CES 2026: Software-defined vehicles continue to evolve and gain momentum and scale
AI is becoming both a vehicle capability and a manufacturing tool for software. CES 2026 confirmed that SDVs are no longer experimental and that the industry is now executing on repeatable, AI-driven, virtualized software platforms designed for mass production, long life-cycle support and continuous OTA evolution.
The recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 (Jan. 6–9, 2026) marked a clear inflection point: software-defined vehicles (SDVs) have entered their industrialization phase. Original equipment manufacturers and suppliers shifted decisively away from exploratory demos and concepts toward scalable, production-ready SDV platforms, with most architectures, toolchains and compute strategies aligned to 2026–28 SOPs. The focus has clearly moved from what SDVs could do, to how they can be built, validated, operated and monetized at scale.
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