Long-standing competitive ways of creating automotive technology are being up-ended as some of the West’s biggest carmakers have begin sharing previously secret digital know-how behind the scenes – in order to create a single shared operating system to power future vehicles.
We’d heard there was some software collaboration in the air but a major revelation by Automotive News this week has shown the surprising scale of the unprecedented alliance. Fierce rivals like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Stellantis have agreed to share previously closely-guarded digital assets in the face of the wave of high-tech Chinese vehicles that threaten to swamp the market.
The software alliance, code-named Eclipse S-Core, means direct competitors like Audi and BMW or VW and Peugeot are pooling software to create a unified operating system for up-coming cars.
Just as Samsung, Google, and Motorola make different looking phones but all use the same basic Android operating system underneath, these rival car companies are – for the first time – creating the foundation to do the same thing for vehicles.
For over a century, car companies have kept their technology like this secret to beat the competition. If you built a smoother engine or a smarter dashboard, you locked it away behind patent lawyers. Driven by a growing panic over fast-evolving Chinese tech competitors, the old-world rivals are abandoning the tradition of corporate secrecy.
Like any operating system, the Eclipse S-Core will sit silently in the background, making sure the car functions digitally. Today, that’s a big deal. In the increasingly digital and electric future, it will be an even bigger deal.
For example, these future auto operating systems will process raw data from radar, cameras and steering sensors, manage downloaded updates and direct commands to operate a physical unit whether that’s air con or electronic steering. The central software is the digital foundation for a growing array of safety features like automatic emergency braking, lane-keeping assistance and adaptive cruise control.
For electric cars, this software monitors battery temperature, health and power distribution to maximize range and controls brake regeneration. And because modern cars are connected to the internet, this software acts as a core firewall to block hackers from accessing the steering or braking controls.
And a wide range of rival cars will now be using exactly the same system under the skin. Because Eclipse S-Core is an open-source code blueprint, it is up to each individual car company to decide which models get it first – but there seems to be little hesitation.
BMW intends to debut it in its forthcoming Neue Klasse generation of electric vehicles like the iX3 and the electric 3-Series . Mini's future electric hatchbacks will follow shortly after.
Mercedes-Benz is heavily investing in its own luxury interface, calling it an operating system (MB.OS), but using the shared Eclipse S-Core code as the hidden, deep-safety foundation underneath that system. It will be starting with future generations of the Mercedes CLA , C-Class and E-Class electric models.
The Volkswagen Group has struggled with its internal software division (Cariad) for years. So for VW, Eclipse S-Core is a lifeline. Expect shared software to debut in premium electric SUVs like the Audi Q6 e-tron and future electric Porsche Macan/Taycan updates, before eventually trickling down to cars like the VW ID.4 and Golf. VW's commercial truck division, Traton (which makes Scania and MAN trucks), has also signed up to use it.
Stellantis (Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroën, Fiat, Jeep, Alfa Romeo) caters more to budget-conscious drivers so is hoping this shared system will slash the cost of building affordable electric cars. You will likely see it running silently behind the dashboards of future generations of the Peugeot 3008, Vauxhall Corsa Electric and the Fiat Grande Panda.
This month is the first time these global heavyweight companies have openly acknowledged they could no longer afford to build software-defined vehicles entirely on their own and effectively admitted that nimble Chinese rivals are out-developing them.
Instead of Mercedes, BMW and VW each spending billions writing separate code to handle basics like telling a steering wheel sensor how to talk to a braking sensor, they are pooling their tech to create this shared, public blueprint. For months, critics said this was just corporate talk and that a committee of rival car companies could never agree on anything, let alone complicated computer code.
But a recent live demonstration at the Bosch Connected World event in Berlin saw ETAS code plugged into actual car components, showing that what it called the "Vehicle Software Platform Suite" can safely handle complex, real-life tasks. This included processing camera data, controlling car stability and downloading over-the-air updates without glitching across the systems of entirely different car brands.
