The conventional automotive industry is a mature, highly regulated, consolidated global business environment, which was conventionally accustomed to lengthy processes of product development and engineering developed and refined through the 20th century. However, with the advent of connectivity, electrification, automated driving and shared mobility, these titans of industry have been forced to become agile, fast-moving organizations as driven by the race to deliver the connected, autonomous vehicles (AVs) of the future.
The automotive industry, being so established, has developed alongside a substantial ecosystem of technical bodies to develop international, regional and national standards to enable conformity, safety and harmonization of engineering efforts across markets. With the AV sector emerging so rapidly, the international standards bodies’ lengthy process of standards development is being tested as industry and policy-makers consider their future needs for assessing the safety of automated vehicles.
This has given rise to a rapidly growing ecosystem of industry alliances and consortia, as industry stakeholders come together to co-create guidance, technical solutions and other tools in the absence of suitable standards – although many of these activities are intended to precede and evolve into technical standards themselves, or provide supplementary technical knowledge to accompany standards.
These alliances and consortia are typically formed to address a specific industry need, and hence are often focused on a singular domain, topic or common purpose. With an ever-increasing number of alliances and consortia forming, it becomes difficult for industry decision-makers to map the ecosystem, decide where to participate, or how to utilize the know-how produced from these consortia.
The reason for this is twofold. First, these consortia typically work independently of one another, with little alignment on common goals across groups. Second, there is a lack of a “single picture” summarizing the focus of these consortia.
The purpose of this white paper is to provide a landscape of relevant industry alliances, consortia
and other groups, while also highlighting the activities of key standards bodies, to provide guidance to decision-makers from industry, as well as other stakeholders from the public sector about these activities.
