Under The Hood: Automotive Storytelling

Behind every automotive innovation lies a human story. Hosted by Stéphane Lagresle, founder of The Storytelling Tribe, this podcast reveals how industry leaders translate complex technologies into compelling narratives. Through conversations with automotive executives, discover practical frameworks for making automotive innovations relatable and meaningful. For executives, product leaders, and marketers transforming mobility through better communication.

Under The Hood: Automotive Storytelling is a business podcast hosted by Stephane Lagresle, with 51 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Stephane Lagresle hosts Under The Hood: Automotive Storytelling, a business show with 51 episodes published.

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  Episode #16

  Autonomous Driving: "Safer Than Humans" Is the Wrong Story - Phil Koopman - S2E16

  Aug 14, 202652 minS2

  In this episode of Automotive Storytelling, the only podcast examining mobility through storytelling, Stéphane Lagresle sits down with Philip Koopman, Carnegie Mellon Faculty Emeritus and originator of the UL 4600 autonomous safety standard, to unpack why the industry's robotaxi safety narrative keeps breaking and what it would take to rebuild public confidence. The AV industry has built its case on one metric: fewer collisions. Phil argues that the metric is doing very little work, and that the gap between what companies claim and what the public sees is widening rather than closing. KEY INSIGHTS A NARRATIVE REWRITTEN TWICE, AND BREAKING A THIRD TIME: Autonomous driving began as a way to increase highway capacity. It became "computers don't drive drunk, so they will save lives." Today it is "the statistics prove we are safer." Phil traces each rewrite back to the moment the previous story collided with reality. STATISTICS LOSE TO VIDEO: Safety is decided by extremely rare events, often called "edge cases". While the public sees a robotaxi drive into floodwater or over lit fireworks, companies talk about millions of miles driven. SAFE IS A BETTER GOAL THAN SAFER: Robotaxi companies sell on being safer than human drivers. Phil makes the case for a different bar, closer to the UK's "careful and competent driver" standard: no red lights, no wrong-way driving, no passing stopped school buses. Earn that, and the statistics can settle later. THE HUMAN NEVER LEFT THE LOOP: Remote assistance is what makes robotaxis viable today, yet the industry frames those operators as having no safety role. PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS LEAD WITH BEHAVIOUR. Audiences judge safety by how a vehicle drives, not by null hypotheses and confidence intervals. WIDEN YOUR SAFETY DEFINITION. Blocked fire trucks and riders pulled off trains never show up in fatalities per mile, and they still count. EXPLAIN THE FIX, NOT JUST THE FACT OF ONE. "We fixed it, trust us" collapses the moment the same failure repeats. BUILD THE HUMAN INTO THE STORY. Remote operators and supervising drivers are part of the safety case, so stop treating them as a footnote. ABOUT OUR GUEST Philip Koopman is Faculty Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, where he spent nearly thirty years as tenured faculty researching embedded systems, software safety and autonomous vehicle safety. He is the originator of UL 4600, the safety standard for autonomous products, and the author of "How Safe Is Safe Enough? Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety" and "The UL 4600 Guidebook". Before academia he served as a US Navy submarine officer during the Cold War, designed embedded CPUs at Harris Semiconductor, and has since conducted more than 200 industry design reviews of embedded software projects. He writes on AV safety on Substack and LinkedIn. AND ONE LAST THING Our closing question is always the same: what is your number one storytelling advice to our audience? Discover Phil's answer at the end of this incredible episode. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and follow us on LinkedIn. "Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling" uncovers the human narratives driving innovation in an industry that impacts lives worldwide. Hosted by Stéphane Lagresle, this podcast explores how the power of storytelling ultimately connects technology to humans.

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  Episode #15

  Automotive Chiplets: Inside the AEK 2026 Silicon Shift - S2E15

  Jul 31, 202631 minS2

  ️ THE SILICON SHIFT, DECODED At AEK 2026, one theme ran through every hallway and keynote: automotive chiplets, and the deeper shift they signal. In this special edition of Automotive Storytelling, I sat down on the floor of the Automobil-Elektronik Kongress with six people shaping the industry's next decade, from semiconductor CTOs to a Microsoft engineer to the congress chairman himself, to unpack what is actually changing under the car. KEY INSIGHTS Silicon vendors have become tier ones for real The old OEM to tier-1 to tier-2 chain has reorganized into a value network, where automakers now go straight to the chipmaker to secure innovation early. The differentiator is not raw performance, it is the tool chain built around it. Power is the ceiling, and chiplets are the answer Compute got cheap; moving data did not. With power and memory proximity emerging as the true limits, the industry is betting on chiplets, packaging specialised pieces so the fast-moving AI parts can evolve without dragging the rest along. The car is becoming the blueprint for physical AI Get the hardest machine right, and you unlock robotics at large. As coding agents mature, code turns into a commodity and high-quality specifications become the advantage, which reframes automotive's mountain of standards from burden to asset. KEY TAKEAWAYS Map your silicon relationships early : The chipmaker you choose shapes your architecture, so treat SoC selection as a strategic, upstream decision rather than a procurement step. Budget for data movement, not just compute : Power draw and memory proximity are becoming the real constraints, so design and message around them. Turn your spec libraries into an asset : As AI writes more code, rigorous specifications and standards become the differentiator, not the paperwork. THE VOICES IN THIS EPISODE Lars Reger, CTO of NXP Semiconductors. Aish Dubey, VP at Renesas on the SoC side. Martin Spiegel of HARMAN Automotive, working on IVI and cockpit domain controller systems. Dominik Wee, Corporate VP of Forward Deployed Engineering at Microsoft. Alfred Vollmer, newly appointed Chairman of the Automobil-Elektronik Kongress and a journalist with roughly forty years covering the industry. And Roger Lanctot, one of the sharpest analysts in mobility. Ready to hear where the industry is really heading? "Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling" uncovers the human narratives driving innovation in an industry that impacts lives worldwide. Hosted by Stéphane Lagresle, this podcast explores how the power of storytelling ultimately connects technology to humans.

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  Episode #14

  Chiplets, Trust, AI and Robots - Lars Reger, EVP and CTO at NXP Semiconductors - S2E14

  Jul 17, 202622 minS2

  Recorded on the floor of the Automobil Elektronik Kongress 2026 in Ludwigsburg, this conversation with Lars Reger, EVP and CTO of NXP Semiconductors, tracks how automotive silicon is reshaping who gets a seat at the table, and how much trust a car actually needs before it can drive itself. Key insights From value chain to value network: Lars explains why semiconductor makers now shape OEM decisions earlier than ever, as the industry moves away from a strict OEM to Tier 1 to Tier 2 order. Trust before intelligence: Lars revisits his own line that a car is as much a brain on wheels as a human is a brain on shoes, and uses it to explain why autonomous systems need layered, real-time architecture rather than one giant AI brain. Chiplets, decoded: Lars breaks down what a chiplet actually is, and argues that speed and flexibility, not cost, are the real force behind the trend, as chip design cycles that used to take years get compressed into weeks. Key takeaways Loop in silicon partners earlier. As architecture centralizes, the semiconductor choice increasingly shapes what an OEM can build, not the reverse. Separate real-time control from AI decision-making. Reger's layered model treats safety-critical reflexes and creative AI reasoning as different systems that should not depend on each other. Watch for chiplet interface standards. The next unresolved question in the industry is who defines the standard that lets chiplets from different vendors talk to each other. A grounded look at where automotive silicon is headed, from someone building it. "Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling" uncovers the human narratives driving innovation in an industry that impacts lives worldwide. Hosted by Stéphane Lagresle, this podcast explores how the power of storytelling ultimately connects technology to humans.

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  Episode #13

  The Data Center on Wheels - Jeff Chou, CEO & Co-Founder of Sonatus - S2E13

  Jul 3, 202648 minS2

  🎙 WHEN SILICON VALLEY MEETS THE VEHICLE In this episode of Automotive Storytelling, Stéphane Lagresle sits down with Jeff Chou, the CEO and co-founder of Sonatus, to trace one of the more deliberate bets in automotive software: the thesis that the car would eventually become a data center on wheels, and that everything the IT industry had already learned about networking, orchestration, and AI could be translated to the vehicle. Today, Sonatus technology is deployed in more than 7 million production vehicles. Their whole product portfolio is now leveraging AI. This conversation covers how it got there. 🎯 KEY INSIGHTS Infrastructure Always Comes First Before social media, there was the internet. Before cloud applications, there was networking. Before AI in vehicles, there was the software-defined vehicle. Jeff Chou draws a consistent thread from his data center years through to the automotive present: hardware infrastructure creates the conditions for software infrastructure, which creates the conditions for applications and AI. The SDV was not the destination. It was the foundation. The SDV Trough Was Real. AI Is What Got OEMs Out. Jeff speaks candidly about the "trough of disillusionment" on software-defined vehicles. OEMs had invested thousands of engineers and more lines of code than anticipated, but the promised revenue streams and cost savings didn't materialise as expected. AI changed calculus. Where SDV value was difficult to quantify, AI collapses to two metrics that every OEM understands: time and cost. Sonatus's AI Technician tool is a working example — cutting vehicle diagnostic cycles from weeks to days on the Nissan programme. The Connective Tissue Between Human and Machine Cars don't speak English. Vehicles generate data that engineers, developers, and eventually drivers can't easily interpret without translation. Jeff describes the role Sonatus plays as the connective tissue between the human and the machine: enabling an engineer to interrogate a vehicle in natural language, from anywhere in the world, and get a structured diagnostic response. LLMs, he argues, are what make this human relationship with technology finally possible. China Is Running a Different Race Jeff's account of how Chinese OEMs and tier ones adopt new technology is unusually direct for a CEO speaking on record. The adoption speed is staggering, he says, and the work culture behind it runs on what he calls "007" — midnight to midnight, seven days a week. His assessment: incumbent Western OEMs still have the brand equity, the distribution, and the customer base. It is their race to lose, but they need to act. 💡 PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS Frame AI value to OEMs around time and cost, not capability. SDV failed to deliver on the revenue promise partly because the value proposition was framed around potential, not measurement. AI tools that demonstrably reduce diagnostic cycles or compress time-to-SOP speak a language finance leadership understands. Build your team's cultural DNA before your customer relationships. Sonatus explicitly built a mixed team of Silicon Valley technologists and automotive industry veterans before approaching OEMs. The cultural bridge has to exist internally before it can exist externally. Do not position China as a competitor to dismiss. Jeff's observation is that Western OEMs should treat the pace of Chinese adoption as a signal, not a threat to minimise. What ships there first, is often a preview of where the industry is heading. Treat SDV infrastructure as the prerequisite, not the product. The SDV is what makes AI in vehicles possible. Companies and OEMs that frame it as an end destination misunderstand its role in the technology stack. 🌟 ABOUT YOUR GUIDE Jeff Chou is CEO and co-founder of Sonatus, a Silicon Valley software company specialising in in-vehicle network management, data collection, and AI-driven diagnostics. Before founding Sonatus in 2018, he built his career in the data center industry at companies later acquired by Cisco and Brocade. He holds engineering degrees from UT Austin and Stanford. Sonatus technology is deployed in more than 7 million production vehicles, with Hyundai Motor Group as a flagship customer and partner. Automotive Storytelling is an independent editorial platform. "Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling" uncovers the human narratives driving innovation in an industry that impacts lives worldwide. Hosted by Stéphane Lagresle, this podcast explores how the power of storytelling ultimately connects technology to humans.

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  Episode #12

  The Island That Changed Connectivity Twice - Stacuity - S2E12

  Jun 19, 202627 minS2

  🎙️ WHEN THE RACE CIRCUIT BECOMES THE NETWORK In this episode of Automotive Storytelling, Stéphane Lagresle travels to the Isle of Man during TT Race Week to examine one of the most structurally underexplored problems in connected vehicles: what actually happens to a car's data between the antenna and the application. Filmed on location with the founders of Stacuity, a software-defined connectivity company, this conversation moves from a 37-mile racing circuit to the engineering reality beneath the SDV transition. 🎯 KEY INSIGHTS The Tromboning Problem A Latency Risk Built Into Most Connected Vehicle Architectures Today A car in Australia connects to a mobile network. The data leaves the country, routes to Europe, and comes back. That round trip adds hundreds of milliseconds to every session. Brazil has already legislated against it. India is moving in the same direction. More markets are following faster than vehicle programmes can respond. And the cars already in the field cannot be recalled to fit new SIMs. Fleet Retrofits Without Hardware Changes What APN Repointing Actually Means The most commercially significant detail in this episode is also the least intuitive. Existing fleets can be redirected to in-country infrastructure without touching a single vehicle. No SIM swap, no over-the-air update to the device itself. John Freeman walks through the mechanism: you repoint an Access Point Name inside the network, and every existing subscriber follows. For OEMs facing sovereignty regulation in markets they are already operating in, this changes the nature of the problem entirely. Software-Defined Connectivity Compresses Market Entry From Months to Weeks A partner approached Stacuity with a test request: half a million subscribers, edge connectivity validation for a Chinese customer. Traditional infrastructure: six to nine months. With Stacuity's software-defined layer, the APN was configured and traffic routed in four minutes. The full live solution went live four and a half weeks after the request arrived. John Freeman's framing: the connectivity layer should never be the variable that slows an OEM's market entry. The Marshals as a Network Architecture Model Laura Sawyer describes how more than five hundred marshals manage a 37-mile public road circuit with no single point of failure. Each node passes information forward, flags anomalies, and routes around failure. The episode uses this as its central analogy: handover, edge intelligence, and redundancy, running as a human distributed network since 1907, long before anyone gave it a technical name. It is the clearest non-specialist explanation of what software-defined connectivity is actually trying to replicate. 💡 PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS Audit your data routing paths before regulation arrives. If your vehicles route connectivity data through servers outside the country of use, the legal exposure is already building. Brazil and India have acted. More markets are moving. The audit is easier than the retrofit. Do not assume hardware changes are required for sovereignty compliance. If your fleet uses traditional SIM-based routing, an APN-level redirect may resolve the regulatory exposure without vehicle recall. Understand the mechanism before scoping a programme. Evaluate connectivity infrastructure against deployment speed, not feature parity alone. A six-to-nine-month connectivity deployment timeline is not a technical constraint. It is an architecture choice. Software-defined alternatives exist and are in production. Treat connectivity as a core SDV design variable, not a commodity. The software-defined vehicle requires a software-defined network layer. Connectivity decisions made at programme start will determine what is achievable at launch and in the field. 🌟 ABOUT YOUR GUIDES Chris Hall is Chairman of Stacuity. In 2001, he was part of the team who secured Europe's first 3G licence and launched the Western Hemisphere's first 3G network from the Isle of Man, competing directly with Japan's DoCoMo. His route to the licence: a letter, a 19-pence stamp, and a week's wait. John Freeman is CEO of Stacuity. He leads commercial strategy and partnership development for a platform designed to give OEMs and operators the network-layer flexibility that traditional mobile infrastructure cannot provide. Mike Bromwich is CTO and co-founder of Stacuity. During lockdown, he built a complete mobile core network from first principles, software-only and without proprietary hardware, because the existing architecture could not answer the questions the industry was beginning to ask. His explanation of what software-defined connectivity means in engineering terms is the clearest in this episode. Laura Sawyer is Director of Marshals for the Isle of Man TT, responsible for more than five hundred volunteer officials across a 37-mile public road circuit. Her description of how the marshal network operates provides the episode's central analogy, and the reason this conversation was filmed here and nowhere else. "Under the Hood: Automotive Storytelling" uncovers the human narratives driving innovation in an industry that impacts lives worldwide. Hosted by Stéphane Lagresle, this podcast explores how the power of storytelling ultimately connects technology to humans.

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