Vehicle Signal Specification — Copy
What is Vehicle Signal Specification?
Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) is a widely adopted, open data model created to consistently describe and normalize vehicle data (e.g., speed, tire pressure, interior lights, etc.). At its core, it is intended to be simple to understand and usable in a variety of contexts. Think of VSS as a common language to describe vehicle data in the vehicle and the cloud.
Why is VSS needed?
To truly address the challenge of fragmented data, there must be a common understanding of vehicle data and interfaces between systems, in and out of the vehicle, and across the broader mobility ecosystem. This common understanding of data is fundamental, foundational, and imperative to enabling great current and future digital experiences.
Embracing this need for commonality, standardized vehicle data improves interoperability and eases integration, leading to many scaling opportunities. This saves time and costs, allowing companies to focus on business value creation and differentiating solutions.
Data is a fundamental building block for enabling the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) and connected vehicles of the future. More precisely, the common data definition as represented in VSS will reduce the many automotive data silos and enable connectivity and collaboration across the mobility data space.
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Why VSS Matters for Your Business
To deliver innovative services and seamless new features to consumers, vehicle data must be standardized across all brands and models. VSS (Vehicle Signal Specification) enables this by offering a consistent, developer-friendly format that simplifies how programmers access and use vehicle information.
This standardization is essential for powering a wide range of data-driven applications—from fleet management and predictive maintenance to passenger and road safety. It also supports integration with adjacent industries like insurance and mobility services, all of which rely on accurate and accessible vehicle data.
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Key Advantages
Enables Scalability
- Horizontal integration with adjacent industries leading to cross-industry solutions
- Open collaboration and interchange of software components
- Eases data aggregation and cleaning
- Faster large-scale analytics
- Sharing of sophisticated tooling
- Application and code reuse
Faster Time-to-Market
- Faster product iteration
- Highly portable solutions
- Eases testing and evaluation of new software
- Reduces vendor lock-in
- Enables on-demand, real-time consumer personalization
Supports Future Business
- Open-source collaboration leads to partnerships
- Big tech and cloud providers create new opportunities
- Increased access to normalized data leads to innovation and new opportunities
Drives Innovation
- Open-source collaboration leads to partnerships
- Big tech and cloud providers create new opportunities
- Increased access to normalized data leads to innovation and new opportunities
Enables Collaboration!
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What are the key design principles of VSS?
VSS has maintained a set of design principles through its multi-year evolution that have kept it simple to understand and easy to adopt:
- Simple, flexible, and easily understandable by machines and humans
- Developer-friendly and extensible with industry-supported tooling
- Support use in and out of the vehicle
- Represent the vehicle domain/perspective in multiple contexts of the mobility ecosystem
- Support a robust variety of vehicles, including consumer and commercial vehicles
- Protocol and technology agnostic
So what is VSS exactly?
The VSS data model is a hierarchical tree structure built with modules that can be flexibly combined, as illustrated below.
This standardized data model, specification, and tooling help you simplify tens of thousands of vehicle signals into a common understanding that is protocol and technology-agnostic.
A VSS file (.vspec) is both human and machine-readable, and the available tooling supports automated conversion to the most used industry formats.
Co-chair of DEG:
Erik Jägervall
Bosch
“The automotive industry is changing rapidly. Vehicle data is no longer of interest only for the OEMs but is also the foundation for many services and solutions provided by third parties. VSS gives actors in the automotive industry a mechanism to collaborate on vehicle data definition, by a common syntax for vehicle signals and a large catalog of signals. When agreeing on what vehicle data a service needs signals from the VSS catalog can be used as a reference, and the API used to exchange data may be based on VSS.”
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COVESA Spotlights
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