After the rough COVID-19 years, 2022 has seen the start of economic improvements. Although the automotive industry is experiencing its worst sales numbers in over a decade, it saw increased profits thanks to strong demand, allowing for higher prices. Geopolitical issues such as the war in Ukraine and microchip shortages are forcing analysts and OEMs to remain careful regarding their forecasted results.

Canonical strongly believes that the future of automotive will rely on open source to define and run the next generation of vehicles. To drive this transition, state-of-the-art cybersecurity and functional safety are critical. To learn more about the industry’s specific constraints, we are actively involved in several automotive consortiums and are contributing to automotive-related standards.

If you’ve been reading our recent automotive blogs and white papers, you know that the automotive industry is highly complex and regulated, especially when it comes to functional safety and cybersecurity. Standards and consortiums help ensure that companies provide a common framework and follow compatibility and interoperability approaches. Usually, these standards define constraints in how specific components and systems are designed or how they should work together.

Canonical is excited to announce it is now an official member of the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle Working Group (SDV WG). Eclipse SDV focuses on software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and pushes innovations in automotive-grade solutions using open-source software. By offering an open technology platform, automotive companies can use and integrate open standards and powerful developer experience for their own software development.

One may say that competitive dynamics in the automotive space are constantly changing, and they would not be wrong in the slightest. As retailers face the daily battlefield of getting their customers’ attention with the right mix of products at the right price and on the right platform, their technology infrastructure must be lean and efficient while achieving those goals—and that is no easy feat.

ERLANGEN, Germany, and DOUGLAS, Isle of Man, February 21, 2023 – Elektrobit and Canonical today announced EB corbos Linux – built on Ubuntu, an industry first bringing the largest open-source Linux community to automotive software. Available immediately from Elektrobit, the new solution provides OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers with the benefits and flexibility of an open-source operating system for developing electronic control units (ECUs) in software-defined vehicles.