The 2025 edition of ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Technology Expo Europe has been hailed a resounding success, attracting thousands of visitors from around the world, with exhibitors showcasing the latest advanced mobility products, technologies and services to accelerate scalable end-to-end product development and deployment; improve quality and safety; and reduce costs. The show also saw a number of other firsts, with a range of new events added to the program, including two live technology forums on the show floor, the first ever ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle International Awards, and a free-to-attend mini-conference highlighting the latest developments from the Gaia-X 4 Product Life Cycle – Across Automated Driving (PLC-AAD) project.
The ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Technology Expo Conference featured over 80 conference speakers and included presentations from Waymo, Renault, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Volvo, Wayve, the European Commission, ASAM, Cariad, Plus and Stellantis.
“There are suppliers from all around the world that have come down to Stuttgart for three days, and it’s really nice to meet them,” said Amal Vallavanthara, principal project manager at Bosch. “I have had in-person discussions on what the latest technologies are, what they are up to and what the future holds.”
Dario Fernandez, manager of dynamic performance at Nissan, commented, “We’re here to see, of course, how we can reduce our development time, be more efficient during our testing. It’s very interesting to see the developments on the AI part of the development, how to treat the data. So, we have meet with several of our suppliers here. It’s been very interesting so far. And yeah, looking forward for the rest of the event.”
Noting the shift toward AI integration within the automotive industry, Lucas Barquette, global cost engineer at Volvo, said, “I’m quite amazed [at] how many companies [at the expo] put AI in their name. I think that makes their value maybe 10 times bigger, but [I am also] quite amazed to see how many companies sound like startups.”
He continued, “At Volvo, we have a start-up incubator [where] we try to advise startups and we try to make them grow. I think it’s good because it brings a different mindset [to the industry]; automotive is quite old school, so it brings more dynamics into the game.”
Exhibition highlights
Visitors had the opportunity to engage with key industry players, as well as discover new contacts and potential solutions from an exciting mix of startups, many of which were making their debut at the event. Here’s just some of the highlights from this year’s show:
IPG Automotive presented its new cloud-based simulation workflow for efficient virtual vehicle development. Its advanced solutions for mastering ADAS development challenges include the CarMaker product family, bespoke hardware solution SensInject for direct injection of sensor data (closed loop and replay) and Virto – a modular, cloud-based suite of web applications. Senior global sales strategy manager Jan Oberst explained that aside from managing a large amount of data, Virto “simplifies and scales simulations for virtual vehicle development”. Alexander Frings, director of product management, enthused, “The trade fair enables us to develop potential partnerships, driving the mobility of the future.”
Another interesting debut was ViGEM‘s high-performance platform designed to support ADAS development through comprehensive vehicle validation, mobile data handling, data collection and data center functionality. The CAA 9110 can deliver data rates of up to 60Gb/s.
The platform offers a suite of recording capabilities, including support for PCAP, VPCAP and MDF4 formats. It aims to ensure precise timestamp synchronization through NTP, GPS, PTP or gPTP, enabling the alignment of recorded data. The system also allows for triggered recordings and supports a wide range of recording protocols such as ASAM CMP, PLP, Autosar-DLT, SOME/IP, ASAM XCP and IP camera streams, making it a relevant solution for complex ADAS validation and data acquisition scenarios.
Peter Elsenhans, head of sales at ViGEM, explained, “We collect large volumes of data directly from the test vehicle during operation. This data is then transferred to our copy station, which facilitates a seamless upload to the cloud. This process allows us to quickly return the recording device to the vehicle and continue testing without delay. Our solution is highly flexible, scalable and reliable, making it ideal for demanding ADAS validation workflows.”
At the show, Foretellix announced an expansion of its Foretify platform, which is now integrated with Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint and the Cosmos Transfer World Foundation Model. This enhancement adds hyper-realistic sensor simulation to behavioral scenario testing, helping AV developers accelerate training, reduce development time and lower costs.
“Foretellix is a valued partner in our mission to commercialize autonomous trucks by 2027,” said Torc CEO Peter Vaughan Schmidt. “Their Data-Automation Toolchain enables the large-scale simulation and rigorous scenario testing essential to validating our physical AI Level 4 autonomous system and ensuring that safety remains at the core of everything we do.”
“Physical AI creates a fast lane to autonomy that will ultimately improve our quality of life and help save millions of lives, but making it a reality requires an intelligent, data-driven approach to address AI’s inherent limitations,” added Ziv Binyamini, CEO and co-founder of Foretellix.
Autonoma showcased Copilot, an advanced digital twin simulation system powered by a natural language interface, a key feature of its AutoVerse platform. Built on Autonoma’s robust J3DI physics engine, Copilot delivers ultra-realistic vehicle dynamics and sensor simulations, enabling engineers and non-engineers to build scenarios, tweak agent behaviors and configure environments — all without writing a single line of code.
“As part of this global event, we’re thrilled to engage with innovators looking to accelerate development and enhance collaboration through simulation,” said Kyle Connor, vice president of sales and marketing “Copilot is making simulation not only more accessible, but also more strategically valuable than ever before.”
You can read more news from the show, including exclusive exhibitor video interviews, here.
ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle International Awards
A new awards ceremony celebrating innovations in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle technologies was held at this year’s expo. Organized by ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle International (AAVI) magazine, the ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle International Awards recognize standout projects and technologies from the past 18 months, highlighting achievements across the autonomous mobility sector.
The inaugural awards featured eight categories, with nominations submitted by a panel of international industry experts and the final winners chosen by AAVI’s international subscribers. “At a critical juncture for the automotive and transportation sectors, these awards honor the hard-working engineering teams behind the most noteworthy achievements driving safer, smarter and more sustainable mobility solutions,” said AAVI editor Anthony James.
Winners on the night included Waymo, MAN Truck & Bus, Wayve and EuroNCAP.
Conference insights
The three-day conference once again provided the perfect platform to discuss the key challenges, trends and technologies shaping the automotive landscape. Dan Cauchy, executive director of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), emphasized the growing shift toward open-source software in developing software-defined vehicles (SDVs) and advocated for for a collaborative approach — “100 million lines of code, shared by everyone” — to reduce duplicated effort and enable scalable development.
Cauchy explained that instead of relying on dedicated processors or system-on-chips (SoCs) for each function, the open-source approach promotes a one-size-fits-all model. By decoupling hardware from software, this strategy allows individual functions to be updated independently. AGL is already supported by major OEMs like Toyota, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz, powering systems such as infotainment, digital dashboards and telematics.
Open source, he noted, is intended to provide a shared foundation, covering 70–80% of a production project’s starting point. Through numerous updates to the open software platform (named after fish), the platform continues to grow and enable smarter technologies. The latest release, Quirky Quillback, introduced enhancements like Flutter integration, improved web app support and broader hardware compatibility. “We need to use open source to grow open source,” Cauchy urged, stressing the importance of participation to demonstrate its value to decision-makers.
To address safety in open-source systems, Cauchy cited the ELISA initiative, launched in April 2025. In this project, AGL is working on advancing functional safety by analyzing current open-source software (OSS) development practices, identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) and developing a framework to assess how well OSS projects align with safety and security objectives, industry standards and regulatory requirements. He also hinted at potential developments, noting ongoing — but undisclosed — discussions with Nvidia.
Phil Koopman, associate professor at Pennsylvania’s Carnegie Mellon University, implored the sector to embrace more comprehensive safety engineering systems, during a thought-provoking presentation titled ‘Understanding self-driving vehicle safety’. He also found time to discuss this further with AAVI in this exclusive interview filmed at the show. “You have to think bigger than the driver,” he explained. “If you want to be safe, you need to ask the ‘what if’ questions.”
Open to conference delegates only, an exclusive workshop also took place, covering how to specify the ODD in a machine-readable and human-interpretable fashion. Speaking in the run up to the event, workshop leader Andreas Richter, engineering program manager at Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, said, “We will learn how to analyze the real-world conditions and how to exclude unsuitable ones. We will modularize the specification to enable assembling a single joint specification from components provided by numerous teams and experts. We will understand which use cases and data are required to support ODD evaluation, including discussion of the various technologies and data sources involved. Finally, we will understand how to utilize these definitions in simulation toolchains to determine the impact of specific capabilities.” Andreas was supported by a team of experts: Iskra Gašparić and Florian Klück from AVL, Omar Elzeiny and Xavier Rouah from dSpace, and Ulrich Korus and Max Winkelmann from Applied Intuition.
As well as the three-day conference, an exclusive mini-conference on the Gaia-X 4 Product Life Cycle – Across Automated Driving (PLC-AAD) project took place at ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Technology Expo Europe. The project is creating an open and distributed data ecosystem to support the product lifecycle of automated driving functions, in line with Gaia-X standards.
The event featured 10 speakers and eight presentations, and drew strong interest from simulation, validation and HIL/SIL experts. According to Alexander F Walser, managing director of the Automotive Solution Center for Simulation, who chaired the mini-conference, automotive OEMs and suppliers face growing challenges in developing automated and connected driving functions due to complex software-hardware integration and deep, data-driven supply chains, and the project addresses this by enabling secure, regulated and traceable data sharing. “Gaia-X 4 PLC-AAD enhances trust, interoperability and efficiency through standardized information models and architectures,” Walser noted.
Dates for your calendar
After another successful European show, those interested in the latest developments and innovations in ADAS and automated driving should make a note of the dates for the ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Technology Summit North America, which is taking place on August 27 –28, 2025, at the McEnery Center in San Jose, California. The European event will return to Stuttgart next year on June 23, 24 & 25, 2026.