QNX, a division of BlackBerry Limited, has released its second annual Under the Hood: SDV Developer Report, a global study of 1,100 automotive software developers examining attitudes towards software-defined vehicle (SDV) development as the industry moves from ambition to execution
Findings from the UK show that automotive software developers have high confidence in development productivity and compliance capabilities. However, UK developers also shared that significant development capacity is being spent on foundational software and integration, instead of focusing on developing new vehicle features and user experiences that add greater value to OEM offerings.
Debugging and testing has become the biggest development challenge in the UK
Debugging and testing is the leading software development challenge for UK developers, up from the fourth in 2025. 52% now identify it as one of their biggest challenges, up from 39% in 2025, and higher than the 44% global average.
This finding contrasts with developers’ confidence in their working environments, with 93% rating their productivity as good or excellent, compared to 81% globally. Still, 77% feel significant or moderate pressure from faster-moving competitors, including Chinese EV manufacturers and newer market entrants. The findings suggest UK teams are confident in their ability to deliver, but testing and troubleshooting time is creating friction as they face mounting pressure to differentiate and move faster.
UK teams want to put more effort towards new vehicle features
UK developers were also quite clear about where they feel their software development time and resources should be spent. 81% agree that OEMs should focus more on application and feature innovation than underlying software infrastructure, an increase from 75% in 2025. However, only 7% are mostly focused on the development of new applications and features.
Integration complexity is a major reason UK developers are so time poor in these areas, with UK respondents estimating that 35% of total development effort goes to foundational integration rather than new functionality, while 51% say integration accounts for between 25% and 49% of their work. 76% say the absence of a common, reusable software foundation slows overall SDV development.
Additionally, UK developers do not necessarily equate innovation with simply adding more technology to every vehicle. 83% believe a deliberately minimalist, low-tech vehicle could be commercially successful. The percentage of respondents who consider such a vehicle very likely to succeed has risen from 20% to 32%, suggesting that software can also support simpler customer experiences.
Justin Moon, vice president, Core Product Engineering at QNX, said, “UK automotive software developers are confident in their tools, but the pressure to compete globally is making the cost of underlying software complexity harder for the industry to ignore. Debugging and testing has become their biggest development challenge, while around a third of engineering effort is still being absorbed by foundational integration rather than the differentiating features that drivers will notice. To accelerate timelines without compromising on either safety or security, teams need a trusted software foundation they can build on and reuse, rather than solving the same underlying problems from scratch with every new vehicle programme.”
AI ambition runs ahead of development automation
Expectations for AI to deliver big improvements also remain high among UK automotive software developers. 91% expect it to play a transformational or significant role in development over the next three to five years, compared with 87% globally. UK respondents are most likely to expect AI to have its greatest impact in software design and architecture, cited by 25%.
However, current automation levels are moving in the opposite direction, with the average percentage of automated software development processes falling from 45.6% in 2025 to 40.2% in 2026. The share of respondents reporting that between 76% and 100% of their development process is automated fell from 8% to 1%. This reveals a gap between AI ambition and implementation as teams try to introduce automation capabilities into very complex, safety-critical development environments.
Maite Bezerra, senior principal analyst at Omdia, said, “The industry has spent several years talking about SDVs as a design ambition, but as the data shows, resources during that time have been concentrated on the middleware layer. When teams exhaust resources building custom infrastructure instead of standardising foundational layers, they miss the point. Innovation in middleware is not only challenging for companies that aren’t software-first, but it also doesn’t drive direct customer value. Until automakers step away from the plumbing and focus on the application layer, they will continue to lack a solid business case for SDVs.”
Regulation and cybersecurity move up the UK agenda
Cybersecurity regulation is now the most frequently cited compliance challenge among UK respondents at 55%, compared with 46% globally. Data privacy requirements have also become more prominent, rising from 37% to 47%.
42% identify regulatory overload as their biggest concern about the future of automotive software development in the UK. Concern about platform fragmentation also increased from 19% to 27%.
Despite this, UK developers remain confident in their ability to respond to regulatory developments. 97% are confident that their teams can achieve compliance, compared with 91% globally, and 51% say their confidence in remaining compliant has increased over the past year, compared with 41% globally.
Cybersecurity is also expected to become a significantly more important engineering capability. 71% of UK respondents identify it as one of the most critical skills automotive software developers will need over the next five years. Additionally, 85% believe SDVs are likely to become a major target for cyberattacks within the next three years, slightly above the global figure of 83%.
