Building a next-generation navigation experience from the ground up
A premium automotive manufacturer needed to rebuild its navigation application from scratch as part of a shift to a new infotainment platform – under tight timelines and with dozens of teams working in parallel. Netlight worked alongside the client as co-owners of architecture, quality, and delivery, introducing modular testing standards and designing an analytics architecture that enabled data-driven quality decisions for the first time.
About the client
The client is a premium automotive manufacturer with millions of connected vehicles on the road worldwide. Every piece of in-car software must meet exacting standards of quality, reliability, and refinement.
Challenge
The client's strategic shift to a new infotainment platform meant rebuilding its navigation application – one of the most visible features in any vehicle – entirely from scratch:
- Dozens of teams needed to establish new architectural patterns, communication frameworks, and integration points simultaneously
- The team had to meet premium quality expectations on a tight timeline
- There was no way to capture real-world navigation performance or steer improvements with data
Solution
Netlight worked alongside the client's engineering teams as co-owners of architecture, quality, and delivery. Together, we consolidated core architectural foundations – from dependency management to offline capabilities to seamless route handling. Always prioritising long-term maintainability over short-term convenience.
We introduced structured cross-team alignment formats to surface integration risks early and cut redundant effort. We brought in modular testing practices so effective that the client's central platform teams adopted them as the organisation-wide standard.
We designed an analytics architecture with the client's data teams: a data bridge connecting vehicle and backend systems, enabling for the first time data-driven quality decisions based on real-world driving behaviour.
Impact
- Significantly reduced defect density compared to the previous platform, measured across multiple release cycles
- Notably faster development cycles, enabling the client to meet critical launch deadlines
- Modular testing and architecture standards adopted as the reference across the client's in-car application portfolio
- Cross-departmental analytics architecture serving as the blueprint for further onboard-to-backend data flows
Let's get started
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