The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world’s largest open source foundations, along with multiple industry leaders, including Bosch, Microsoft and others, announced an open invitation for technology leaders to help define a new working group focused specifically on the Software-Defined Vehicle.

The ultimate goal will be the creation of a vendor-agnostic, open-source ecosystem with a vivid, contributing community focused on building the foundation for a new era in automotive software development. This announcement serves as a “call to action” for all interested parties to join this initiative and help shape the future of mobility.

Next-generation vehicle developers are turning to software-based solutions for new designs. The Eclipse Foundation believes this will lead to an open-source revolution that results in software-defined vehicles. Software-defined vehicles will enable vehicle manufacturers as well as automotive suppliers to put software at the very center of vehicle development, with hardware considerations to follow.

To achieve this significant change in the design process, this new working group will build the foundation of an open ecosystem for deploying, configuring, and monitoring vehicle software in a secure and safe way.

The approach will consider high performance computers as well as legacy ECUs and will stretch from quality managed to safety-relevant functions across all vehicle domains under adherence of the highest safety and security standards.

Vehicle manufactures around the world may use this foundation to focus on differentiating customer features, such as mobility services and end-user experience improvements, while saving time and cost on the non-differentiating elements, such as operating systems, middleware or communication protocols.

To support the transformation to software-defined vehicles, major players from the technology industry as well as the automotive industry are encouraged to collaboratively develop an open source in-vehicle application runtime stack, cloud-based vehicle operations as well as highly integrated development toolchains. The ultimate goal of the open source software-defined vehicle initiative is to scale in-vehicle software across vehicle models, product lines, brands, organizations, and time.

The Eclipse Foundation and its decades of experience managing the governance of complex technology initiatives and multi-vendor organizations make it the ideal organization to help manage such an endeavor. Its commitment to transparency, vendor-neutrality, and a shared voice will ensure that all participants have the opportunity to shape the future of the working group.

Technological, organizational, and cultural innovations pave the way for the software-defined vehicle. The use of open-source software and technology neutrality are the pillars for a strong community to actively shape the transformation in automotive software engineering together with our customers and partners. For Bosch, collaboration across industries is key to realize the software-defined vehicle. Together with the Eclipse Foundation and other participants we are driving this change and looking forward to welcoming additional contributors to the initiative.

—Sven Kappel, vice president - Head of Project Software Defined Vehicle at Bosch