Red Hat today announced a collaboration with General Motors (GM) to expand the development of software-defined vehicles at the edge and lay the foundation for broader electric vehicle (EV) adoption.

Specifically, the two companies hope to reduce overall costs of in-vehicle software systems; shorten the time-to-market development cycle; implement a continuous functional safety certification for vehicles and other use cases; and create new business models, services, and revenue streams.

The partnership is founded on Red Hat's In-Vehicle Operating System that the vendor claims will provide a functional-safety certified Linux OS for GM vehicles using the company's end-to-end software platform, Ultifi.

The cloud-native OS will accelerate the development of GM's software-defined vehicle programs and allow both companies to push valuable features to customers in a shorter time period, according to Red Hat. GM plans to launch its Ultifi platform in 2023.

The two companies expect this integration will support various in-vehicle safety and non-safety related applications including driver assistance programs, infotainment, connectivity, and body control.

“General Motors is now a platform company and working with Red Hat is a critical element in advancing our Ultifi software development," GM VP Scott Miller said in a statement. "Incorporating the company’s expertise in open source solutions and enterprise networks will pay dividends as we aim to provide the most developer-friendly software platform in the industry."

GM's platform separates software from hardware and provides application program interfaces specifically for software development. This flexible architecture opens the door for additional cloud-based services, accelerated software development, and new customer value that doesn't affect standard hardware controls, according to the automaker.

Driver safety is often the top priority of in-vehicle software, along with cybersecurity protection. In current in-vehicle systems, the testing and certification of these priority requirements can draw out the development process and make software updates difficult. This partnership aims to simplify the process and increase the frequency of updating in-vehicle systems by pushing continuous functional-safety certification from Red Hat's in-vehicle OS into GM's Ultifi platform.

Though EVs aren't a new concept, a lot of progress needs to be made toward wider EV adoption, Red Hat Edge VP Francis Chow noted. "That’s where the move toward the software-defined vehicle comes into play," he wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

To that point, automakers will need a scalable platform as the foundation of software-defined vehicles "in order to shift their focus to providing enhanced driver experiences that can progress the advancement of electric vehicles," Chow explained.

An in-vehicle OS like Red Hat's will be the foundation of future "watershed moments" between open source software and automotive leaders, he added.