Since 2013, Tilmann Ochs, Daniel Wagner and I have been working on research activities to define, motivate and implement a software platform for autonomous driving systems using custom-off-the-shelf open-source software. On FOSDEM 2014, we presented our understanding of future automotive software and our plans to use pre-existing open-source software for implementation of a collaborative automotive base platform.

Now, three years later, it is time to re-evaluate this effort and critically review its progress, its success stories and its failures. In this talk, we present our main assumptions in 2013, and give some insights in on-going software development activities supporting our ideas. Then, we evaluate to which extend we were successful to implement these ideas, to which extend we could improve our understanding, and how this has refined our plans.

On the technical side, we discuss the factors that influence the selection of the communication middleware and the underlying operating system of an automotive platform for autonomous driving systems. On the business side, we discuss the economics of automotive software development and implications on use and development of open-source software in the automotive domain that we encountered.