The automotive industry faces growing demands and technological shifts, necessitating new approaches. In the context of increasing sustainability requirements, the future car must remain adaptable throughout its lifecycle. Similar to smartphones, it should receive over-the-air updates to extend its functionality. Achieving this requires fundamental changes in electronics, software, hardware architecture, and development processes. The authors face part of these challenges as part of the project Software-Defined Car (SofDCar).

This paper addresses different aspects in context of product planning and product development for a software-defined car. The aim and vision of a methodological overall framework was broken down to the goal of creating an initial framework. This idea includes three fields with several approaches. The first field focuses on the development of a roadmap based on future scenarios. With two approaches, a cross-generational roadmap for the implementation of product properties was developed in this research based on changing product properties, robustness and innovation potential. Further, an initial approach was developed to continuously monitor the roadmap against the future environment to be able to anticipate and implement them into the car. The second field focuses on validation of the identified product needs by assessing the products future benefits. Based on these benefits, requirements for the validation system are derived. To enable updates and upgrades, planned product properties must be designed for extensibility and exchangeability. Hence, the characterization of the design space was focused within the third field. An approach was developed to define modules by considering suitable interfaces and standardization using design-for-modularization.