SOAFEE Seminar China 2025 Recap

The SOAFEE community showed up in Shanghai in early November for the fifth SOAFEE Seminar, bringing together automotive OEMs, software innovators, silicon providers, and ecosystem partners to share progress on the rapidly accelerating shift toward software-defined and AI-defined vehicles.  With more than 250 registrants and strong representation from leading OEMs, including NIO, Li Auto, CHANGAN, BMW Group, DENSO, and SigmaStar, this year's seminar reflected China's growing leadership in shaping the SDV and AI-defined vehicle landscape.   In addition to the main program, SOAFEE also hosted a closed-door, invite-only APAC member workshop focused on advancing technical alignment and future Blueprint direction.   

Ahead of the seminar, SOAFEE convened a half-day, closed-door workshop for APAC members, chaired by Jerry Zhao, from Panasonic Automotive Systems, the leader of the SOAFEE APAC Hub.  The session brought together over 50 participants for a structured discussion on some of the region’s most pressing software development and architecture challenges.  The agenda centered on four areas: preparing virtual ECUs for SOP readiness, evaluating the role of containers in cross-domain consolidation, aligning on priority use cases for vehicle AI, and exploring new candidate technologies for future Blueprint contributions.  Across these discussions, members emphasized practical deployment barriers, the importance of standardized interfaces, and the need for closer coordination with peer industry consortia.  The workshop reinforced the strength of regional collaboration and surfaced clear opportunities for continued technical convergence through SOAFEE. 

In his Seminar opening remarks, Suraj Gajendra, the chair of the SOAFEE Governing Body,  highlighted SOAFEE's global expansion to more than 150 members, with APAC companies representing nearly 40%, highlighting the region's role at the forefront of the SDV and AI-defined vehicle transformation.  He also shared key milestones, such as SOAFEE.next, an expanding portfolio of member-delivered Blueprints, and deeper alignment with peer consortia working on complementary layers of the automotive software stack.  Suraj also invited other governing body members to extend the welcome, with LG Electronics and Panasonic Automotive in person, and video messages from Aumovio, AWS and Red Hat. 

The seminar included updates from the Marketing Steering Committee, Technical Steering Committee, and the APAC Regional Hub, highlighting how community efforts continue to turn other methodologies into practical, consumable software. Some of the key themes highlighted included:  

Blueprints as a path to standardized interfaces  

SOAFEE shared its growing Blueprint roadmap, including efforts such as PICCOLO, Open AD Kit, Unified HMI, and vSkipGen.  These examples demonstrate how multiple companies can converge on shared patterns that validate interface behavior and unlock portability across hardware and cloud environments.  

Expanding focus areas for developers  

The Technical Steering Committee outlined work spanning AI workload integration, heterogeneous compute, functional safety, cloud native toolchains, and lifecycle management.  The message was consistent across sessions:  SOAFEE members are collaborating across the stack to identify and mature standardized interfaces that reduce integration risk and accelerate SDV and AIDV timelines.   

APAC Regional Hub impact  

Led by Jerry Zhao of Panasonic Automotive Systems, the APAC Regional Hub continues to lower barriers to regional collaboration through time-zone-aligned meetings, shared problem statements, and OEM- and Tier-1-driven validation of virtualization, container security, AI simulation, and vECU readiness.  Participation continues to grow across China, Japan, and Korea. 

The seminar featured a strong lineup of SOAFEE member presentations, each offering practical insight into how the industry is tackling software-defined and AI-defined vehicle development.  Across the sessions, several consistent themes emerged, reflecting both shared challenges and shared momentum across the ecosystem.  Together, these discussions underscored the importance of open collaboration and Blueprint-driven development as the industry advances from SDV foundations toward AI-defined vehicle capabilities.  You can find all the presentation files from Toyota, ASIC, Red Hat, Astemo, Autocore, DENSO, ThunderSoft, Panasonic Automotive, LG Electronics, Black Sesame, and Arm China here.  Some of the key topics discussed included:  

•  The organizational and technical shifts needed to support SDV scale, including diagnostics modernization and cross-line configuration governance
• The rise of open-source in China, including vulnerability detection research, compliance automation trends, and maturing open-software governance practices
• The growing role of functional safety Linux, mixed criticality containers, and standardized OS infrastructure for ADAs and safety workloads
• The use of virtualization,  cloud native tooling, and generative AI to accelerate idea creation, prototyping, and validation workflows
• AI-Driven automation across requirements, design, testing, and verification, highlighting new development models for automotive software
• Cloud native ADAS architectures, deterministic middleware, and regional cloud deployments that validate portability across hardware and cloud providers 

Seven member companies hosted live demos featuring SDV tools, ADAS solutions, cloud native workflows, cockpit technologies, and Blueprint implementations.  These hands-on sessions enabled teams to exchange practical insights across engineering, deployment, and integration workflows.    

The China 2025 Seminar reinforced a clear trend: APAC, and China in particular, is emerging as a global center of gravity for SDV and AI-defined vehicle development.  From open-source governance to virtual ECUs, containerized autonomy workloads, functional-safety Linux, and AI-assisted engineering, the community is rapidly converging around shared building blocks that support scalable, cloud-native automotive platforms.    

SOAFEE will continue expanding its Blueprint library, working across consortia, and strengthening the APAC Regional Hub to accelerate progress toward modular, portable, and standardized SDV and AIDV software.  We look forward to continuing this momentum at future seminars, bringing together developers, architects, and ecosystem partners to share the future of vehicle compute.