A modern car contains dozens to hundreds of processors, and the industry is in the middle of a once-in-a-generation shift to the software-defined vehicle. That transition is making carmakers rethink their silicon — and increasingly, the answer involves RISC-V. At RISC-V Summit Europe 2026, automotive was one of the most serious verticals on display.
Why Automakers Are Betting on RISC-V
Two forces are pushing cars toward an open ISA:
- Supply-chain control. The chip shortages taught the industry the cost of single-vendor lock-in. An open ISA with multiple suppliers reduces strategic risk and secures long-term availability — a recurring sovereignty theme.
- Customization. Software-defined vehicles consolidate functions onto fewer, more powerful compute domains. Carmakers want to tailor that silicon — adding accelerators, security features, or safety mechanisms — without licensing friction.
The same logic that made RISC-V win embedded applies here, scaled up and held to a far higher safety bar.
Quintauris: The Industry Joint Venture
The clearest signal of intent is Quintauris — a joint venture founded by five giants: Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, and Qualcomm. Its mission is to accelerate RISC-V adoption, starting with automotive, by providing a commercial, standardized RISC-V foundation that carmakers and Tier-1 suppliers can build on with confidence.
Why does a JV matter? Because automotive needs more than an open spec. It needs reference designs, certified toolchains, long-term support commitments, and a standardized baseline so the ecosystem does not fragment. Quintauris is the industry organizing itself to provide exactly that — the automotive analogue of the profiles effort that standardizes RISC-V more broadly.
Functional Safety Is About Implementation, Not the ISA
A common misconception: “can an open ISA be safe enough for a car?” The answer is yes, because functional safety is a property of the implementation, not the instruction set. The ISA defines behavior; safety comes from how the silicon and processes are built.
The relevant standard is ISO 26262, which defines ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) ratings from ASIL-A (lowest) to ASIL-D (highest, e.g. steering and braking). Reaching them requires hardware and process mechanisms such as:
- Lockstep cores — two cores run the same code in parallel and compare results to detect faults.
- ECC on memories and buses to detect and correct bit errors.
- Built-in self-test (BIST) to catch latent hardware faults at startup and runtime.
- Certified development processes with rigorous documentation and traceability.
RISC-V cores can implement all of these — and several vendors already ship safety-certified RISC-V silicon targeting ASIL-B through ASIL-D.
Verification: Trust but Verify
Safety leans heavily on verification, and this is where the open ecosystem shines. The open-source cores community has built serious tooling — formal verification, co-simulation frameworks like DiffTest-H, and exhaustive compliance suites — that helps prove a core behaves exactly as specified. For a safety case, being able to inspect and independently verify the design is a genuine advantage of openness.
Mixed-Criticality: Many Workloads, One SoC
The software-defined vehicle consolidates workloads that used to live on separate ECUs: a safety-critical braking task, a real-time motor controller, and a non-critical infotainment stack might now share one chip. This is mixed-criticality, and it depends on strong isolation:
- PMP and the privilege model to sandbox tasks
- The hypervisor (H) extension to run isolated virtual machines
- Real-time determinism for the safety-critical partitions
RISC-V’s modular privilege architecture maps naturally onto these requirements.
What’s Still Maturing
Automotive is conservative for good reason, and a few things are still hardening:
- Tool certification — qualified compilers and the full ISO 26262 tool chain are still being built out (a downstream concern for the toolchain ecosystem).
- Track record — automotive trusts what has been in the field for years; RISC-V is earning that history now.
- Standardization — Quintauris and the profiles effort are converging the baseline so suppliers interoperate.
The trajectory, though, is unmistakable: RISC-V is moving from “interesting” to “designed-in.”
The Bottom Line
Cars are becoming computers on wheels, and the industry wants those computers built on an open, multi-sourced, customizable foundation it controls. With Quintauris organizing five major players and safety-certified RISC-V silicon already shipping, automotive is one of RISC-V’s most credible high-value markets. Functional safety was never blocked by the open ISA — it is, as always, about how carefully you build and verify the implementation.
Part of my RISC-V series. See also RISC-V security and the 2026 ecosystem overview.
