How can software benefit chassis innovation?

0:01 Introduction to Chassis Innovation

Today in The Garage and an episode recorded live at Auto Tech 2026 in Novi, Michigan, we’re talking about something very different. So often when we think about innovation in vehicles, it’s easy to think about autonomous driving, or it’s common to think about the infotainment system or an app store or the latest streaming services or voice capabilities or so on. But so often, it’s easy to forget about the actual driving and how the car actually feels.

And so much of that is done by the chassis subsystem. And that includes the tires, the braking, the steering, the suspension, all of those things which are so important to the driving experience but often are not thought about by maybe the average person. But in fact, there’s incredible innovation in chassis and in fact, as we go to software defined vehicles where software brings innovation and enhanced capabilities over time, innovation in chassis is a super exciting area.

And who better to talk about that than the president of either “Zed-F” or ZF, depending on your perspective, which is a major tier one supplier that drives a lot of these subsystems. Ramiro Gutierrez, who is president of ZF North America. He joined us and we talked about so many different exciting ideas about how chassis innovation can both drive a better experience for the driver, but also improve cost and reuse and bring those capabilities to a wider range of price points. It was a fun conversation and I really hope you enjoy. Let’s go!

1:56 Guest Introduction: Ramiro Gutierrez

Welcome to The Garage. I’m John Heinlein, Chief Marketing Officer with Sonatus. We’re here at Auto Tech 2026 in Novi, Michigan and we’re so pleased to be joined by Ramiro today. Ramiro, welcome to The Garage.

Thank you very much, John. Very happy to be here.

You want to start by telling us a little about you and your background personally?

Yeah. I am originally from Spain as you can tell by my accent and I came to the US fourteen years ago moving with my family to here to Detroit working at the time for TRW. As you probably know, TRW was bought by ZF in 2015 and since then we we’ve been here. I mean, the only fun factor there is that every Christmas we go to Africa. We have some family there from Spain that move into Africa and we normally spend Christmas in Africa. It’s a good break from the winter here in Detroit.

It’s quite different than Detroit. So you went right to your fun fact, that’s excellent. I had the opportunity a few years back to visit Malawi in Africa. We had a collaboration at Arm with UNICEF.

I was actually one of the champions of our collaboration with UNICEF. So I got to spend an incredible week looking at the great work they’re doing Okay. And visiting this incredible part of the world and and trying to do some trying to do some good. So it’s exciting exciting adventure for you.

Interesting enough. I mean, is where you’re probably familiar with the Kalahari test. Kalahari is that in the south part of Africa, which is where I go. So normally I see plenty of test cars going around even if I go there for vacation.

Very good. For the ZF is a hugely successful company, but for those of our listeners who may not know about it, can you tell us about your company and then also about your role?

Yeah. So ZF is as you said, a big supplier out there. We cover multiple areas of the business and we have a passenger car division that basically covers transmissions and chassis products. And within chassis, we cover braking, we cover steering, we cover suspension. Right? So on top of that, have an industrial division and on top of that, we have a commercial vehicle division that basically covers similar kind of product portfolio elements. So my role at ZF, I am the president of North America and on top of that role, I am the head of our steering business globally.

Steering globally, okay.

Correct. So I basically manage our steering business across all the customers and all the plans that we have on engineering. Yeah.

4:22 The Role of Software in Chassis Systems

Okay. Well, let’s jump right into it. Historically, I think people would have thought of chassis and steering and all these things you’re talking about is very hardware centric thing. In a world where now we’re bringing software into more and more subsystems, how is software making its way into the subsystems in chassis?

I think this is actually a pretty good question. I mean, in the old times, I remember somebody told me, you know, braking was used to be a very boring thing. It was just about calipers. And then somebody came with this idea of ABS and then as a sudden, you know, the the thing of a caliper was moving into something more technology driven and then after that, came up with the idea of stability control and then suddenly braking was something even bigger. And so this is what is happening right now with software. We have now the ability through software to manage very traditional mechanical equipment that is sitting in the car in different ways that traditionally has happened. Not only that, we can actually make the braking, the steering, the suspension to work together through software in a way that creates value for the end customer that has never happened before.

You mentioned so many different aspects of that. I mean, I think ABS isn’t kind of an easy one that people think about in terms of like an obvious, but the idea of stability control and steering and braking working, that’s a very interesting way to look at it.

Yeah. I mean, can put the same analogy for braking into a steering. Mean, steering probably I am old enough to drive cars without power steering, right? Probably you drove some of those too. I mean, there, we went into hydraulic steering, from hydraulic steering we went into electro hydraulic, from there we went into electric steering and now we’re going into a steer by wire. So is a constant evolution in the chassis components. It may not be as sexy as infotainment, but certainly chassis has been going a long way from what it was a pure mechanical element into high technology or top technology part of the equation.

6:26 Brand-specific Driving Experience

You talked about not not sexy, I think the reality is that brands care a lot about the feel of their cars. Certainly a number of brands, you know, pride themselves on having a specific feel. Mercedes, BMW, they all have a kind of a brand feel I think that they want to deliver. How are you able to use these capabilities to allow OEMs to deliver brand specific kind of a IP in a way, driving IP, right?

And that has been, you know, a question or a topic for many of our customers, right? We have customers that by nature, they are global players. And in some cases, their customers in Europe have a like or a dislike for a particular element of the driving and they struggle to have a global car that would satisfy their customers in Asia, their customers in Europe and their customer in the US, let’s say. Now, software is bringing the ability to them to get the same hardware behaving in a complete different way depending on how you want to tune it.

So our ability here is to give our customers, let’s say, a middleware where they can build upon their DNA to get that particular element, let’s call it the steering, behaving in a completely different way as per the customer like or customer taste. This very morning I was driving a car from one of our customers and they gave us a car, a US only vehicle, right? And they say, our team thinks that we can get some European like steering into this vehicle.

Would you guys be able to do something for it? So we retrofitted the steering system of the vehicle into an steer-by-wire system. And then as a sudden, I am driving a muscle car US based for US centric customers and the steering feels like a 911. So the beauty of it is that as soon as you are now on the highway, you touch a button and then it goes back to a very comfortable cruising steering kind of feeling. So that is the beauty of this software defined vehicle. That is the beauty of all these by-wire technology into these traditional chassis components, steering being one of them.

8:49 Dynamic Driving Feel Through Software

I was really excited to to speak with you this week and I think you’re bringing such a unique perspective. We we had conversations in the past with different subsystem made or for example, or thing, where one of the other reasons you might want to have things that are portable is because of regulatory reasons. Lighting, there’s all kinds of regulations and stuff. But you’re bringing a completely different perspective.

It’s it’s feel and personal preference and also whether it’s a sportier feel. And thing you just said blows my mind about how dynamically during the drive you can say, I’m on the highway. Maybe I could do a comfort feeling now cause I don’t need it to feel stiff and and tiring. But then I get back on the road now and I get my sports car back and they press the button and it comes back.

I love that. And then as a sudden, you have a car that behaves completely different in one scenario or the other. You don’t need any sports car and a cruising car. And you can have the both worlds with just through software.

That’s great.

So it’s not driving any engineering spend, not driving any hardware cost, it’s just pure software. I think I mentioned to you the other day, I mean, through our customers, in AP because they are kind of more dynamic thinking to understand that the traditional customers. We are creating things like now that you have an steer-by-wire and a brake-by-wire system in the car, you transform your car into a racing simulator or a video game kind of functionality where you may be charging your battery for twenty minutes. You’re sitting in your car, I don’t know, listening to music, but now you can do it like a PlayStation mode. And then can you get a better driving simulator than an actual car? I mean, the decoupling of the steering wheel from the steering column or the wheels, decoupling or your pedals from the hydraulic system that is not there anymore is giving you the ability of getting all the fillings together with this panoramic IP that will give you a perfect driving simulator at home.

It’s such a great story, and I know that anytime I’m charging my EV, I’m immediately ejected from the driver’s seat by my daughter who wants to do the driving simulator while we’re charging.

There you go.

But you made me think of something kind of silly or maybe it’s maybe it’s really funny, but when you know when we dream, when we’re sleeping, the body disconnects your brain from your muscles. So you can imagine you’re running, your brain believes that you’re running, but of course you’re not actually running.

It’s sort of the same idea. Kind of.

You get the feeling of driving, you get the feeling of the steering feel and and the and perhaps braking feel and things like that, but the car doesn’t go anywhere.

That is absolutely correct. And so you have all this expensive hardware, why not make it the best video game ever?

I just love that. The beauty of this is that that hardware is there for a primary reason. Course. But now that you have the software, you have the ability to use that hardware for more things.

11:42 Cost Efficiency in Software Defined Vehicles

I truly believe we are only scratching the surface of value creation through software defined vehicles when it comes to reuse the hardware for multiple different purposes, Right. I mean, is multiple examples of that where you use probably your ADAS cameras in the car to do surveillance or security cameras to use like use them like security cameras in your house, right? In your driveway. So there are multiple examples of these and I think there is this discussion about affordability.

And I think actually software defined vehicles would work in terms of getting them more affordable. But it’s not more affordable in terms of the pure content, it’s affordability that comes from the capital that you have spent in producing multiple different part numbers. Now you have one part number and that one part number becomes multiple by the software. So there is no hardware.

So your capital is reduced during engineering. You only validate that mechanical component once. Then through software you can. It’s true.

There’s a lot of conversations around software defined vehicles being a premium thing and when we think about things like central compute or higher things, people say, oh, it’s lots of expensive computers.

And the reality is you can have different trim levels, you can have different performance levels of the processor, perhaps different headroom as you need. But your point about validating the subsystems, the subsystem could be common. Software programmable, yes, but the compute requirements there are modest because they’re localized. And then the central computer or the, you know, the the controller of the car then brings higher premium features or mid-tier features or lower features while reusing the platform that’s been validated. That’s a very clever approach.

That is absolutely correct. And one of the difficulties that we have sits more into, let’s say the established thinking in some customers where it’s actually very difficult to have a conversation about how to put together the braking and the steering or the suspension to work creating a particular functionality that is new because some of our customers, they still work in silos. So you cannot get the braking guy to have a conversation with the steering guy or the steering guy have a conversation with the suspension guy. And this is one of the things why this is now moving even faster.

14:14 New Innovations Announced at CES

It’s incredible. Look at CES, I know just a few months ago, ZF announced a number of new exciting innovations where you’re bringing software to enhance capabilities as a separate thing. Things like road noise reduction and steering feel and stuff.

Do you want to talk about some of those new innovations you I think those are actually very good examples.

The noise reduction solution that we announced at CES, for example, basically sits into two elements that are already part of the vehicle. One is the high leveling sensor that normally you use for your lights and the other one has to do with the suspension, the shock absorbers. So what we have been able to develop is a system through software that basically actuate the valves on the shock absorbers, breathing the frequency that the high level sensor, an accelerometer in the high level sensor is providing. And with that create a counter frequency that kills the tire noise. So, and we get an incredible result with that, reducing the noise level for customer, for the driver in about three decibels, which sounds like a small number but in reality it’s a big number.

And again, the beauty of this is that we’re doing that through software. We are not doing it through hardware. The hardware already sits in there for the primary functionality and we actually extracting, creating value for the end customer out of that hardware that is already sitting in there.

It’s very interesting because I think, you know, the frequency when going over different road surfaces, different speeds, perhaps different tires, different wear levels of your tires, all of those things will affect the noise and how the tire vibrates. And you’re sort of just creating, if you will, anti-vibration to counteract it. Yeah.

I mean, you have cases, for example, where you have vehicles that have these off road package. That looks nicer, more attractive. Not necessarily that you’re going to do a lot of off road, but you like the look. And but those tires, they have a higher profile, right? And that higher profile creates some road noise.

Here you go, you can kill that road noise through this system where you’re generating this counter frequency that eliminates the tire cavity noise that is being produced out there.

16:35 Counteracting Road Noise with Software

It’s wonderful and I actually didn’t choose the off-road package for that reason because I was worried about road noise. I didn’t have your technology. Would have been able to do it. But it is important to see that you you don’t necessarily have to trade off safety or let’s say if you need traction, Detroit, there’s tons of snow here, right? If you need those kind of capabilities, there’s ways to counteract it in software. Another thing that comes to mind is by decoupling hardware and software, which is sort of the promise of SDV in a way, it allows you to learn over time. Because these algorithms you’re describing, these these the analytics and the signal processing and so on, It’s not a single done answer. You’re going to learn and improve and you can bring those updates to the vehicles later.

17:18 Over-the-Air Updates and Future Innovations

That’s correct. I mean, by definition, the software-defined vehicle is going to have an OTA capability, over-the-air capability and that is going to allow you to, again, get a new experience with a new update of the software into your vehicle, develop more functionality. As I said before, I think developers, engineers, even non-automotive engineers will help us develop functionality out of hardware that is sitting in there for a different reason that we don’t even know today. If you buy a car today and that functionality is being developed, in a year from now you will have the ability to have an over the air update into your car and then you’re going to experience the new functionality. So it’s absolutely fantastic.

It’s true that we’re just at the very beginning of how software-defined vehicles can enable innovation from third parties. I know today that’s relatively new area, but clearly that’s a direction of travel that people will be doing.

Just like open source has sort of democratized a lot of different innovation from many places, in a similar way, think there’s going to be a lot of smart, thoughtful innovators that can say, well, you know, you have all this hardware that can do X, why aren’t you doing X? And you’re like, “I never thought of that!” Exactly.

And I like to say that we almost need to design systems for applications that we can’t even visualize yet because smart ideas will come and the hardware plus software tightly coupled of the past, which perhaps served us well in the past, won’t give us that flexibility.

I agree and as I said before, there are so many examples of these.

Quite recently I discovered another attribute of steer-by-wire. I said, one of my engineers told me, Well, you remember we have this ability now to turn the steering farther because through software we know what is the diameter of the wheel, the rim diameter. A lot of people doesn’t know that when you produce a car, if the car has an option that will have twenty two inches wheel, even if the mainstream is twenty inches, the guy that buys the twenty inches car will have a smaller turning radius that actually the hardware would allow him to have because it has to be protected for the twenty-two inches option.

So the twenty-two inches option, fine is going to be there, but the customer having the twenty inches cannot take full advantage of the hardware sitting in there. Now with the steer-by-wire is gonna push a bottom into the dashboard saying, have twenty inches and automatically it’s going to gain a smaller turning radius.

That’s incredible. What unique story. I’m going to quote you on that because so often people don’t think about something so simple as that. That in turning radius, I mean, who doesn’t want — in California, we make U-turns like constantly. So there there are some places you you if you can’t make it if you don’t make a U-turn, you will not be able to get there. So turning radius is premium.

But if if you haven’t chosen these gigantic wheels, why not get a better turning radius?

Alright. I love that. And and again, I I want you to stay with this thinking about affordability. Affordability these days is on the media all the time. Software is a key element to keep creating value at an extremely low marginal cost.

That is very important that people understand. There is a thinking about affordability that means, oh, let’s de-content the vehicle. Let’s de-content the vehicle. Automatically, you may reduce the cost of the vehicle, you may reduce the price of the vehicle but customers may not find that vehicle attractive anymore.

Here we have a tool, software that can create, can keep creating value, attracting those customers to your brand, to your car at an extremely low marginal cost. And that is the thinking in here.

21:17 Decoupling Hardware and Software Solutions

Well, a perfect topic to then pivot from is to consider the decoupling of hardware and software where suppliers like you would have historically years ago provided hardware and software in a box sealed up, never to be looked at again. But as what we’re talking about now is this decoupling of IP and intellectual property around software and hardware. And in some cases, what I hear you saying is you might sell those separately. Customer might have a subsystem hardware that they like already, but that you could sell them some software separately.

That’s correct. I mean, we have all kinds of customers from the customer that wants a turnkey solution. So they want the full functionality developed to a customer that wants a very specific part of their solution. So what we’re doing is opening our software tool to customers where they can build upon, as I said before, middleware, their functionality so that their DNA is still going to be there but we provide that middleware that does most of the functionality and then they can tune it in a direction or another. And that doesn’t necessarily require our hardware to sit on the vehicle as well.

It’s so interesting. I’m so pleased that we were able to have this conversation because it’s an area we’ve not covered before and my eyes have been open to new ideas and I think all day long about these topics, but my eyes have been open to new sectors and new parts of the vehicle that I didn’t think about. So I’m so glad you shared this with me and with our listeners.

22:49 Conclusion and Future Experiences

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, maybe when you are around, you can come to the office and I can get you in one of those cars so you experience it by yourself.

Would love to to try that out and to be able to experience it firsthand. Ramiro, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, John. Thank you for having me.

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