Starting January 1, 2020, Volkswagen Group’s Car.Software organization will operate as an independent business unit, centralizing the associates and subsidiaries within the Group that develop car software and software for digital ecosystems. Initially, around 3,000 digital experts will be grouped together under the Car.Software banner.
The expanded Car.Software organization intends to invest over €7bn (US$7.75bn) in its tasks and projects by 2025. The planned development of a uniform software architecture will enable VW to generate sizable economies of scale in the Group, substantially reducing per-vehicle software costs across all brands.
Car.Software will be based at Audi Electronics Venture and will incorporate other German sites in Berlin, Bochum, the Ingolstadt area, the Stuttgart area, and in Wolfsburg. International locations of the software organization include Seattle, Washington, USA, and Beijing, China.
Volkswagen Group has plans to expand the newly integrated organization with the goal of transferring in skilled professionals from the Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi und Porsche brands. Over time, the number of experts will also be sustainably increased through new hires, strategic acquisitions and further partnerships. VW expects that by 2025, more than 10,000 associates in the Car.Software organization will develop software for vehicles and digital ecosystems as well as customer-centric functions at dealers.
“With our Car.Software organization we will create an ideal platform for pioneering software development in the Volkswagen Group. We are stepping up our efforts,” said Christian Senger, member of the board of management of the Volkswagen brand responsible for Digital Car & Services, who has Group-wide responsibility for in-vehicle software.
“We will increase our competitiveness in the Volkswagen Group by controlling a much larger share of the value creation in the digitalization of our vehicles going forward. For this reason, we will also develop software on a cross-brand basis in the Car.Software organization. This will allow us to achieve important synergies and economies of scale for all brands.”
Once a number of organizational questions have been resolved in cooperation with the responsible works councils over the coming months, the Car.Software organization will play a key role in boosting the in-house share of VW car software development from the current figure of less than 10% to at least 60% by 2025.
The organization will develop cross-brand software in five domains: connected car and device platform, intelligent body and cockpit, automated driving, vehicle motion and energy, and digital business and mobility services. The objective is to establish one uniform software architecture in the Group and bring together parallel development paths in the brands.
The domains will cover the development work on one standard vehicle operating system – vw.os – for all Group vehicles and their connection to the Volkswagen Automotive Cloud, a standardized infotainment platform, all assistance systems including highly automated driving functions, software functions for connecting the drive system, chassis and charging technology, and ecosystems for all of the brands’ mobility services and digital business models.