The Dispatch: Week 40

SDV Insider - October 2, 2026

Welcome back to SDV Insider.

Momenta and Dongfeng Stellantis Partnership Signing. Image: Momenta

Last week we said the SDV contest was shifting from what the software does to how fast and how safely a company can change it. This week the question moved one step further back: who writes the software at all. Several of the nine items below are a company deciding that the hardest part of its stack is not something it will build in house, and signing a name to the decision. Two more, from GM and Lucid, show the other half of the pattern: the OEM keeps the customer-facing layer, the fleet dashboard and the cabin, firmly in house.

That is a more consequential choice than it looks. A toolchain can be swapped. A driving stack, a vehicle OS foundation, a risk-scoring model wired into underwriting, these get designed into a product cycle and stay for a decade. The week’s announcements are not product news so much as a set of long-term dependencies being locked in, several of them crossing borders that would have been unthinkable to cross three years ago.

It was also a week where the autonomous trucking sector stopped talking about capability and started talking about lanes, customers and unit economics, which is usually the sign that a technology has run out of excuses.

The signal this week: the build-or-buy decision for core vehicle software is being settled. Buy the layers underneath, build the experience on top.

🚀 Top Story

Momenta Will Develop Driver Assistance for Peugeot and Jeep, in China and Beyond

Announced September 28, with the agreement signed September 24 in Shanghai, Chinese autonomous driving software developer Momenta will co-develop advanced driver assistance systems with Dongfeng Stellantis Automotive Technology (Wuhan), the joint venture known as DSAT. The systems are built on Momenta’s R7 world model and extend to Level 3 capability. They are destined for new Peugeot and Jeep models arriving from 2027 in battery electric and plug-in hybrid form, tuned per brand, and aimed at China, Europe and other global markets rather than China alone.

DSAT general manager Lv Haitao framed it as combining Peugeot’s driving dynamics and Jeep’s off-road capability with intelligent technology, with the vehicle engineering and chassis work staying on the Stellantis side. Momenta chief executive Cao Xudong described the agreement as widening the company’s partner network ahead of an expected market inflection in 2028.

The export clause is what makes this different from the long list of China-market-only ADAS tie-ups. A Chinese software supplier is being written into the roadmap of two globally distributed Western nameplates, with the explicit intent of shipping that stack outside China.

Our Take: Treat the Level 3 framing as a capability target rather than a homologation claim, because type approval in Europe is a separate and much slower problem than algorithmic readiness, and nothing in the announcement addresses it. The real content here is the admission underneath. Stellantis has spent years assembling autonomy partnerships and still concluded that the fastest route to a competitive assisted-driving experience runs through a Chinese supplier, in the same quarter that Western regulators are tightening scrutiny of exactly that dependency. Every OEM is now running the same arithmetic: a driving stack costs billions and several years to build, the Chinese suppliers have the data volume and the iteration speed, and the alternative is shipping a visibly worse product. Expect the data governance questions to arrive later and be harder than the engineering ones, because a stack trained and updated across jurisdictions has to satisfy the EU Data Act, China’s data localization rules and whatever Washington decides about connected vehicle software, all at once and all with different answers.

⚙️ Industry Pulse

Kodiak Names Dallas to Houston as Its First Long-Haul Driverless Lane

A Kodiak driverless truck on the highway. Image: Kodiak AI

On September 25 Kodiak AI named the 219-mile Interstate 45 corridor between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston as the launch lane for unsupervised driverless highway service, targeted before the end of 2026, with IKEA named as a commercial partner on the route. The company reports more than 3.5 million autonomous miles on that corridor since 2019, over 40,000 cumulative hours of paid driverless operations as of June 30, and an internal Autonomy Readiness Measure sitting at 93 percent in August against a 100 percent launch gate. Chief executive Don Burnette leaned on the Permian Basin record, where 35 driverless trucks have run for Atlas Energy Solutions with no human in the cab for nearly two years. The notable part is the readiness metric: a numeric, publicly stated gate is a different kind of commitment from a demo video.

Aurora Puts a Number on It: 200 Driverless Trucks This Year, 30,000 by 2030

Reported September 27 off Aurora Innovation’s analyst and investor day, the company intends to close 2026 with roughly 200 driverless trucks and scale to more than 30,000 by the end of 2030. The sceptical read in the freight press is about unit economics rather than capability: carrier adoption depends on reaching the fleet scale that actually drives down cost per mile, and the gap between 200 and 30,000 is where that case gets proved or does not. Two of the three largest autonomous trucking programs now have public, dated commitments against which they can be measured, which is a healthier state for the sector than another year of selective milestone announcements.

Nissan Puts a 3 Million Pound Autonomous Research Project on Cambridge Streets

Nissan's ADventure project will run an autonomous LEAF on Cambridge streets. Image: Nissan

Announced September 27, Nissan’s ADventure project will run a 2022 LEAF fitted with Nissan-developed autonomous driving technology on public roads in Cambridge, funded with 3 million pounds through the UK Government’s CAM Pathfinder programme. Partners include WMG at the University of Warwick, PAVE UK, Zenzic and Innovate UK, and the stated focus is as much on service design and passenger confidence as on the stack itself. Professor Siddartha Khastgir of WMG and Nissan R&D senior vice president David Moss both framed it around understanding how an autonomous mobility service works for a specific community. That framing is the interesting part. Validation of the driving function is increasingly treated as table stakes, and the open question has moved to whether anyone will ride.

🚗 Product & Software

Lucid Brings the Gravity Cabin Software to the Air With UX 3.0, Over the Air for 2025 and Newer

Lucid Air cockpit running Air UX 3.0. Image: Lucid Motors

Published September 29, Lucid’s Air UX 3.0, shipped in software version 2.11.0, ports the in-car experience it built for the Gravity SUV back to the Air sedan. The headline changes are swipeable cards on the right cockpit panel, a slimmed pilot panel with a pull-down Quick Controls menu, true multitasking across apps, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto expanded to fill the full panel, and EV routing that lets drivers favour preferred charging networks, include adapter-compatible stations and set a minimum range on arrival. Profiles switch faster, guest profiles reset cleanly and now need a PIN to exit, and Easy Entry and Exit moves the seat relative to each driver’s saved position. It is standard on the 2027 Air and arrives over the air for model year 2025 and newer cars. Owners of 2022, 2023 and some 2024 cars need a 950 dollar centre console control unit swap at a service centre first. That last line is the honest footnote in every software-defined vehicle story: the compute ages faster than the car, and at some point the update has a hardware floor with a price on it.

GM Launches OnStar Fleet Intelligence, With an AI Assistant Sitting on Top of the Vehicle Data

The OnStar Fleet Intelligence dashboard. Image: GM

Announced September 30, GM Fleet’s OnStar Fleet Intelligence platform pulls order tracking, vehicle connection, OnStar plan renewal, diagnostics such as fuel efficiency and range, geofencing and vehicle protection into a single account, and lets a customer with a Fleet Account Number manage every vehicle under it regardless of brand, equipment or OnStar plan with one login. On top sits Fleet Insights, which looks for patterns across vehicles, routes and drivers rather than one report at a time, and an OnStar Fleet AI Assistant that answers natural language questions such as total idling time per vehicle this month or which units are most and least utilised. GM Fleet vice president Ian Hucker framed it as fewer administrative hurdles; OnStar’s Arnie Magnotta framed it as thirty years of connected vehicle history turned into a management product. Availability is a phased rollout to select fleet customers. The strategic content is where GM chose to build rather than buy: the fleet operator’s screen. An OEM that owns the dashboard owns the renewal, the data relationship and the upsell, which is exactly the ground aftermarket telematics has held for two decades.

💼 Company Moves & Partnerships

Vector and SCSK Bundle a Pre-Integrated Stack for the Smallest ECUs in the Car

Announced September 29, Vector and Japan’s SCSK have released a joint evaluation bundle for Renesas RL78/F2x microcontrollers that pairs Vector’s MICROSAR IO, a lightweight basic software platform for sensor and actuator applications, with SCSK’s QINeS-Lite platform and hardware drivers built on the open Chiisai specification. QINeS-Lite is aimed at small edge ECUs and carries the capabilities those parts increasingly have to support: high-speed communication, over-the-air update, cybersecurity and diagnostics. Both companies pitch it as reducing integration effort and improving software reuse ahead of software-defined vehicle architectures, and the bundle is available on request from Vector. Most SDV coverage, this newsletter included, lives at the high-performance computer and the zonal controller. The long tail is hundreds of tiny ECUs on a vehicle that still have to be updatable and defensible once R156 and the Cyber Resilience Act reach down to them, and a pre-integrated stack for a 16-bit-class part is how that tail gets handled without every supplier integrating it from scratch.

Catching Up: Coretura Picks Alloy Kore as the Software Floor Under Its Truck Platform

Dated September 22 and just outside our window, this one is worth the catch-up because it is the first design win for a product the whole commercial vehicle sector has been watching. Coretura, the SDV platform venture founded by Daimler Truck and Volvo Group, selected Alloy Kore, the vehicle OS foundation jointly developed by QNX and Vector, pairing a safety-certified real-time operating system with pre-integrated automotive system services and Vector’s middleware and communication layer. Coretura chief executive Johan Lunden described it as a deliberate step toward vehicles that keep getting smarter and more valuable long after launch. Two of the largest truck makers on earth jointly built a software company and then chose not to write the layer underneath it, which tells you precisely where they think the differentiation is and is not.

📊 Market & Reports

PwC: AI Adoption Across the Automotive Value Chain Goes From 47 Percent to 72 Percent by 2030

Published September 24 and drawn from a spring 2026 survey of 720 automotive executives across 33 countries, PwC’s global automotive outlook puts current AI and advanced technology adoption at 47 percent of companies, rising to a projected 72 percent by 2030, with 51 percent of executives calling AI critical to their strategic goals. Forty-six percent name entrants from the technology and energy sectors as a significant competitive threat over five years. The number worth sitting with is the revenue mix: respondents expect 33 percent of revenue within five years to come from fleet operators, mobility providers and governments, up from 21 percent today. Survey data is intent rather than outcome, but a twelve point shift in who the customer is would reshape what the software has to do.

👋 That’s a Wrap

This week’s signal:

• The build-or-buy question on core vehicle software is being answered layer by layer. Stellantis bought a driving stack and Coretura bought an OS foundation, while GM and Lucid kept the fleet dashboard and the cabin in house.
• Geography is no longer a constraint on who supplies the stack. A Chinese ADAS developer is now in the roadmap for Peugeot and Jeep outside China, with the data governance problem left for later.
• Autonomous trucking has moved to lanes, customers and dated numbers. Kodiak named a corridor and a readiness gate; Aurora named 200 this year and 30,000 by 2030.
• Validating the driving function is becoming the easy half. Nissan is spending its UK research money on whether people will actually use the service.
• Software-defined reaches down to the smallest ECU and up to the fleet manager’s screen. Vector and SCSK packaged OTA and cyber for a sensor-class microcontroller; GM put an AI assistant on top of OnStar fleet data.
• Over the air has a hardware floor. Lucid’s UX 3.0 is free for 2025 and newer Airs and costs 950 dollars of new hardware for older ones.

A busier week than last, and a more revealing one. Watch who signs what, not who demos what.

- The SDV Insider Crew 🚗💨