What's the State of Automotive Software Development in 2026?

“What’s driving automotive development in 2026? Get the insights you need to keep pace with shifting market patterns and emerging trends.”

, Perforce, webinar overview

What’s covered

Perforce, Auto IQ, and the Eclipse Foundation surveyed over 450 industry professionals on what’s shaping automotive software in 2026, what’s working, what’s stuck, and where teams are placing their bets. This webinar walks through the headline findings and what they mean for engineering and quality leaders:

• Quality is the leading development concern: ahead of speed, cost, and feature velocity. Why the calculus has shifted as software-defined vehicles ship.
• 71% of automotive developers are using AI in product design: what they’re using it for, where it’s helping, where it’s introducing new failure modes.
• Safety vs. AI regulation: the collision between fast-moving AI tooling and the slower-moving safety regime (ISO 26262, ISO 21448, EU AI Act).
• Toolset modernisation: managing the explosion of software components in software-defined vehicles, and the static-analysis / requirements-traceability / ALM stack teams are settling on.

The session is built for engineering leaders, quality directors, and compliance owners who need a credible read on where the industry is heading and what to budget for in the next 12-18 months.

Speakers

Session times

Two regional broadcasts on the same day:

Region	Time
India (live with EMEA)	Thursday 21 May 2026, 14:30 IST
EMEA (UK)	Thursday 21 May 2026, 10:00 BST
US Central	Thursday 21 May 2026, 12:00 CDT
US East	Thursday 21 May 2026, 13:00 EDT
US West	Thursday 21 May 2026, 10:00 PDT

Registration and attendance is completely free. Indian engineering teams are best served by the EMEA broadcast at 14:30 IST. Times sourced from the official Perforce webinar page.

Why Indian teams should care

Indian automotive software is no longer a captive back-office for European and US OEMs, Tier-1s and OEM R&D centres in Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad are owning more of the safety-critical stack, from ECU firmware to ADAS perception to in-vehicle infotainment. Two pressures are reshaping the work:

• Quality has overtaken speed as the binding constraint. Recall costs, OTA-rollback incidents, and the cost of an ISO 26262 audit finding now outweigh the cost of a slower release cadence. The survey quantifies this shift across the global pool.
• AI tooling is in production, but safety governance is catching up. 71% adoption in design means most teams have already crossed the rubicon. The question is no longer whether to use AI, it’s how to satisfy a safety case when part of the pipeline is non-deterministic.

The webinar is one of the few credible cross-industry datasets on these questions in 2026.

Why GSAS is sharing this

GSAS Micro Systems is the authorized India partner for the Perforce safety-critical toolchain, Helix QAC, Klocwork, and Helix ALM. The same teams running these tools in production are the audience Perforce surveyed, so the findings map directly to decisions Indian engineering leaders are making this quarter.

If your team is sizing a static-analysis or ALM investment against the 2026 baseline, particularly for ISO 26262, ASPICE, or AUTOSAR programs, talk to us after the webinar.

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