Hey folks. I'm a shareholder in Sierra Wireless (SWIR: Nasdaq), who I believe is also the 3G / 4G module supplier to Tesla. I've followed the company for a long time and today was just catching up on the latest quarterly conference call. One of their big wins for the quarter was a design win with a global automotive OEM. It was their biggest win ever, and over the life of the contract they'll sell millions of (presumably 4G) wireless modules for use in cars.
Sierra is the biggest vendor in the space. They have been a consolidator in this market for many years. If you are going to get a wireless module designed into a car (or almost any other application) this is THE #1 company to go talk to. So I found it interesting they described their major new design win as starting to ramp in 2018, but not really hitting volume until 2019. They confirmed that, even though this is an electronic aspect of a vehicle, the design cycle is still quite long.
Isn't this interesting from a Tesla perspective? It seems that the world's biggest suppliers of wireless modems has just won a major (millions of units) deal and it won't really get into volume until 2019. By then the Model 3 should be well into mass production. And while this is happening every single Tesla car that gets sold will collect massive amounts of data for improving autonomous driving, etc.
Wow, are the big boys every slow to move to what is OBVIOUS as a required next step for cars ... wireless modems in every vehicle. We're talking about a part that adds less than $100 to the BOM of a vehicle.
Does anyone see any information to contradict my thinking here? Am I missing something? Are any other big car companies putting wireless modems in their entire fleet?
Sierra is the biggest vendor in the space. They have been a consolidator in this market for many years. If you are going to get a wireless module designed into a car (or almost any other application) this is THE #1 company to go talk to. So I found it interesting they described their major new design win as starting to ramp in 2018, but not really hitting volume until 2019. They confirmed that, even though this is an electronic aspect of a vehicle, the design cycle is still quite long.
Isn't this interesting from a Tesla perspective? It seems that the world's biggest suppliers of wireless modems has just won a major (millions of units) deal and it won't really get into volume until 2019. By then the Model 3 should be well into mass production. And while this is happening every single Tesla car that gets sold will collect massive amounts of data for improving autonomous driving, etc.
Wow, are the big boys every slow to move to what is OBVIOUS as a required next step for cars ... wireless modems in every vehicle. We're talking about a part that adds less than $100 to the BOM of a vehicle.
Does anyone see any information to contradict my thinking here? Am I missing something? Are any other big car companies putting wireless modems in their entire fleet?
