April 21, 2026 - Elektrobit CEO Calls On Automakers to Stop Reinventing Code

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for April 21, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

As legacy automakers have struggled to implement software-defined vehicles or SDVs over the past five or six years, one of the biggest obstacles to success is having the right engineering processes and procedures in place to ease integration and allow deployment across many vehicles. Automakers and suppliers have been putting code into vehicles for more than 50 years, so they know how to write code. When I began my engineering career in 1990, the code that went into a vehicle at the start of production never got changed over the product lifecycle. Instead, for every new application, the last iteration of code was updated and revised to improve performance or functionality because the code that was already on the road would remain unchanged.

At a conference in Germany, Elektrobit CEO Maria Anhalt has called out the poorly defined software interfaces and constant rewriting of standard functions as leading to "integration hell." The inconsistency across the industry, with every automaker seemingly deciding it needs its own proprietary software platform, makes it even harder for suppliers to integrate and test the components they provide. In the mobile device industry, this has led to an almost universal consolidation on two platforms, Android and iOS, so developers only need to write to one or the other or both. Dozens of device makers use Android, and an app written for Android will function on almost all of them. 

The auto industry similarly needs to consolidate down to relatively few platforms since that isn't a product differentiator anyway. This way, suppliers and automaker engineers only need to ensure their applications work on these platforms, and then they can focus more on innovation rather than constant debugging. 

Thanks for listening.