EV Software Stacks Are Going Open-Source — The Real Landscape of AGL, Eclipse SDV, and COVESA
Automotive Grade Linux, Eclipse SDV, and COVESA are building the shared open-source infrastructure that automakers no longer want to maintain independently. Here's how the initiatives work, who's involved, and what standardized diagnostic APIs mean for EV owners.
The push toward open-source automotive software has produced three overlapping initiatives that now represent the most substantial collaborative effort in the industry. Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) working group, and the Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance (COVESA) each target a different layer of the vehicle software stack, but all operate on the same premise: shared infrastructure — CAN bus abstraction, FOTA update orchestration, diagnostic APIs — costs less to maintain collectively than in parallel proprietary implementations, and no single manufacturer gains a competitive edge from keeping these layers proprietary.
AGL, hosted under the Linux Foundation, counts over 150 member organizations including Toyota, Denso, Renesas, and Panasonic. Its main deliverable is a standardized Linux-based platform for in-vehicle infotainment and connectivity. AGL IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) is in production in Toyota and Subaru vehicles, making it the most deployed open-source automotive OS by volume. Eclipse SDV, launched in 2022, targets the connectivity and software-defined vehicle layers above the OS. BMW is a founding member alongside Bosch, Continental, and Microsoft. The project's Kuksa Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) — a standardized tree of vehicle data signals — is the piece most relevant to EV diagnostics: apps and fleet management tools built against VSS can read battery state, charge history, and powertrain telemetry without manufacturer-specific SDKs, provided OEMs implement the interface.
For EV owners and the third-party tool ecosystem, the practical impact takes years to materialize in production vehicles but matters when it does. Today, third-party battery health monitoring tools, charge optimization apps, and fleet management platforms must negotiate separate data access agreements with each manufacturer and maintain separate SDKs that break when OEMs update their stacks. A VSS-compliant diagnostic layer across brands would eliminate that fragmentation — the same way standardized web protocols eliminated the need for separate tools for each website. The path from working group specification to production vehicle is long, but the direction across the industry is clear.
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