For a century, the car was a machine that happened to contain electronics. Today it's a two-ton computer that moves at highway speeds.
Almost everything on a vehicle now runs on software, from lighting sequences to driver assistance features to infotainment systems. Which means the driving experience is now largely designed in code and judged against the phone in a driver’s pocket. It’s also the part that ages fastest: A multi-year production cycle turns an infotainment system designed in 2021 and released in 2026 into something that quickly feels like a flip phone.
So what does it look like to design a car in the era of AI-defined vehicles, one that also retains the look and feel of what makes a brand unique?
It’s a challenge that requires balance. And the key to harnessing new capabilities that make driving more personal and intuitive while keeping the experience true to the brand, according to Ralph Gilles, chief design officer of Stellantis, is restraint.
“Technology should be a silent partner,” he says. “Anytime a new shiny technology comes along, we tend to run in that direction. But our job as designers, as caretakers of these brands, is to not forget the human involved.”
It’s a shift Applied Intuition’s Head of Design Karl Heiselman has watched reshape the field. “Software is becoming like a new material, a new tool in designing an experience,” Heiselman says. “We've moved from designing the object that you drive to an experience that you have over time—both the ownership experience and the driving experience.”
Gilles has led some of the industry's boldest design decisions, including the recent all-electric Dodge Charger Daytona and a redesign of the 2014 Jeep® Cherokee. The Cherokee design favored a fuel-efficient, aerodynamic shape and modern interiors that used premium materials. His choice faced initial criticism, but the redesigned model quickly became one of the automaker's best-selling vehicles.
“Looking for latent needs is my big thing,” says Gilles, adding that every vehicle should deliver something drivers want—even if they don’t know they want it yet. “I'm not a big fan of seeing what’s on the road today and saying, ‘ooh, we’ve got to do that’—because that was done three or four years prior.”
Earlier this fall, Gilles sat down with Heiselman at Stellantis’s campus in Auburn Hills, Michigan, to discuss how to design great cars—and driver experiences—in the era of SDVs. For over a year, Applied Intuition and Stellantis have been working together to perfect Stellantis's in-vehicle infotainment platform, STLA SmartCockpit.
During the conversation, Heiselman brought up a frustration that many drivers are likely familiar with: “I have a car that I really love. I love the design of it, I love the way it drives. But what I don’t love is that the center dash is essentially taken over by my phone.”
That’s the problem Cabin Intelligence helps address: making the cabin experience as well-crafted as the vehicle around it so that drivers don’t retreat to their phone for a better one.
Powered by Applied Intuition’s Cabin Intelligence software, STLA SmartCockpit will enable Stellantis to deliver intelligent and personalized in-cabin experiences across the automaker’s 14 global brands. Because Cabin Intelligence is built into the vehicle’s operating system, it can coordinate tasks across all the apps running in the vehicle. When a driver makes a request through STLA SmartCockpit’s voice agent, it draws on what’s on the screen and what other apps are doing to deliver accurate, personalized results. And it's designed to be modular for brand differentiation, putting each brand in control of its own specific layouts, feature selection, graphics, and themes, so a Jeep Wrangler’s cabin feels unmistakably like a Jeep Wrangler while an Alfa Romeo Stelvio’s feels unmistakably like an Alfa Romeo Stelvio.
“Building one great cabin experience is challenging enough. Building a system that can produce fourteen of them and keep every one up to date long after the vehicles ship is another matter entirely,” says Adriano Quiroga, head of vehicle intelligence at Applied Intuition. “That’s what Cabin Intelligence is designed to do: remove the tradeoff between affordability and flexibility so designers can spend their time and energy on the experience itself.”
The partnership also addresses a crucial need: bringing cost-effectiveness, innovation, and longevity to infotainment systems that are both expensive and often outdated by the time they hit the market. The result is not only an intuitive infotainment system that responds to each driver, but one that can be continuously upgraded.
During their conversation, Gilles explained how important it is to ensure that the identity of each brand is stewarded carefully through each technological innovation. AI can be used to further enhance each brand’s persona, Gilles says, but for many drivers their Jeep SUV is their tool for adventure, so AI needs to help them enjoy that adventure, not get in the way. “Maybe AI is going to help them find a route they hadn’t seen before,” he says of off-roaders. “Or maybe there’s even a system that advises the right approach speed to a curve in the road based on data from other drivers.”
That foundation is what gives designers like Gilles room to work, and it's one thread of a much bigger collaboration. In May, the companies announced an expanded partnership to develop and scale the next generation of STLA Brain, Stellantis’s core vehicle software platform. Applied Intuition is bringing its Vehicle OS, Cabin Intelligence, and autonomy systems to accelerate development, validation, and deployment across Stellantis’s core systems. The goal: one software foundation that makes the whole vehicle feel seamless, while leaving room for 14 distinct brand identities to come through.
It’s a model that Gilles already knows well. His job, as he describes it, is finding solutions and efficiencies that elevate every brand at once. A single software foundation, extended to the entire portfolio, is just one example of that.
It also unlocks the future that both companies are building toward. Gilles imagines a day when the daily commute becomes something that people actually look forward to. “The car takes on a relaxation mode, where people are hankering to get in their car because they're going to look forward to that 20 minutes of relaxation,” he says.
Getting there will take an enormous amount of work, but for Gilles, the destination is less about the technology itself. It's also about the legacy it leaves behind.
“We have these incredible brands that are 100 years old, and still evolving and still staying relevant,” he says. “I know that I'm only here for a while, and I'm going to hand these brands over to the next generation. I want to keep the story going.”
