Semicast Thoughts Post-CES
Here are my thoughts on the DMS and OMS market following CES2025.
Source: Substack
What is evident is that NCAP26 is proving an earthquake for driver monitoring decision making at the OEMs. I have written about the new protocols previously, but the summary basically says to the OEMs: "Now take driver monitoring seriously, or lose your five-star rating." NCAP26 starts to meld ADAS with DMS, a trend which will become deeper with NCAP29, so OEMs are having to carefully consider the long-term supplier partnerships and innovation and technology roadmaps. Out has gone the "tick-the-box" mentality of the recent past (NCAP23), and in has come the serious decision making and planning which would be expected of a primary safety system which is increasingly being mandated as a safety technology to make public roads safer. Well done Euro NCAP!
If you were an alien visiting CES for the first time, you could be forgiven for thinking that software defined vehicles is the only thing happening in automotive. There's two significant trends for driver monitoring; SDV for sure, but also legacy E/E architecture. An OEM can do pretty much anything for SDV (Qualcomm is doing very well here in the digital cockpit), but in the coming years significant volume will still lie in legacy E/E architecture vehicles. On the timescales for NCAP26 (12 months) and EU GSR for advanced distraction warning ADDW (new vehicle types now and all new vehicles in 18 months) significant decisions will have to be made to integrate DMS for legacy E/E architecture.
My view remains that the timings lean toward packaged solutions which OEMs can drop in their vehicles, rather than tearing apart the interior of each existing model type and restyling and retooling for the image sensor, image processor, and IR optical path. The timings could imply decisions have already been made but are just not yet visible. The wildcard in all of this is the China NEV makers, many of which adopted SDV using Qualcomm and NVIDIA SoCs running GBT-compliant DMS software, but will be forced to adopt other solutions to meet NCAP26 and ADDW.
All text © 2025 Semicast Research Limited.