe normally a mobile phone company as a sector that’s adjacent to making cars. And to do that pivot in four years. I mean, I guess that’s something for anyone on the podcast to think about is if we’re in agreement that digital is devouring the world and everything is becoming digital, then really the pivoting into other sectors, we should maybe sometimes take a step back and think boldly on where we can go, what we can do. Big risk, but potentially either if you’re facing extinction in your own current sector, looking into something else, or just big advantage of being able to extend your reach in that sense. And maybe we have people in the call that are thinking, and where next do we go with our services, our skills, our products, thinking about industries that we wouldn’t normally. Because tech is that connector opens the door on every single sector in that sense.

Robert Brown
Oh, absolutely. If you think about the change in the automotive supply chain, you know, you’ve gone from predominantly hand manufacturing by hand and by machine. If you go back a number of years, you know, assembly of vehicles, but the whole way the supply chain has changed now. And you talk about traditional supply chain, you know, manufacturers now you need to think about, well, IT providers, software providers, components that have built in tech in them, you know, wiring harnesses and sat nav, that all goes in the car. All those sort of technologies that years ago you probably. The only technology you probably have in the car other than the, you know, the speedometer would be a radio. And then the radio went to a radio cassette and then it went to a radio with, you know, cd and now you just plug in Apple Play and off you go.

Debbie Forster MBE
Yeah, no, absolutely. I remember when the car, you know, when they, oh, my goodness, look, we can play our CDs in the car. That was, that was edgy. So that’s got to have tremendous impact on the workforce as well.

Robert Brown
Yeah, I mean, the upskilling that’s required, obviously you’re going to go from still requiring people to be able to do the manufacturing side, which is obviously now vastly reduced in terms of numbers because technology is coming. Machines can now do, you know, think about, go back a number of years ago, you’d have people welding the car and obviously never heard of. Now you’ve got completely autonomous welding tech that’s on the assembly line comes in, sits in the welding bay and the welding’s automatically done and it moves on to the next stage. Yeah.

So there’s still that level of skill that’s there, but, you know, going from needing having a welding qualification, for example, now you need to have the software qualification to be able to develop and run and maintain the software programming and equipment that’s now been used to put the vehicle together.

Debbie Forster MBE
Now, you know, when we think about this digitisation, this making the automotive industry part of tech, it links a lot into what you do at BSI. Can you, can you walk me through what the BSI does and what your role within the BSI is?

Robert Brown
Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for giving that lead in, really. Yeah. So BSI is British Standards Institution. When I joined, bizarrely, I thought it was British Standard Institute, but I was quite quickly corrected to Institution. Yes. So been around since 1901. I think two interesting sides to it is that we’re the UK national standards body, so that’s one side. So we develop British standards in the UK. BSI is a member and a founding member of ISO. If you think about, you know, international standards, people might think about 9001 in terms of quality management, or 27,001 in terms of information security. So a lot of the work that’s done by part of British standards as our organisation is what we used to call, or it’s now called, Knowledge Solutions.

So it’s our responsibility on behalf of the UK, and obviously not just the UK automotive, because there’s so many international organisations involved in automotive that are based in the UK, to convene the automotive industry together to help support the development of international British standards, which can become an international standard on all the things that are ultimately potentially risk to the success of the automotive sector. And that then leads into, you know, things like AI, for example, and cyber security and all those things that we’re having to develop. You know, it’s come from an organisation needing to have a certificate that checks the effectiveness of the quality management system. And now the organisation needs to think about the management system ecosystem. So you need quality and environmental, you need health and safety, you need cyber. It’s massive in the supply chain.

Debbie Forster MBE
I think, you know, and that must have been huge and just an exponentially growing area because. Whereas I’d imagine a lot of the standards used to be around health and safety and quality, but now there’s. I mean, nobody comes on this show and says, no, we don’t worry about cyber, that’s not a problem for us. But this is big for the automotive industry when we think about cyber threat and cyber security, isn’t it?

Robert Brown
It’s huge. I think it’s probably the biggest threat, personally speaking. I don’t think a day goes by where you don’t look at the news, whether it’s on a TV or a pad or something. I was going to say read a newspaper. You don’t tend to read a newspaper these days, where there’s some sort of report of some big organisation not been out of you trade, take orders online, manufacture cars. There’s one currently in the UK, there’s a cyber issue. One of the manufacturers in the UK, I don’t think they’ve manufactured a car in two days. All through cyber. These attacks are huge.

Debbie Forster MBE
And that supply chain, so we’ll talk about what it means for individual cars, but I think like everyone, we need to really understand that cyber threat is not an understanding the cybersecurity of our supply chain, is not merely them getting just into our information or data, but manufacturing supply lines, supply chains. The whole piece can be ground to a halt. And given that we have a global marketplace now, that means we can’t just be looking at what’s happening here in the UK. Any company needs to be looking right through every aspect of their business to understand what’s happening in that cybersecurity, mustn’t it?

Robert Brown
Absolutely. I think there’s obviously two parts to it. I think I was when I first came into industry, I was in the days of total quality management and that big push about, well, you know, quality is everyone responsibility. It’s not the sort of people that wear white shirts and test the products. You know, manufacturing makes the parts at the end of the day. And now we see a lot of initiatives around cyber and trying to ensure we do a fantastic job in BSI about the individual’s responsibility in terms of understanding the impact of cyber security and how they can be affected and what we can do to lower that risk. But then, yeah, you’re absolutely right. You know, we’re talking about a global supply chain.

Look what happened when we had, unfortunately, the COVID epidemic and how that sort of stopped us manufacturing vehicles across the world, but parts could just not be moved and transported. And it’s not too far to stretch to say, you know, if you had a big cybersecurity attack on a prime tier one provider to the OEM, that could put them out 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, you know, 9 days. However, that could stop parts being shipped, stop parts being delivered, stop the cars being manufactured. Been examples when that has happened it’s, it seems to be on the rise, doesn’t it? You hear more about it and I think that’s good from a point of view of raising people’s awareness more, but then it questions whether as organisations we’re making the right judgement call about how we need to look at cyber and control it.

Debbie Forster MBE
Yeah, and I think that’s really important and I think we’re preaching to the converted on this podcast because tech people are trying to, it’s trying to get all aspects of the organisation because there is supply chain but I’m sure within the automotive industry there’s the cyber threat has information in terms of getting into a car, what’s going on in the car. Talk me through some of those and how you’re working with the industry to combat that threat, to raise awareness and to raise the security in that.

Robert Brown
Yeah, really good point. I mean I think there’s annual event that goes on in the US where they, it’s like how quickly can you know, can you get into an EV, an automotive vehicle? And I think the last one that happened last year, a couple of years ago, they got in via the sensor on the tire pressure. So got into the car via the sensor on the tire pressure valve. But yeah, huge. I mean recently I think it was around about 2021 the UNECE organisation, the United Nations, they bought out some requirements then aimed at the vehicle manufacturers regulations around cyber security and the other one which need to take into consideration about over the air updates. So the one about cyber was just technically another almost three letter acronym, regulation 155 and the other one’s regulation.

Debbie Forster MBE
Oh yeah, 155. I mean I liked 154 but 155 is really the one that got me, kept me up reading that night.

Robert Brown
Where did that number even come from? Who knows? That was really adding a requirement to the vehicle manufacturers to demonstrate that they had an effective cyber security management system. And part of their, you know, conformity of production for the vehicles has now started. That’s a requirement that’s been rolled out and now the OEMs are seeing the value of that approach. And that approach, like a lot of things within the automotive sector and other sectors, you know, it’s like, well, cyber, well you know, we need to do something on that. It’s nice to have. Oh yeah, that’s going to cost us 30 grand. They’re now saying to the supply chain. Right, okay. We know it’s effective and we’re going to mandate it. So supply chain now has no option. You need to adopt what’s the latest, best practise in terms of, you know, cybersecurity management to address those issues.

Debbie Forster MBE
It’s huge. I mean, my mind is reeling. I’m thinking about driving my car before recording this today and you know, as I park the car it was saying it needed to do a software update. Yeah, of course if they’ve not really got their cyber up to spate, that could be hacked. My car, everybody’s car suddenly doesn’t work. They could be through my tire sensor getting through. Not to just give me a sleepless night, which it may do about my car, but it is about, I think any of us in any sector, in any industry as tech leaders have to get our company to think more widely in that way as everything becomes digital, as everything is becoming more effective, hyper powered by tech, yes, we’ve got to convince our people to do that, but in the same way we’ve got to get them to really think through and what happens if it goes wrong. And if we’re talking about cyber, you and I know Robert, don’t we, it’s not asking yourself what I do if it goes wrong, it’s what do I do when it goes wrong. Because as you were saying, this is becoming more of a daily reality, those cyber incursions and it is how are we preventing it and then what are the plans if they get through? I think is really important and I think as tech leaders we have that challenge to take everybody, not just our devs, not just our engineering departments through that, to really understand what that means.

Robert Brown
Yeah, we said before it’s everyone’s responsibility. And I think the thing with tech, in a way it’s sort of like almost under the surface, you know, updates occur and sometimes you don’t even have to press a button. So it’s not somewhere you don’t get into your vehicle and something is physically different in the vehicle. You get into the vehicle and it’s got more options perhaps, you know, you can go on your app for a certain car manufacturer and say, okay, I now want to, and I want to trigger the fact it’s now it’s cold, it’s a winter, I want to, you know, have the next six months, I want to have the heated seat option and you pay for six months of heated seat option and then you switch it off or you know, you pick up another option for the summer.

It’s like you say, it’s almost like a mobile phone. I mean, a mobile phone. Realistically, you know, I know it’s a mobile phone by name, but it’s not really a mobile phone, is it? It’s like a, you know, it’s every. It’s a computer. You carry it around everywhere. The last thing is a phone, to be honest. Yeah. So I think, you know, you see things change and probably not even notice they change. But yeah, it’s everyone. It’s the industry’s responsibility and individually it’s our responsibility to take the necessary steps to educate people. And that’s the first point we all need to be educated about, you know, what could go, can go wrong and what would the impact go wrong?

There’s a technique that’s used in the automotive industry called Failure Mode Effects Analysis, FMEA and that talks about, well, you know, if something goes wrong, not, you know, what would be the impact. Not, you know, and one of them can’t be, well, you know, we do this, it’s never going to go wrong. Well, sooner or later something will go wrong or something. You know, as the tech develops, you know, these people that do hacking, they sort of get ahead of the game, don’t they? It’s like when they used to, people used to break into cars, you know, oh, we can do this way. And then, well, we know we’ll have central locking. You take the key away and put it in your pocket and then they got scanners to take the code and oh, there you go. So there’s that horrendous approach of having to try and protect it from, you know, people that don’t really live in the real world and go to work properly.

Debbie Forster MBE
Well, it’s. But I think it’s something for all of us to think because it could be very easy if we are in tech within our companies, that we are thinking about our software, we’re thinking about our processes and when we think about our hardware, we are thinking about our servers, we’re not thinking about the tech that underpins the software, that underpins the really bare infrastructure of what our organisation may do. And that is something to wake up and think about, both in the good. How could you maximise that? But what are you going to do? Because if the software on something that all your forklifts works runs on goes down, they’re going to ask you because you’re tech, aren’t you? And how are we going to fix it? So, it’s interesting to start thinking more broadly, more deeply in areas that we might not have been able to do that.

Okay, so Robert, I feel like we’ve already gone to the horizon and back, but for you, we’ve been talking a lot about what is the day-to-day reality and what’s coming up straight away. What’s on the horizon for you? I love hearing from the audience. What is fascinating, you grabbing your attention on the horizon?

Robert Brown
Yeah, I think the one thing is the speed, isn’t it? The speed of how software has been developed, systems lead times have been reduced and just the evolution of the vehicle, it’s just amazing. When I’m in China, the tech is just like huge pads in the car and probably they’ll get to the first completely autonomous car driving itself on the road. I think that’s going to continue and that’s exciting. And you’re almost like we’re not really sure what’s next. Although I’m sure listeners to this podcast in the tech industry, they know what’s just around the corner.

Debbie Forster MBE
Okay, everybody likes to talk about on the show, this used to be much more wide ranging. I think a lot of times on this question it is, what about AI is fascinating you on the horizon?

Robert Brown
Yeah, AI has got to be the number one thing around the corner, which is becoming almost talked about even more than cyber threats. I think the approach for AI and the controls required around AI obviously similar to cyber. And I don’t know whether people on the podcast will know, but there’s ISO bought out an international standard last year, 40 2001, all about IT management. But yeah, you think about application of AI on the vehicle. Now ultimately, you know, you can open the door, maybe you just walk up to the car and the car automatically opens for you and you get in and that AI in that vehicle can completely understand what type of music do you want to listen to, what temperature you want the car at, what your seat positions like, how you sort of drive in terms of accelerating away from the lights, how you corner, whole driving style. It can adjust the, you know, automatically adjust the suspension for the ride and all those sort of things.

Debbie Forster MBE
I’m already feeling judged by my car, by the way. I’m sensing it will be really disappointed in me.

Robert Brown
Well, my son is 20 years old. He passed his driving test a couple of years ago and he has a black box which helps reduce his insurance based on his driving style. So you can have it the first year in the UK and the second year. And that black box monitors him in terms of acceleration, cornering and speed compared to the speed on the road. And, you know, and you can reduce your insurance by, I think in his first year he could reduce it by 60% based on his driving style. It’s fantastic. But you think about that AI controlled vehicle is tracking all that information. I think two things futuristically, you know, you could, your insurance company could be receiving that data, you know, obviously in a controlled manner, because it’s private information. And that could also reduce your annual insurance policy or it might well depend on driving style, it may well significantly increase it as well. But then you think about, you know, the move is all towards getting to, is it level five autonomous vehicle. And the AI is certainly going to play a major role in that because it’s going to have that vehicle completely connected to everything, you know, with the copy V2X. So it’s going to control your speed, you know, and cars ahead of you. If there’s a, if there’s an issue, you know, and need to slow down, all the vehicles will slow down, all the vehicles will move forward. You know, the safety, that’s going to be huge. Hopefully, it’ll impact on traffic in terms of slowing everything down. It’ll just be completely controlled. So it undoubtedly is the future, you know, controlling the vehicle, linking it to, you know, all the infrastructure that’s required. It’s very exciting.

Debbie Forster MBE
While we’re trying to get there, it’s why I want you guys at BSI to make sure that you’re getting that security, getting it cyber resilient, making sure there’s standards in place against hallucinations, etc. Because that’s not what I want when I’m barrelling down the motorway.

Robert Brown
Now, I can assure you there’s management systems that are developed and out there being adopted and mandated in the supply chain to protect and there’s obviously ongoing developments as we move forward with the sector. Very exciting time. I’m not sure I’m going to get away from, you know, changing gear and holding the steering wheel, to just sitting there and putting the postcode in and let the car do the rest.

Debbie Forster MBE
I guess it’s in the same way, you know, for a lot of us of a certain age, it’s a little sad sometimes. We can’t lift the bonnet and be able to do something, even if it’s sort of pointless. Maybe we’re going to think back longingly in stage. Do you remember when you could get in the car and go a little faster or do those sorts of things? And we might, for some of us, take a little bit of fun out.

Robert Brown
Wind the window down? Yeah.

Debbie Forster MBE
My partner doesn’t let me do it without moaning. I wonder if the AI will.

And then, last but not least, Robert, I’m a nosy little so and so and I love to know what people are reading or watching or listening that they find valuable. What, when you’re not having to be Robert Global Head of Automotive BSI Group. What do you find this useful?

Robert Brown
Yeah, from. I mean, from an industry point of view, you know, I’m in a privileged position obviously, because where BSI sits as a national standards body and where we sit within the auto sector and the convening of automotive organisations to help develop new standards and the way it’s discussed and shared and developed. Yeah. There’s probably two or three organisations I sign up to their newsletters to keep me up to date and I think the ones that I typically have, and that’s almost like on a daily basis, there’s the Auto World – they have a SDV newsletter which comes out I think two or three times a week.

Debbie Forster MBE
And my audience can now feel very proud. They know that an SDV is a software derived vehicle. Drop that into your next dinner party or down the pub. No, that’s good. No, we’re there, Robert. We know that now. Anyone else that does what’s an SUV? We get to look really smug and go, come on, keep up.

Robert Brown
Well, there’s another one for the audience and for you, if you’ve not come across it. NEV.

Debbie Forster MBE
Nev. And what’s that stand for?

Robert Brown
When I was in China, they talked a lot about NEVs. I was like, I had to Google it because I wasn’t sure what it was. New Energy Vehicle. So not just necessarily EVs or plug in hybrids, but also, you know, what’s coming in terms of hydrogen maybe or other approaches. So very much the thing that’s being talked about at the moment as well as SDVs is. Yeah, NEVs. New New Energy Vehicles. Very popular terminology.

Debbie Forster MBE
All right, people, you heard it here. There’s your latest acronym to draw drop in conversation and look like you’re ahead of that curve. Listen, Robert, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of XTech.

Robert Brown
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. Really enjoyed it.

Debbie Forster MBE
And thank you to all of you for joining us on this episode of XTech. If you’d like to appear as a guest on the show, don’t waste a minute. Email us now at [email protected]. I’d like to thank our whole team of tech experts at Fox Agency for making this podcast possible. I’m Debbie Forster, and you’ve been listening to XTech.

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