The Software Fix Automakers Have Been Waiting for Might Be Here in 2026
QNX and Vector’s collaboration promises to streamline the complex, costly software foundations behind the next generation of cars.
By Tim Stevens
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Ryan Lugo
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Motor Trend Archive
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Dec 12, 2025 (Updated: May 15, 2026)
We’re in the middle of one of the most transformative periods in automotive history. No, it’s not the shift to electrification, though that’s certainly causing no shortage of consternation for some legacy automakers. It’s the rapid race to embrace the software-defined vehicle, or SDV, a concept that’s reshaping not just how cars are built, but how they’re conceived, developed, and monetized.
What on paper sounds like a simple switch from discrete hardware components to over-the-air (OTA) updatable algorithms has become an endless string of headaches among some of the industry’s biggest players. Increasing demands for ever-evolving functionality—from advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) to predictive maintenance and personalized infotainment—must be delivered through a tangled web of legacy systems and stringent regulatory requirements. The result is a nearly untenable situation that could see future cars offering fewer features, not more, if a solution isn’t found quickly.
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Thankfully, a potential solution is emerging from a strategic partnership between two industry titans. QNX, the hardware virtualization gurus at BlackBerry, and Vector Informatik, the middleware maestros, have teamed up to create what they’re calling the Foundational Vehicle Software Platform. If it delivers on its promises, it could eliminate many of the most complex and challenging aspects of automotive software development, potentially saving automakers billions and accelerating the timeline for SDV deployment by years.
The Software-Defined Shift: More Than Just OTA Updates
The term software-defined vehicle isn’t exactly new. But as this low-level concept has sprung to the forefront of vehicle design, its meaning has been evolving rapidly.
“It’s a term that’s been around for seven or eight years,” John Wall, the president at QNX, explained in a 2025 interview. “I think in the last few years, it’s really come to mean something very specific. I think for me, what it really signifies is that the vehicle is getting more and more dependent on software for features.”
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In some organizations, the shift to SDVs has been pitched as a sort of panacea for all an organization’s woes, enabling a dramatic reduction and simplification of hardware within the car—all while providing a platform for vehicles that can stay relevant on the market for longer periods, thanks to continuous software updates.
“I think one of the main factors driving SDV in the traditional car companies is the ability to continue to enhance the vehicle over time, and to be able to add new features, and to be able to monetize those new features within the vehicle,” Wall added. This monetization aspect, often through subscription-based services and feature unlocks, is a key driver for automakers looking to increase recurring revenue streams beyond the initial vehicle sale, especially in a highly competitive market where differentiation is increasingly difficult.
But behind all those promises lurks a troubling reality that has left the software organizations of some manufacturers in a shambles. The complexity of integrating hundreds of millions of lines of code from dozens of suppliers, all while meeting stringent safety and security standards, has proven to be a monumental challenge.
The Organizational Overhaul Automakers Didn’t See Coming
Achieving new heights in software doesn’t just require more advanced code. For some traditional automakers, it requires an entire organizational reboot, a shift in culture that many have struggled to implement.
“At the moment, they are struggling, especially in the development processes,” Matthias Traub, a member of the board of directors and the CTO at Vector, noted. “Also from a cultural perspective. They are coming from a clear waterfall-based process with clear roles.”
The waterfall approach is a legacy software development methodology designed around projects with well-defined tasks, roles, and deadlines, where each phase must be completed before the next begins. That doesn’t work so well in an increasingly dynamic automotive software landscape, where requirements change frequently and bugs are discovered late in the development cycle.
“Now it’s time to go towards a real DevOps approach,” Traub said. “So you have smaller teams, which have the responsibility for the whole chain, so the design, the build, the software development, the test, and so on.” This shift to DevOps, or development operations, emphasizes collaboration, automation, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), allowing teams to iterate quickly and respond to changes in real-time. However, this cultural shift is proving difficult for some established automotive companies, many of which have hierarchical structures and risk-averse cultures built around hardware engineering rather than software development.
Furthermore, there’s a misguided belief among many companies that they need to develop every piece of code in-house, an approach that has led to significant inefficiencies. “I think that’s where a lot of them have fallen down,” Wall admitted.
Feeling the need to own the entire software stack means developers writing software to do extremely basic functions like securely sending data over a car’s built-in modem or painting pixels on the car’s displays. Companies that just want to build cars have instead found themselves writing layer upon layer of software that their customers will never see. This “reinventing the wheel” approach not only wastes valuable development time and resources but also diverts focus from core competencies.
“Their energy should be focused on features that delight their customers, not on operating systems and networking stacks,” Wall emphasized. This aligns with the growing trend of automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) focusing on their unique value propositions—such as brand identity, user experience (UX), and domain-specific features—while outsourcing or partnering for foundational software components.
The Regulatory Tightrope: Navigating a Compliance Minefield
If a software stack growing taller by the minute isn’t scary enough, the breadth of modern software regulatory frameworks can be a massive challenge. The lists of things developers must be aware of just keeps getting longer, creating a compliance minefield that’s difficult to navigate.
“Things like the software bill of material, the provenance of where your software came from, you have what’s going on in the U.S., no Chinese code,” Wall said, referring to recent geopolitical tensions and supply chain security concerns that have led to restrictions on the use of certain software components. “There are a lot of things to think about. It’s a really dynamic situation.”
These regulatory hurdles add significant complexity and cost to the development process. Automakers must now track the origin of every software component, ensure compliance with various national and international regulations, and maintain detailed documentation for audit purposes. This is especially challenging in the automotive industry, where vehicles can contain tens of thousands of software components from hundreds of suppliers, making it difficult to maintain a complete and accurate software bill of materials (SBOM).
Not only do evolving regulations provide a moving target for initial compliance, but they also require ongoing updatability and response to vulnerabilities. As new regulations are introduced or existing ones are updated, automakers must be able to quickly adapt their software and demonstrate compliance. This requires a flexible and agile development process, as well as robust monitoring and update mechanisms to address security vulnerabilities that may be discovered after the vehicle is on the road.
“The industry is at a tipping point where software complexity threatens to outpace innovations,” Traub warned. If this continues, Traub worries that next-generation cars might actually have fewer features than those on the road today, as automakers struggle to balance feature creep with regulatory compliance. This would be a significant setback for the industry, which has been touting the benefits of software-defined vehicles, such as enhanced user experiences and new revenue streams, for years.
A New Platform Emerges: QNX and Vector’s Solution
Complex regulatory environments are an area that QNX has navigated repeatedly in the past. The company’s foundational operating system can be found in everything from nuclear power plants to military aircraft, where the cost of failure is measured in lives and national security. This deep expertise in safety-critical systems provides a strong foundation for their automotive offerings.
“A lot of the security requirements came from the medical field, and we saw them a little bit earlier, based on the Biden administration, some of the things that they put in place,” Wall said, referring to recent executive orders aimed at improving cybersecurity and supply chain security in critical infrastructure, including the automotive sector.
The Foundational Vehicle Software Platform is built on that expertise. It’s a series of interfaces and tools from QNX and Vector designed to streamline modern automotive software development. It builds on both companies’ long history of abstracting and simplifying complicated aspects of integrated systems development. In an automotive sense, that means providing secure, reliable, and certifiable hardware integration, allowing automakers to focus on their core competencies.
“We’re trying to remove a lot of those difficult things to deal with by bringing them together and providing one source of truth for the platform,” Wall said. This “single source of truth” approach helps to eliminate the confusion and errors that can arise when different teams use different tools and processes, ensuring that everyone is working with the same information and following the same procedures.
QNX and Vector have been working together for years on various projects but have worked closely together for the past 18 months to develop the new platform. Although still an evolving and ongoing project, it’s already showing solid promise not just in terms of simplification but performance, too. The platform is designed to run on a variety of hardware architectures, including x86 and Arm
