The Eclipse Foundation, one of the largest open source foundation, along with multiple industry leaders, including Bosch, Microsoft and others, today 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.
Today, next-generation vehicle developers are turning to software-based solutions for their new designs. The 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.
“We’re very excited to develop this new effort here at the Eclipse Foundation. Although we have extensive roots with the automotive community, a project of this scope and scale has never been attempted before,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “This initiative enables participants to get in at the ‘ground level” and ensure they each have an equal voice in this project.”
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. Vehicle manufactures around the world may use this foundation to focus on differentiating customer features, like mobility services and end-user experience improvements, while saving time and cost on the non-differentiating elements, like 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.
