In this week’s Fish Fry we’re casting our line into one of the most transformative shifts happening in the automotive industry today: the rise of software-defined systems! Nitish Rao from MathWorks and I take a closer look at which vehicle functions are best handled by AI-driven systems, and which still depend on the reliability of traditional control software and how virtual ECUs and digital twins enable simulation and validation before real hardware. We also discuss a question many engineers are asking: can software and AI actually reduce hardware costs?