Honda’s Chief Architect on SDV: “It Is Impossible to Achieve It Alone”

Adapted from the talk by Yuichi Kusakabe, Chief Architect, Honda Motor R&D Co., Ltd. , AGL All Member Meeting Japan 2026, Tokyo, May 14, 2026

TL;DR

No single company, including Honda, can build a Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) platform entirely on its own. At AGL AMM Japan 2026 in Tokyo, Honda Chief Architect Yuichi Kusakabe made the case for industry-wide collaboration, backing his argument with three live demonstrations of the AGL SoDeV platform running on the Renesas R-Car V4H, the new R-Car X5H, and a Raspberry Pi 5.

Three Shifts Reshaping Automotive Software

Kusakabe outlined three structural changes transforming the automotive software landscape:

Hardware-Defined to Software-Defined: Vehicle value is increasingly driven by software functions that can be continuously updated over-the-air. This shifts the primary competitive battleground from manufacturing capacity to software development velocity.
Closed Systems to Open Standards: Siloed, proprietary architectures severely limit scalability. In response, industry consortiums are establishing open standards. Kusakabe cited JASPAR as a prime example: its Yoriito project, which defines standardized vehicle APIs including Signal, Access, and Platform Abstraction Layers, released its first open-source codebase on GitHub in April 2026.
Linear Supply Chains to Collaborative Ecosystems: The traditional OEM -> Tier 1 -> Tier 2 -> Tier 3 hierarchy is giving way to open networks where semiconductor vendors, cloud providers, and software firms interact directly. Honda’s analysis of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) revealed that 58.9% of its 1,357 repositories (799 total) consist of external open-source components. Managing license and security compliance across that volume of upstream code is a challenge no single automaker can manage alone.

The AGL SoDeV Reference Platform

At the core of the presentation was the AGL SoDeV reference platform, an open-source SDV reference implementation announced by Automotive Grade Linux in December 2025. Led by Panasonic Automotive Systems, Honda, and the AGL SDV Expert Group, the project incorporates contributions from Toyota, Mazda, AISIN, and Renesas.

The platform architecture uses a Xen Type 1 hypervisor to manage isolated software domains:

Dom0: Acts as the primary control domain.
DomD: Handles hardware access via a standardized VirtIO back-end.
DomU: Runs guest workloads independently (such as AAOS, AGL, and Zephyr ASIL applications).

VirtIO, the open OASIS standard for virtual device I/O, provides the abstraction layer required to make software portable across different system-on-chips (SoCs).

Kusakabe demonstrated the platform running across three hardware targets:

Renesas R-Car V4H (Cortex-A76 x 4): Consolidates Honda’s Android Automotive OS (AAOS) IVI in a guest domain alongside a Zephyr ASIL domain and AGL instrument cluster software on a single SoC under Xen.
Renesas R-Car X5H (Cortex-A720AE x 32): Honda ported its IVI software from the V4H in remarkably short order. Because VirtIO ensures binary compatibility, the IVI source code required no modifications, needing only to be flashed onto the new chip.
Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB model): Powered by Xen 4.19 with a Zephyr Dom0 and AGL DomU, this setup drove two HDMI displays simultaneously using CPU-only rendering (GPU bring-up under Xen remains ongoing). The RPi5 Xen layer (meta-xt-prod-devel-rpi5) is a public GitHub project maintained by xen-troops, with Xen toolstack coverage on RPi5 currently supporting 19 of 72 xl subcommands.

Functional Safety and Certification Progress

Two open-source initiatives are critical to establishing SoDeV’s safety certification pathway:

The Xen Project: With sponsorship from AMD, the project is actively pursuing functional safety alignment with ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3. Kusakabe serves as a Xen Board Member.
ELISA (Enabling Linux In Safety Applications): Works to define protocols for deploying Linux in safety-critical systems like instrument clusters.

A key focus for the community is refining the implementation of tell-tale monitoring between DomD and DomU guest instances within domain-isolated architectures.

Honda’s Open Source Program Office

Honda established its Open Source Program Office (OSPO) in April 2024, with Kusakabe taking on the role of OSPO Tech Lead alongside his architectural duties. The company has achieved OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 conformance for open-source license compliance and ISO/IEC 18974 conformance for open-source security assurance. To handle Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) management across Tier 1 to 3 suppliers, Honda utilizes SPDX Lite in spreadsheet format as a practical compliance standard.

The Path Forward & Community Involvement

The transition toward software-defined vehicles represents a fundamental industry shift, one where no single company can cover the entire software stack alone. Open-source communities already hold many of the foundational solutions, making cross-industry collaboration essential.