The Road Ahead: Unlocking New Opportunities with Standardized Commercial Vehicle Data

Commercial fleets operate in demanding environments, balancing regulatory requirements, vehicle maintenance, and integration with fleet management solutions. Electrification now presents additional challenges, including real-time battery insights and energy optimization, all supported by robust and secure over-the-air updates.

In response to these demands, the ACEA–COVESA MoU, announced in July 2025, represents a key step towards industry-wide interoperability. By bringing together truck and bus OEMs with COVESA, this agreement sets the stage for VSS to become the data backbone of the commercial vehicle sector, enabling greater collaboration, industry alignment, and innovation. In this blog, we discuss the background of VSS in the past, how Sonatus has used it effectively, and our outlook for increased opportunities in the industry from this new standard.

Background: The Rising Need for Standardizing Data in Commercial Vehicles

The commercial vehicle industry is entering an exciting new era, driven by advancements in software, enhanced connectivity, and data-driven intelligence. According to COVESA, the telematics market in the commercial vehicle sector is projected to expand significantly from $33 billion in 2022 to $95 billion by 2032. This growth is poised to accelerate the development of digital fleet services and innovative connected logistics solutions.

However, this rapid growth brings new complexities. Over 90% of fleets run mixed-brand vehicles, creating significant data management challenges. Proprietary signal formats and inconsistent naming conventions across OEMs make seamless integration into fleet management systems difficult. This fragmentation drives up costs, hinders innovation, and slows the rollout of transformative digital services.

What is COVESA VSS?

COVESA’s Vehicle Signal Specification (COVESA VSS) directly addresses these challenges with a standardized, brand-agnostic framework for vehicle signals. VSS enables benefits such as streamlined integration, reduced operational complexity, and faster deployment of digital services. Sonatus, a proud COVESA member, has demonstrated these outcomes in passenger vehicles and is now extending the impact to commercial vehicles.

Sonatus’s Use of VSS in Passenger Vehicles

Sonatus adopted VSS at scale in passenger vehicles. By utilizing VSS in our products, Sonatus enables OEMs to leverage the benefits of common data collection and in-vehicle feature automation solutions across vehicle domains and models. With solutions like Sonatus Collector AI and Sonatus Automator AI, OEMs gain precise data acquisition, advanced analytics, and automated workflows, helping them innovate with new features and services, improve vehicle quality, and enhance post-sales maintenance and diagnostics. Building on these successes in the passenger vehicle segment, the broader implications become evident when considering commercial vehicles.

Leadership in passenger vehicles set the stage for commercial vehicles, where challenges of operational integrity, vehicle diversity, and efficiency are even more complex. Building on its experience in passenger cars, Sonatus can now leverage its commitment to signal standardization to meet the demands of commercial fleets and drive innovation in a new era of connectivity.

Sonatus’s Early Implementation in Commercial Vehicles

Similar to our work in passenger vehicles, Sonatus is helping to standardize commercial vehicle signals in our VSS implementation process. Recent demonstrations illustrated how we unified signals across various commercial vehicles, ranging from medium to heavy duty, using VSS. This allowed the seamless creation of digital services, simplified integration, and improved operational insights to help:

• Achieve fleet-wide interoperability with a unified data model across heterogeneous brands and classes.
• Reduce integration costs by using a single data interface, eliminating the need to maintain various and redundant custom APIs.
• Enhance analytics by allowing consistent and standardized benchmarking across all vehicle populations.
• Unlock automation by supporting workflows such as maintenance triggers, route optimization, and driver alerts using standardized signals.
• Boost innovation and productivity by utilizing an abstraction layer that enables different vehicle domain teams to easily comprehend all signals and messages.

Sonatus Collector AI and Automator AI leverage VSS to deliver LLM-driven policy generation. This is enabled by VSS’s robust natural language metadata for vehicle signal definitions. By establishing a unified abstraction layer, VSS breaks down silos, allowing for seamless integration across various systems. It accelerates cross-domain collaboration and empowers OEMs to drive faster, more consistent innovation at scale across vehicle platforms and models. For example, both Class 8 trucks and Class 3 vans can utilize identical predictive maintenance workflows, eliminating model-specific coding and reducing engineering effort.

AI Technician: Unlocking Fleet Intelligence Through VSS Standardization

Sonatus’s AI Technician exemplifies the importance of VSS in enabling next-generation, intelligent mobility. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems require standardized signal names to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs). AI Technician translates thousands of raw vehicle signals into actionable intelligence. It leverages the VSS framework across all makes and models.

This rigorous standardization empowers the AI to deliver rich, context-aware insights on demand. These insights range from diagnosing faults and uncovering performance trends to proactively recommending maintenance. For commercial fleets in mixed-brand environments, this means frictionless, AI-driven intelligence at scale. It eliminates the barriers of proprietary integrations and unlocks new levels of operational excellence.

Future Outlook: Scaling VSS in Commercial Fleets

Looking ahead, VSS stands poised to revolutionize data-driven innovations in commercial vehicles with standardized onboard APIs that enhance data exchange, offering clear benefits such as industry-wide compatibility, reduced integration costs, and faster digital service rollouts by:

• Forging powerful industry-wide collaborations to champion unified vehicle standards for critical signals, such as engine signals, vehicle location, fuel consumption, and diagnostics, will establish the essential groundwork for fleets to achieve consistent and standardized data that improves operations.
• Driving the harmonization of advanced signals for ADAS, load monitoring, energy management, and EV charging to unleash new, actionable data, empowering OEMs and fleets to reach unprecedented intelligence and operational excellence.
• Integrating seamlessly with smart logistics ecosystems and AI-powered fleet orchestration to propel fleets into a new era, optimizing routes, slashing downtime, and unlocking holistic energy management for every asset.

Complementing these technical advancements, the business impact is equally compelling. By enabling industry-wide adoption, VSS empowers fleets to benefit from cost savings, easier data integration, reduced downtime, accelerated digital services, and improved operational efficiency.

Conclusion

The commercial vehicle industry stands on the brink of a software-defined revolution. COVESA, with the support of members like Sonatus, is championing VSS beyond passenger vehicles. We are unlocking seamless interoperability, operational excellence, and breakthrough innovation for OEMs to deliver to their fleet customers.