Shaping the future of embedded automotive development with AUMOVIO and AWS

Continental has transitioned its automotive technology business into a new company: AUMOVIO. Its solution, vSDV Composer, is a development platform built on AWS that combines virtual ECUs, automation, and an AI-powered engineering assistant to help automakers improve testing scalability, reduce compliance-related errors, and accelerate software development by more than 50%.

Software and AI are now the defining forces shaping the automotive industry, transforming how vehicles are designed, engineered, and built. Continental has transitioned its automotive technology business into a new company, AUMOVIO. One of the goals of AUMOVIO is to shape the future of software-defined vehicles (SDVs). It offers vSDV Composer, a next-generation development platform built on AWS that accelerates software development time by more than 50% across the complete automotive development lifecycle. It brings together virtual Electronic Control Units (ECUs), automation, and AI-powered engineering to help enable rapid iteration and scalable testing while helping automakers increase software development productivity.

vSDV Composer introduces a new, AI-powered engineering assistant. It is a pioneering automotive-specific assistant, developed in collaboration with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center (GenAIIC). What sets the assistant apart is its deep grounding in classical embedded systems and optimized automotive architectures. When trained by AUMOVIO using its extensive knowledge base, the engineering assistant can understand automotive standards like AUTOSAR so developers can use it to help reduce compliance-related errors.

Delivering higher-quality vehicle software faster with virtualization and AI

As vehicles become increasingly software-defined, automakers face challenges with growing software complexity, faster innovation cycles, and stringent quality requirements. Traditional development methods, built around physical hardware, localized teams, and manual processes, are becoming constraints. Automakers now must coordinate thousands of engineers across global locations while managing extensive code bases that require validation across numerous scenarios.

For automotive developers, writing code that satisfies design standards is an important and time-consuming process. Every code change must be documented, reviewed, and tested. It’s a complex process that involves multiple steps, even for small updates that can impact hundreds of files. Before shipping code, developers must check it against compliance tools, which often find more errors to go back and correct.

Using the cloud with AI-powered development and verification can help automakers deliver higher quality vehicle software faster. AUMOVIOS’s vSDV Composer, powered by AWS, serves as a foundation, enabling global teams to collaborate in real time, scale compute resources on demand, and simulate diverse test conditions, all without physical hardware. vSDV Composer features an integrated, gen AI engineering assistant, powered by Amazon Bedrock, that AUMOVIO trained to recognize potential compliance-related issues in code early, helping reduce the errors developers face when running code through final compliance tools. As a result, developers can move faster and with greater confidence when making code changes.

The vSDV Composer’s engineering assistant can be tightly integrated into the development workflow and is available directly as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) plugin, allowing developers to access its capabilities seamlessly within their existing environment. In addition to being an agentic system, the engineering assistant is trained on AUMOVIO’s extensive knowledge base, including 20+ years of embedded automotive source code and process documentation, which makes it as knowledgeable as a senior engineer sitting next to each developer and being available at any time.

Defining a fully agentic vision for vehicle development

The evolution of generative AI in software development has unfolded as a series of breakthroughs. It began with early chatbot assistants, which were useful for quick Q&A but disconnected from the tools developers relied on, forcing constant context-switching. The next step forward came with domain-specific models that delivered more precise answers, though they still followed rigid, one-way workflows. Then came a leap in agility to orchestrated workflows, where an LLM could direct a sequence of specialized agents to get work done more intelligently. Today, we’ve entered the era of collaborative multi-agent systems, where AI agents share knowledge, context, and tasks, much like a human team, tackling complex problems together and opening entirely new possibilities for software development.

As AUMOVIO continues developing vSDV Composer, the solution may grow beyond today’s capabilities to become a central hub for AI agent collaboration in automotive engineering. Among the next milestones is the adoption of Agent-to-Agent protocols (A2A, ACP). These protocols are designed with built-in safeguards and operational assurances, enabling tools from different vendors to exchange information and collaborate without friction, while helping maintain trust and reliability across diverse environments.

Another area of advancement will be external agent coordination. This will allow vSDV Composer’s engineering assistant to work not only with agents inside the platform, but also with agents provided by external groups or suppliers. In practice, this means that an ECU project could integrate knowledge and capabilities from multiple organizations and coordinate with supplier-specific design and validation agents. By creating a common interface and synchronization mechanism, external coordination helps ensure that large-scale projects can progress seamlessly even when responsibilities are distributed across many stakeholders.

Conclusion

AI and the cloud are reshaping the future of automotive development. By combining decades of embedded systems expertise from AUMOVIO with modern AI and cloud technology from AWS, vSDV Composer illustrates how development can become faster, more adaptive, and better aligned with compliance needs. Contact AWS to learn more about how AWS is helping automakers accelerate embedded software development.