Vehicle Signal Specification
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 overcome the challenges caused by fragmented data and meet consumer expectations for digital experiences, a shared understanding of vehicle data and system interfaces is essential, both within the vehicle and across the wider mobility ecosystem. This shared understanding is not optional; it is the foundation for delivering exceptional digital experiences today and in the future.
Member Contributors & Adopters
Why VSS Matters for Your Business
To deliver innovative services and seamless new features to consumers, vehicle data meaning must be consistent across brands and models. VSS enables this by offering a common, developer-friendly model that simplifies how programmers use vehicle data.
This common model 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.
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!
VSS Adoption
Case Studies
Blogs
White Papers
COVESA in Action
Other
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?
VSS is a data model that consistently defines the meaning of vehicle signals and organizes them in a hierarchical tree structure consisting of nodes and leaves, as illustrated below.
This industry shared data model, specification, and tooling enables you to collaborate with others and 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 commonly 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.”
VSS Explorer: Innovate with VSS
Discover the VSS catalog with the intuitive Explorer tool. If you are interested in rapid prototyping, validating new vehicle signals, or contributing to the evolution of VSS, this tool is designed for you. Use it to streamline vehicle communication and innovation seamlessly, directly in your browser. Explore, prototype, and evolve the future signals with the VSS Explorer at https://vss.digital.auto/.
Standards & Open Source Projects Using VSS
Get Involved
Community Calendar
Slack Workspace; Channel #vss
VSS Project
GitHub
COVESA Spotlights
Commercial fleets run on data. These fleets include a wide range of vehicle classes ranging from passenger cars, delivery vans, and heavy-duty trucks to construction equipment, and are owned and operated by a commercial entity instead of an individual....
Consumers expect the absolute best, safest, and problem-free content and experiences integrated into their digital world from their phones, smart home devices, computers, and electronic devices immediately as they become available. Why would they expect less from their vehicles? The reality today is not quite so simply in the Automotive industry and the vehicle’s data space is often messy and disconnected...
Collaboration to unify guidelines and interoperability for vehicle applications, primarily within the Android open source environment (AOSP). With mutual requirements, guidelines for APIs and reference implementations we can reduce cost and speed up time to market while enabling app developers to develop once and then easily deploy to many OEMs...