His answer starts with a gap he sees between his Chinese customers and his Western ones. One of them looked at sMOTION, ZF's active suspension system, and worked out that independent control of all four wheels means a driver can raise a corner and change a flat tire without cranking a jack. The same customer figured out how to oscillate the wheels to rock a car out of a sand trap. None of that required new hardware.
Ramiro then walks through the tire noise function ZF showed at CES, which uses a semi-active damper and a chassis sensor already on the vehicle to generate a counter-signal and cut cabin noise by roughly 3 decibels. His point, beneath all of it, is that value built into software costs a fraction of what value built into hardware does, and he is pushing his own engineers to find it before customers ask.
Watch the full conversation with Ramiro Gutierrez, and subscribe for more from the leaders reshaping this industry: https://www.youtube.com/@jangriffithsautomotiveleaders
#SoftwareDefinedVehicle #AutomotiveEngineering #ZF #AutomotiveIndustry #AutomotiveLeadership
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The Automotive Leaders Podcast is hosted by Jan Griffiths, the champion for culture change in the automotive industry. From a farm in Wales to the C-suite of a $3 billion Tier-1 supplier, Jan built her career inside this industry. Now she's out to transform it.
Her argument is blunt. The pressure on this industry isn't letting up. The survivors will be the ones who reinvent how they work. Speed wins. Everyone else gets left behind.
Every episode, Jan sits down with the leaders driving that change. Real conversations about tariffs, supply chain shocks, EV uncertainty, AI, and the shift from command-and-control to authentic, human-centered leadership.
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