In connected car news are Renesas, AKM, Motive, Sonatus, Hagiwara, TRATON and Red Hat.
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Renesas New Chips for Dashboards & Charging Stations
Renesas Electronics announced two new additions to its microprocessor lineup, the RZ/G3L and RZ/G3SE. Both chips share the same physical footprint, so a manufacturer can swap between them on the same circuit board depending on how much graphical horsepower a project needs. The RZ/G3L, built around up to four Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at 1.2 GHz, comes with a built-in 3D graphics processor and video codec, making it a natural fit for rich, animated dashboard displays. The RZ/G3SE trims things down for simpler, cost-conscious screens, the kind you’d find on an EV charging wallbox or an industrial gateway.
Both chips are built to sip power when they’re not busy, dropping into a deep standby mode that uses just one milliwatt while still keeping the Linux operating system ready to spring back to life almost instantly. They also come loaded with security features, including secure boot, Arm TrustZone, and tamper detection, along with support for 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and the kind of deterministic networking that industrial automation depends on. Renesas already has a reference design ready to go for EV charging wallboxes, and evaluation kits are available now for engineers who want to start prototyping.
AKM’s Sensors Help Microchip Fault Detections
Asahi Kasei Microdevices, known as AKM, has gotten its coreless current sensors written into Microchip Technology’s newest arc fault detection system, a piece of safety hardware built to catch dangerous electrical arcs in DC power systems like EV chargers, solar arrays, and battery storage units. The tricky part about arc detection has always been telling the difference between a genuine hazard and ordinary electrical noise, since things like inverter switching or a contactor bouncing can look a lot like a dangerous arc to a simple sensor.
AKM’s CZ39 and CZ3K sensors respond in just 100 nanoseconds, feeding clean, low-noise signal data into Microchip’s dsPIC33A chip, which runs the actual detection logic right there on the hardware instead of relying on a separate processor or a cloud connection. That speed and accuracy should mean fewer false alarms and faster shutdowns when something really is wrong. AKM developed and tested the system out of its San Jose facility, and the company sees it extending well beyond EV chargers into places like AI server racks and high-voltage data centers, anywhere that a fast, reliable fault detector can prevent a small electrical problem from becoming a big one.
Motive Raises $1.3 Billion
Fleet telematics company Motive Technologies has landed more than $1.3 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, and Pranav Singhvi, a Managing Director at the firm, is joining Motive’s board as part of the deal. The funding comes on the heels of some genuinely strong numbers, with Motive surpassing $600 million in annual recurring revenue, growing 30 percent year over year, and holding onto customers well enough to post a net revenue retention rate above 120 percent. Alongside the new financing, the company also withdrew its earlier S-1 filing with the SEC, putting a public offering on hold for now.
Motive plans to put the new capital toward expanding its AI capabilities across the physical side of fleet operations, including safety monitoring, computer vision systems that help prevent collisions, and predictive maintenance tools designed to keep trucks and job-site equipment running longer between repairs. Some of the money will also go toward international expansion under Thomas Hansen, who took over as President of Go-to-Market earlier this year, as the company works to win over larger carriers and supply chain customers around the world.
Sonatus and Hagiwara Partner for SDVs
Sonatus and Japanese tier-one supplier Hagiwara Electronics have struck a partnership aimed at getting software-defined vehicle technology into production faster. Under the agreement, Hagiwara will distribute Sonatus’s software across Japan, North America, Europe, India, and China, reaching automakers that build everything from passenger cars to construction and farm equipment.
The two companies have already put together a working reference design, combining Sonatus’s Fastlane Collector software with Hagiwara’s Hiyoko evaluation board, which runs on a Renesas R-Car-S4 chip. Together, the setup handles heavy vehicle network traffic, collects telemetry at the edge, isolates faults, and even runs machine learning models locally, all things automakers need as they shift toward centralized zonal computing architectures. By pre-validating the software on a chip that’s already automotive-grade, the partners hope to shave meaningful time off the testing and validation process for the OEMs and suppliers who adopt it.
TRATON Truck Software Platform on Red Hat Linux
TRATON Group, the commercial vehicle parent company behind Scania, MAN, International, and Volkswagen Truck & Bus, has partnered with Red Hat to bring its In-Vehicle Operating System into TRATON’s own software platform, called TRATON ONE OS. The idea is to give all four brands a shared, safety-certifiable Linux foundation, which should make it easier to roll out over-the-air updates and onboard new software suppliers without reinventing the wheel for each nameplate.
By building on an open, container-based standard, TRATON can keep its various brands’ software more consistent while reducing the friction that normally comes with plugging new suppliers or vendors into a vehicle’s electronics. TRATON isn’t handing over the keys entirely, though; the company is holding onto control of its core electrical architecture, safety certification, regulatory approval, and any proprietary customer-facing features, while leaning on Red Hat’s platform to handle the ongoing work of security patching and lifecycle maintenance across its global fleet.