Comment: The deep software-driven transformation of the automotive industry should be a wake-up call for manufacturing. David Hughes, director of UKI Solutions Consulting at PTC, discusses why a new approach to product development is needed.

Way back in 1965, MIT developed the Apollo Guidance Computer for Nasa’s Apollo program – the world’s first widely recognised embedded software system.

Just six years later, in 1971, Intel released the first microprocessor, the 4004. This freed embedded software systems from hardware devices as independent computing units, and was a milestone in modern computer engineering.

Fast forward to today, where software working on microprocessors is about to take over the world – or, at least, the role played by hardware in product development in the past century.

Take Volkswagen as an example. Its 2020 projections anticipated that a car could integrate up to 1 billion lines of code by 2025. Such advancements position car manufacturers as software companies,...