Browse Topic: Embedded software
If you ask automotive software developers - and QNX Research did - you'll hear that OEMs would benefit from an update to their software strategies. In October, QNX released its “Under the Hood: The SDV Developer Report,” a survey of 1,100 auto industry software developers in North America, Europe, and Asia and came away with three main points. First, 58% of respondents said software recalls have “significantly” changed how they develop software. Second, 91% said they expect AI to play a “major role” in future software development, estimating AI could replace 35% of current roles by 2035. Finally, and music to QNX's ears, 80% said automakers should put their focus on application-layer innovations and not on software infrastructure. That last finding describes the space where QNX, a division of BlackBerry Limited, and automotive technology supplier Vector have created an initiative to first define what foundational software means for SDVs and then deliver those components to OEMs and
The automotive industry's future hinges on a new AI-native engineering workflow that accelerates iteration, strengthens system thinking, and preserves human judgment. Automotive development cycles are compressing at a pace the industry has never seen. The shift to all-electric fleets of software-defined vehicles is moving faster than traditional processes can absorb. In parallel, regulatory pressure and customer expectations keep rising, demanding greater performance, higher safety, better energy efficiency, and sharper competitiveness. In this environment, OEMs R&D competitiveness depends on three factors: How quickly teams can explore and iterate on design choices while delivering differentiated value, product performance, and cost efficiency. How early system-level interactions can be detected, before they turn into delivery friction or costly late-stage failures. How effectively a company can encode and scale its internal engineering know-how into lean development processes.
With the rise of AI and other new digital technologies on the horizon, ACT Expo 2026 will be a crucial intersection for industry leaders to map out the route ahead. Since 2011, ACT Expo has served as a meeting point of technology and business discussions for the commercial vehicle industry. The 2026 show in Las Vegas (www.actexpo.com) is shaping up to be another important waypoint for the industry as it continues to grapple with new technologies, regulations and other significant challenges. This year's agenda program builds on ACT Expo's long-established emphasis on clean transportation and places an increased focus on the digital frontier, including AI, autonomy, connectivity and software-defined vehicles. Truck & Off-Highway Enginering interviewed Erik Neandross, president of the Clean Transportation Solutions group at TRC, about what topics are emerging as the main trends heading into 2026 and what he thinks will be some of the most important themes of the upcoming convention.
The rapid evolution of in-vehicle electronic systems toward zonal based architectures introduces a new layer of complexity in automotive diagnostics. Traditional architectures, built on Controller Area Network (CAN) and Local Interconnect Network (LIN) protocols, operate on a uniform Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), enabling simplified and consistent diagnostic workflows across Electronic Control Units (ECUs). However, next-generation platforms must accommodate diverse communication protocols (e.g., CAN, LIN, DoIP, SOME/IP) and heterogeneous operating systems (e.g., RTOS, Linux, QNX), resulting in fragmented and inflexible diagnostic processes. This paper presents a Diagnostic controller that addresses these challenges by enabling unified, scalable, and adaptive diagnostic capabilities across modern vehicle platforms. The proposed system consolidates protocol handling at the application level, abstracts diagnostic complexities, and allows cross-platform communication through
For a company focused on selling components to make physical connections in vehicles, TE Connectivity is more than ready for future growth in software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and the corresponding rise in vehicles with zonal architectures. Ruediger Ostermann, vice president and chief technology officer for Global Automotive at TE Connectivity, said TE agrees with industry estimates that the number of cars with a zonal architecture will rise from around 2% in 2023 to between 35-40% in the mid-2030s.
This year's SAE COMVEC conference held in mid-September in Schaumburg, Illinois, was focused around the theme “Shaping the Future Together” by embracing advancement, empowerment and exploration in the commercial and off-highway vehicle industries. Workforce and technology topics ranged from skills gaps to powertrain development and software-defined vehicles (SDVs) to AI deployment - a thread that ran through many of the conference's sessions. Following are a few of the salient points made by industry experts at the annual engineering event:
The development of cyber-physical systems necessarily involves the expertise of an interdisciplinary team – not all of whom have deep embedded software knowledge. Graphical software development environments alleviate many of these challenges but in turn create concerns for their appropriateness in a rigorous software initiative. Their tool suites further enable the creation of physics models which can be coupled in the loop with the corresponding software component’s control law in an integrated test environment. Such a methodology addresses many of the challenges that arise in trying to create suitable test cases for physics-based problems. If the test developer ensures that test development in such a methodology observes software engineering’s design-for-change paradigm, the test harness can be reused from a virtualized environment to one using a hardware-in-the-loop simulator and/or production machinery. Concerns over the lack of model-based software engineering’s rigor can be
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