COVESA’s global community gathered in beautiful Porto, Portugal, on 22–23 April 2026, coming together to discuss solutions to business and technical challenges facing the connected vehicle industry. And while the group was smaller this spring due to tighter travel budgets, the energy, insights, and breakthroughs shared across both days made this one of the most impactful meetings yet.

A Powerful Kickoff: New Collaborations and Big API News

Executive Director Steve Crumb set the tone early with fresh results from the latest COVESA Member Survey, followed by a major announcement — Kazuo Tsobouchi, Chairman of JASPAR’s API Standardization WG (representing Honda), officially unveiled COVESA and JASPAR’s active collaboration on Standard APIs, built on top of COVESA’s robust VSS and VISS technologies.

Attendees also got a first look at Yoriito, JASPAR’s brand-new open source project featuring more than 1K APIs and 370K+ lines of code contributed by member companies. COVESA was honored that JASPAR chose this meeting as the stage for sharing these achievements publicly.

Toyota’s Yasushi Ando expanded on the technical details in a follow-up talk, and Steve closed the opening session by confirming COVESA’s presence at Automotive World in Tokyo (9–11 September) and the Fall AMM in the Detroit area (28–29 October).

Spotlight on SDV Momentum, AI, and Vehicle Data Innovation

One of the standout moments of day one was a joint readout from Omdia’s Maite Bezzera and Sonatus CMO John Heinlein, who unveiled findings from a new survey tracking global progress in Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs).

The rest of the day delivered a mix of forward-looking discussions on Artificial Intelligence, emerging applications of vehicle data in operations and safety, and a compelling update from COVESA Chairperson Graham Smethurst of BMW. He highlighted BMW’s new “neue klasse” of vehicles, built heavily around data modeled in VSS.

Deep Technical Work: VSS, VDM, AOSP, Commercial Vehicles & GenAI

Wednesday’s two technical tracks offered hands-on learning and concrete progress updates across multiple workstreams:

• VSS & VDM advancements, including how these models continue to underpin SDV architectures
• AOSP App Framework Expert Group, featuring hands-on sessions with BMW’s newly contributed VSS-for-VHAL project
• Commercial & Fleet Vehicle Expert Group, highlighting ACEA’s promising evolution of FMS toward VSS
• Generative AI Project, which shared notable strides in its latest development cycle

Showcase Night: Innovation on Display

The day concluded with the always-popular COVESA Networking Reception and Showcase.

Eighteen organizations and three COVESA groups demonstrated cutting-edge solutions across connected vehicle technology.

A special congratulations goes to VxLabs, awarded the Most Valuable Contributor recognition for their VSS-powered cybersecurity solution.

Thursday Tracks: AI, Cybersecurity, Data, Payments & More

The final day offered two technical tracks and a dedicated business track covering some of the most pressing trends in mobility today, including:

• Agentic AI
• VISS
• SDV: Vision to Reality
• Cybersecurity Management
• Leveraging VSS for Collision Detection
• EU Data Act
• In-Vehicle Payments
• Connectivity-Defined Vehicles
• Scalable Function Development for SDV

Presentations for many of the sessions are available here.

Thank You to Our Sponsors & See You This Fall

COVESA extends its sincere thanks to all event sponsors who made the Spring AMM possible.

We look forward to continuing the momentum in Tokyo (9–11 September) and Novi, Michigan (28–29 October), or better yet, seeing you at both events!