An Open Platform for Software-Defined Vehicles: Expectations vs. Reality

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Welcome to the first installment of Scoping Out the Software Defined Vehicle, a series brought to you by the Eclipse Foundation to take an inside look at one of the top trends in the embedded space – software-defined vehicles. In this installment, we spoke with Martin Schleicher, head of software strategy at Continental, about building an open platform for use in SDVs.

embeddedcomputing.com/, Jan. 12, 2024 – 

There are always a handful of technologies and buzzwords floating around the forefront of the embedded space and beyond – they promise unimaginable innovations, to be The Next Big Thing in x industry. Technologies like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, open source, or software-defined vehicles.

But sometimes, these big umbrella terms have a crossroads that makes them more tangible for users and developers – more applicable to real-life customer needs. Take the Eclipse Foundation, for example, who have formed a working group of several key industry players to develop an open technology platform for software-defined vehicles.

The open-source movement, if you will, has been gaining popularity for years. Lots of people believe in the freedom aspect, the community aspect, and it shows. Open source is all over, being used in all kinds of applications and projects, big and small. But what happens when you want to use open-source software in something like a vehicle, where people's safety is entirely dependent on the vehicle's systems running properly?

First of all, you have to build the platform. According to Martin Schleicher, head of software strategy at Continental (which is a member of the Eclipse Foundation's SDV Working Group), even this rarely goes as planned.

The expectation – or perhaps hope would be a better term – is that you have all your decisions regarding the hardware that will be used in your platform hammered out in the early stages of the product development lifecycle, Schleicher says. Then, with that out of the way, you can build on top of that already-established and mature base according to your customers' needs.

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