Volkswagen’s transformation into a tech company is in full swing

The car as a fully connected, digital living space that constantly offers new functions, can be individualized with applications and is regularly updated. This includes infotainment and cockpit functions, right through to assistance systems and chassis management.

We will not be able to master this change solely with our outstanding industrial expertise. The key is powerful software.

Today, our cars already contain more than 100 million lines of code, ten times more than a smartphone operating system, and even significantly more than a modern jet plane. The extent continues to grow rapidly because more and more functionality and thus software performance is demanded. In a few years, this number will even triple.
We are therefore making software a further core competence of Volkswagen.

The Car.Software Organisation as a key

With the Car.Software Organisation, the Volkswagen Group is building its own business unit that focuses exclusively on software and powerful electronic units. The main task is to develop a group-wide software platform with our own vehicle operating system VW.OS and the corresponding Volkswagen Automotive Cloud.

Our VW.OS will be used by every brand and every model in the Group. This way we will tackle the increasing complexity of the car of the future.

With software, especially for a platform solution, only the scaling counts. We at the Volkswagen Group have the technological know-how and the right size for an own vehicle operating system. Our goal: We want to launch the most powerful software stack in the industry.

A unique opportunity for digital minds

The Car.Software Organisation will bring together more than 10,000 experts under one roof. We are constructing the company as an agile software company, specially tailored to the requirements of modern software development and detached from the working models of mechanical engineering. In Europe, we bring together around 50 percent of our competencies, the majority of them in Germany. Another 30 percent is located in China, our largest single passenger car market. We are also building up expertise in North America, India and Israel.

It is crucial for us that the Car.Software Organisation has its own culture and language, its own agile way of working and its own identity. We want to move away from the pure placing of orders on the basis of functional specifications and take things into our own hands. To achieve this, skilled employees with an inexhaustible thirst for knowledge, who want to develop more software themselves, are indispensable. We want a culture of doers.

The transformation of Volkswagen into a Tech company is in full swing. And it is only happening once, right now. This is a unique opportunity — also and above all for software developers and IT experts.