Why open source gives the auto industry a second chance and which startups are already benefiting today.
The auto industry has long convinced itself that it could catch up with the software lag behind Tesla and China with a few thousand new developers. You just have to hire enough programmers, roll out a few new platforms – and the industrial group will become a tech champion. This illusion has now collapsed, but the industry has found a solution.
More than 30 manufacturers, suppliers and chip companies, including BMW, Daimler, VW and Stellantis, have agreed on a common open source basis for vehicle software. Behind it are the Association of German Automobile Manufacturers (VDA) and the Eclipse Foundation, which is working to anchor open source software in the industry. People have finally understood that the auto industry can only survive if they abandon the idea of trying to do everything on their own.
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Chinese manufacturers like BYD, Nio and Xiaomi have long been developing their cars like smartphones. A central computer architecture, continuous software updates, new functions via download. The car is no longer the product there – it is the platform. Whoever iterates quickly wins.
The old model has lost
European manufacturers, on the other hand, carry decades of proprietary IT with them. Everyone builds their own middleware, their own interfaces, their own security models. This makes systems expensive, slow and, above all, not scalable. This is exactly what is deadly in the platform age. In the end, the complex systems slow down the speed of development. And that’s exactly what you can no longer allow yourself to do.
Open source is therefore not an ideology, but an industrial policy tool. When the industry agrees on common ground, innovation can happen where it belongs: at the top of the platform and deep in the infrastructure. Because European manufacturers have a lot of catching up to do on both levels.
This is also good news for startups from the mobility scene. For the first time, a market is being created in which young companies can realistically play. As long as each OEM maintains its own software world, every collaboration remains an expensive individual project. An open architecture turns vehicle software into something that can be developed and sold like cloud services.
Startups are already making money
Companies like Apex.AI from Munich show what this looks like. They build a certifiable, automotive-compatible software base on the open source robotics stack ROS2 that BMW, Bosch or Volvo can use directly. Autoware, the open driving stack for autonomous vehicles, has long been used by European test fleets, robotaxi projects and suppliers – operated and industrialized by companies like TIER IV. And providers like TTTech Auto or dSpace make their money by making these open architectures so robust that they work in series.
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This is not a marginal phenomenon. This is how platform ecosystems are created: one provides the basis, many others create value on top of it. It’s exactly this model that made the tech industry big – and it’s exactly how Chinese manufacturers built their speed.
This is inconvenient for Europe’s car manufacturers. It means giving up control. But the alternative would be to continue competing in isolated software silos against globally scaling platforms. This race has long been decided. Open source does not guarantee success. But it is the last realistic chance to become part of the global innovation system again – instead of just its customer.
