Survey: QNX Finds Challenges, Openings in SDV Work

A new study shows the difficulty of software integration

December 1, 2025

Sebastian Blanco

QNX claims its software is used in more than 255 million vehicles on the road today. (QNX)

If you ask automotive software developers – and QNX Research did – you’ll hear that OEMs would benefit from an update to their software strategies. In October, QNX released its “Under the Hood: The SDV Developer Report,” a survey of 1,100 auto industry software developers in North America, Europe, and Asia and came away with three main points. First, 58% of respondents said software recalls have “significantly” changed how they develop software. Second, 91% said they expect AI to play a “major role” in future software development, estimating AI could replace 35% of current roles by 2035. Finally, and music to QNX’s ears, 80% said automakers should put their focus on application-layer innovations and not on software infrastructure.

That last finding describes the space where QNX, a division of BlackBerry Limited, and automotive technology supplier Vector have created an initiative to first define what foundational software means for SDVs and then deliver those components to OEMs and Tier 1s, which can then focus on what makes sense for them as a brand or for a specific customer, Justin Moon, vice president of Core Product Engineering at QNX, told SAE Media.

“Non-differentiating does not mean non-essential or not needed,” he said. “It's about driving focus. Our entire product portfolio effectively serves as the base to that foundational vehicle software platform,” including things like diagnostics and unified logging.

QNX recently released the latest version of its safety-certified operating system, which forms the basis of the foundational vehicle software platform, and integrates components from, for example, QNX and Vector.

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities were the top risk that developers worry could stymie the SDV rollout over the next 5-10 years. (QNX)

“You have to understand that safety certification and security certification are arguably just as complicated as the technology integration itself,” Moon said. “Solving those challenges is a huge value and a huge time-to-series benefit to the OEMs and the Tier Ones.” Moon said QNX will open the safety-certified OS up for early access with “very well-defined APIs” by the end of 2025, will full certification and general availability coming late in 2026.

Incorporating legacy

One area where the industry could use some help, Moon said, is with software integrations and performance enhancements. “They come up in just about every SOP, so why not team up and build a product and a platform that actually satisfies those across the board,” he said. It allows for leveraging economies of scale.” Smaller OEMs that have expressed interest in building lower-priced vehicles could benefit from a foundational platform that is ubiquitous across multiple ECUs or endpoints.

“You need it in every ECU,” Moon said. “Why not [standardize it]? That way, you can focus on your true value add and leveraging those very in-demand developer resources on the differentiation and the value therein.”

Moon said software integration is a problem that continues to frustrate the auto industry. “Anything that the industry can do to help the OEMs, the Tier Ones and the other suppliers actually mitigate some of that complexity is a huge win,” he said. “That's not necessarily just an opinion of mine. Look at any conference that's happened over the last 18 months. Software complexity is one of the key topics, right? So, anything that we can do to mitigate some of those complexities, whether they are technical or more regulatory, I think that's a win for the industry.”

One aspect of that win could be shorter development cycles, an obviously important topic these days. Moon said QNX’s foundational software can make it easier to integrate legacy systems, bringing 100 years of advancement to tomorrow’s high-tech platforms.

“There's still a lot of legacy integration that has to occur, which does increase the complexity of the overarching vehicle-level integration,” he said. “Obviously, you've seen lots of significant change, for the better, in terms of EV architectures in the vehicles and the consolidation of certain componentry. At the same time, there are still legacy systems that need to be adhered to and integrated with extreme value. Legacy doesn't necessarily mean bad, right? It just means that it's something that needs to be considered.”

Defining SDVs

QNX believes its underlying structures are the type of feature that can push engineers to introduce better SDV technologies.

“Without a solid foundation of fundamental technologies, it's very difficult to really realize what an SDV should be,” Moon said. “We're not just a quote, unquote, real-time operating system. We are a high-level operating system that is fundamentally deterministic, safety and security-certified. From a feature-to-feature perspective, you could compare us to Linux. The differentiation is around the architecture of the operating system and the ability to actually certify at all levels from a safety and security perspective.”

Moon said OEMs have a number of ways to benefit from QNX’s offerings.

“[Software definition provides] the ability for the industry to provide new content, and I don't mean content and just from an ingestion perspective, but new content in terms of better models for object detection and different trim line models and all of those types of things,” he said. “The whole point of migration to software definition is to make those things a little bit easier.”