VW has been facing an uphill battle to develop and perfect its next-generation software platform in recent years and is hopeful that a new hire will help it.
The German car manufacturer has just announced that it has hired Sanjay Lal. While he is far from a household name, he will join VW having previously worked at Rivian and once serving as director of engineering at Tesla for two years. Lal also worked at Google on its Android Automotive project.
Bloomberg reports that Lal will lead a software design hub at VW’s Cariad unit that is developing a new software platform for the company’s future EVs. The new software platform will be introduced to the market by two VW and Audi models and form the basis for an architecture that will be shared across VW’s entire portfolio of brands.
Lal served as director engineering at Tesla between July 2017 and June 2019. He then joined Google’s Android Automotive division between June 2019 and August 2021. Since then, he has served as the vice president of the software platform at Rivian.
Read: VW Cariad’s Software Issues Trigger Delay Of Porsche Macan EV
In October last year, it was revealed that Porsche had been forced to delay the launch of the electric Macan because of issues related to Cariad’s next-generation 2.0 software. Earlier this year, VW chief operating officer Arno Antlitz said the company had pivoted its focus to developing a Software 1.2 platform to allow for the launch of the new Macan and Audi Q6 e-tron while postponing Software 2.0 to around 2027 or 2028.
Fixing Cariad has been one of the main aims of VW chief executive Oliver Blume since he took the helm of the car manufacturer. The subsidiary’s former leader Dirk Hilgenberg was replaced with Bentley’s production chief this year.
