Speakers: Florian Rohde (iProcess) and Hemant Sikaria (Sibros).
How heavy-duty OEMs can meet UNECE R169 Event Data Recorder rules by treating crash data as a vehicle-wide architecture opportunity, not a standalone black box. This session covers whether today’s TCU can host the EDR, standalone vs. integrated designs, and a 2026-2029 roadmap to type approval. 👉 WATCH THE SESSION ON-DEMAND HERE
Welcome back to SDV Insider.
It is mid-July, the season when many are worrying about whether the car has enough signal to stream a podcast across a dead stretch of interstate. This week the industry was worrying about the same thing, just with a lot more money on the line. Two of the week’s biggest moves were about who carries the car’s data and how, one on a dedicated 5G core and one bounced off a satellite.
Underneath the connectivity news, the plot advanced on two other fronts. The software that actually drives the car went public, as a Chinese autonomy supplier backed by GM, Mercedes and Tencent listed in Hong Kong at roughly a nine-billion-dollar valuation. And the boring-but-real proof point of the SDV era, an update that installs itself while nobody is in the vehicle, arrived for Class 8 trucks. The glamorous layer and the plumbing layer moved in the same week.
The signal this week: the SDV is being rebuilt from the connection and the cap table outward, not just from the code.
Momenta, the GM and Tencent backed autonomous-driving software firm, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under ticker 6880.HK and raised roughly $752 million (about HK$5.9 billion), rising around 3% on its debut for a valuation near $9 billion. The cornerstone book read like a who’s who of capital and OEMs, with Singapore’s GIC, Fidelity, BlackRock and Mercedes-Benz Group together taking roughly half the offering.
The use of proceeds is the tell. Momenta says it will put about 60% toward its core technology, including its algorithms, its automation toolchain and its Momenta Mainline platform, and about 20% toward commercializing and scaling its robotaxi work. In other words, the money is going into the driving software and the pipeline that ships it, not into steel.
Founded in 2016 by Cao Xudong, Momenta supplies assisted- and automated-driving stacks to global automakers, and a Chinese AD supplier with Western-OEM backing tapping public markets is a structural marker for how this layer gets financed from here.
Our Take: For years the autonomy conversation has been about miles, metros and safety cases. This is a different kind of milestone: the AV/SDV software stack is now something you can buy shares in, capitalized independently of any single carmaker. When Mercedes is both a cornerstone investor and a prospective customer, the line between OEM and software vendor keeps blurring, and the balance sheet, not just the codebase, becomes competitive terrain. Watch whether other AD suppliers read this debut as an open window.
Mack added a Lock & Leave option to its over-the-air system: a driver initiates an eligible update through the display, locks the truck and walks away, and the vehicle stays powered only long enough to finish installing before shutting itself down. It debuts this fall on the Mack Pioneer, Anthem, and the all-new Granite and Keystone, on the back of more than 50,000 remote updates in the past year at a 99.99% success rate. Unattended OTA is the operational proof point that the SDV model is real in big commercial vehicles, where every minute of downtime is money.
A proposed bill to let autonomous vehicles operate in Washington, DC has become a lobbying proxy war between two companies that are supposed to be on the same side. Uber opposes the measure, arguing it would displace for-hire human drivers and hand Waymo a de facto monopoly in the District, while Waymo says it would welcome language clarifying that different network models can operate there. The AV rulebook is now being written city by city, and the alliances behind it are starting to fracture along platform lines.
Demonstrated in a BMW iX3 during the 5G Automotive Association meeting week in Munich, the call ran over a non-terrestrial NB-IoT link using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Auto 5G Modem-RF Gen 2, Cubic3’s software-defined eSIM profile switching, and a Fraunhofer AI voice codec tuned for narrow, low-bandwidth channels. The pitch is coverage where cellular ends: emergency voice and messaging, fleet connectivity, and OTA updates in dead zones. It is a research demo, not a production feature, but it extends the always-connected assumption that SDVs are built on past the edge of the cell map.
Every newly manufactured US-market BMW, MINI and BMW Group vehicle now connects through Verizon’s nationwide 5G Standalone for Connected Vehicles, a dedicated 3GPP Release 16 core built for the job rather than an overlay on 4G, delivered via KDDI’s Global Communications Platform. The connection powers BMW ConnectedDrive, over-the-air firmware and map updates, and subscription features. This is the plumbing decision under the SDV: a named carrier on a purpose-built core sets the ceiling for what OTA and data services are even possible over the life of the car.
MarketsandMarkets pegs the software-defined vehicle market at $447.55 billion in 2026, growing to $1,707.36 billion by 2035 at a 16.0% CAGR. Treat it as a vendor research estimate rather than gospel, but it is a clean, in-window sizing that brackets the week’s infrastructure and capital-markets moves, and it lines up directionally with other 2026 SDV sizings clustering around the $450 billion mark for this year.
August 2026 (Bay Area). Silicon Valley gathering of OEMs, suppliers and silicon vendors to work through SDV architecture, autonomy scale-up and the shifting regulatory picture.
👋 That’s a Wrap
This week’s signals:
The autonomy software layer went public: Momenta’s ~$9B Hong Kong listing makes the AV stack an independently capitalized asset, with Mercedes both cornerstone and customer.
The connectivity backbone got named: Verizon on a dedicated 5G Standalone core for all new US BMW Group vehicles, and a Viasat/BMW satellite voice call for where cellular runs out.
Unattended OTA reached the big rigs: Mack’s Lock & Leave installs while nobody is in the cab, the uptime-first proof point for commercial SDVs.
The rulebook is now a battleground: Uber and its partner Waymo are lobbying against each other over who gets to run robotaxis in DC.
The glamour and the plumbing moved together this week, and the plumbing may be the more durable story.
