EU Action Plan for the Automotive Industry Should Allow Synergies with Other Sectors
Today, the EU Commission presents the “EU Industrial Action Plan for the automotive sector”. The FZI Research Center for Information Technology recommends paying more attention to possible synergies than to sector boundaries.
Karlsruhe, 03/05/2025 – Central software components and data access for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are, for example, used in various applications. Therefore, innovation in future technologies and capabilities should consider such synergies with other mobility areas, and the automotive sector should not be considered separately from other areas. European companies can cooperate competitively, develop faster, and save on costs by using identical building blocks.
To point out this untapped potential of technology development, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology participated in the public consultation of the EU Commission. The Commission had allowed public participation in the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of the European Automotive Industry at the beginning of February. Now that this has ended and after several rounds of talks with a limited circle of invited representatives, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presents the “EU Industrial Action Plan for the automotive sector” to the public. It was developed on the basis of this process.
The European Commission has based the Strategic Dialogue on a short concept paper. It served as a starting point for discussions and participation. With this template and based on its core competence in developing software-based mobility solutions, the FZI has formulated its statement.
For Oliver Denninger, Division Manager at the FZI and responsible for the FZI’s statement, this point is crucial: “From a technical point of view, both the high-volume automotive market and the markets for passenger and logistics vehicles with low to medium volumes share many common building blocks for automation. Both can benefit from the availability of high-quality data, such as maps and intelligent infrastructure. Extending the focus of the European Commission’s action plan beyond the automotive sector to include mobility solutions could accelerate market introduction and reduce the required capital expenditure. The highly integrated European industry would have a unique advantage over global competitors here.”
The FZI statement notes that Europe currently does not have sufficient cross-industry technological sovereignty in these areas. “Therefore, the distinction between market-differentiating and non-differentiating capabilities should be re-evaluated,” Denninger further explains. Using open-source principles could create a fair competitive environment without causing major compliance issues with competition law. The European initiative Software-Defined Vehicle of the Future (SDVoF) is an example of such action in this field. The FZI is involved in the initiative in the FEDERATE and HAL4SDV projects.
Paradigms of the open data community should also be considered in a broader sense. They promote the transparency of systems and support the development of AI-based ADAS functions and systems. This could enable European coopetition in this area, that is, the combination of cooperation and competition, involving science and society.
In the medium term, the European Union should also take into account open hardware reference architectures to enable a fully sovereign technology stack. This would bring innovative open-source communities closer to market-ready applications, including mobility systems requiring safety qualification and homologation. To this end, initiatives such as the CHIPS-JU High-Performance Automotive RISC-V platforms should be continued to provide automotive-compatible execution platforms for ADAS. For safety-critical applications, software and hardware must be considered and developed together.
About the FZI
The FZI Research Center for Information Technology, with headquarters in Karlsruhe and a branch office in Berlin, is a non-profit institution for information technology application research and technology transfer. It delivers the latest scientific findings in information technology to companies and public institutions and qualifies individuals for academic and business careers or the leap into self-employment. Supervised by professors from various faculties, the research groups at the FZI develop interdisciplinary concepts, software, hardware and system solutions for their clients and implement the solutions found as prototypes. The FZI House of Living Labs provides a unique research environment for application research. The FZI is an innovation partner of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and strategic partner of the German Informatics Society (GI).
Download press information (pdf):
More downloads & links:
- Press release from the European Commission on the Strategic Dialogue
- Concept paper: Strategic Dialogue on the future of the European automotive industry
- Further information on the European Software-Defined Vehicle of the Future (SDVoF) initiative
- Further information on the role of the FZI in the FEDERATE project
- Further information on the HAL4SDV project