TomTom's Manuela Locarno Ajayi: AI in navigation is the road to the future

**Hannah Lutz** (0:04)
Hi, and welcome to the Automotive News Shift podcast, where we bring you the latest on automotive technology, trends, and transformation. I'm Hannah Lutz, Assistant Managing Editor of Content at Automotive News.

**Molly Boygon** (0:17)
And I'm Molly Boygon, tech and innovation reporter at Automotive News. Our guest today is Manuela Locarno Ajayi, the Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at TomTom. She spoke to Hannah about how AI is changing navigation and how TomTom is developing real-time mapping at the lane level.

**Manuela Locarno Ajayi** (0:35)
We truly believe that maps shouldn't be looked at as a catch for the autonomous system, but really very much as a complement to the overall platform that the AVR built on.

**Molly Boygon** (0:46)
But first, let's talk about the week. For that, we're joined by our colleague, Lois Jones, a reporter at Automotive News Europe, covering software-defined vehicles, electric vehicles, and technology. Hi, Lois.
Hi.

**Lois Jones** (0:58)
Good morning.

**Hannah Lutz** (0:59)
Lois, you wrote about the development of digital twins. These systems test vehicles and plant layouts virtually before production begins, and automakers including BMW, Toyota, and General Motors have used them. Could you explain how these digital twins work?

**Lois Jones** (1:14)
Sure. If we think of a digital twin as a living virtual clone of a physical object, like a car or even an entire factory. It's not just a static 3D model. It's connected to the real object by sensors. So whatever happens to the real object happens to the virtual clone in real time.
This allows car makers and other automotive companies to test changes, predict breakdowns, and fix problems in the virtual world before they even happen in the physical world.

**Hannah Lutz** (1:52)
So they're happening inside the vehicle itself or a simulated vehicle, but also on the plant floor, I want to make sure we have that clear that there's so many different uses for the digital twins.

**Lois Jones** (2:03)
That's correct, yes.

**Molly Boygon** (2:04)
And so for digital twins on a plant floor, what does that look like? How are automakers and suppliers and other people in the ecosystem using digital twins to design a plant layout more efficiently?

**Lois Jones** (2:18)
Okay, if you look at digital assembly lines, car makers use complete 3D scans of their factories to map out production lines and simulate how machines and employees will operate. For example, BMW's virtual factory reduces simulation times for vehicle-bodied collision checks from four weeks to just three days.

**Molly Boygon** (2:44)
Pretty impressive.

**Hannah Lutz** (2:45)
Yeah, that's very significant improvement. So if the digital twins are moving to a predictive virtual first approach, as you wrote, what does that mean for automakers? And which automakers have seen the biggest impact since using them?

**Lois Jones** (2:58)
Well, it means that car makers can completely design, stress test and manufacture vehicles digitally before investing in physical factories or materials. So industry leaders such as BMW, Toyota and General Motors have achieved the highest operational impact.
They've realized up to 30% cost savings and halved facility planning times.

**Molly Boygon** (3:27)
You know, the automakers are sort of straddling so many different areas of innovation right now, trying to develop software defined vehicles, still working on their EV platforms and then also still working with internal combustion engine systems and other sort of legacy systems. Can you explain to what extent it's easy or hard to integrate digital twins across all of those different sort of production priorities?

**Lois Jones** (3:52)
That's a good point. It's exceptionally difficult, actually, integrating digital twins with legacy systems.
Because you've got decades old equipment, which typically relies on siloed data structures, incompatible communication protocols, and physical hardware that lacks modern internet connectivity. So this leads to a technological mismatch, and it prevents the real-time bidirectional data flow that a digital twin requires to function.

**Hannah Lutz** (4:28)
Super interesting. Thank you so much, Lois, for joining us.

**Lois Jones** (4:30)
Thank you for your time today.

**Hannah Lutz** (4:33)
AI and cutting-edge technology are changing the game across the automotive industry. I spoke with Manuela Locarno Ajayi, Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at TomTom, which is building real-time, lane-specific navigation powered by AI.
Let's turn to that conversation. Hi, Manuela. Thanks for joining me on Shift.

**Manuela Locarno Ajayi** (4:53)
Thank you for having me.

**Hannah Lutz** (4:54)
We are at TomTom's Discover Conference in Detroit today, and we've heard experts from TomTom, Bosch, Amazon, Deloitte, Vistion, and Qualcomm, and others talk about AI, vehicle technology, all connected to mapping, which I know is TomTom's specialty.
Manuela, when we think about mapping in cars, I think most of us still think about maps as pure navigation systems, at least from a consumer point of view. How has the role of maps changed over the past decade and continues to change?