What's the progress of AI and SDV in 2026? | with Maitê Bezerra of Omdia

**John** (0:00)
Today in The Garage, we're recording live at the COVESA all-member meeting in Porto, Portugal.
One of the things that we do every year at the COVESA all member meeting is Sonatus has worked with Omdia, an important research firm in the industry, to survey the industry and understand the trends in software-defined vehicles. This is our second year sponsoring the annual SDV survey. And last year, working with Omdia, we significantly expanded the survey set to a much larger pool.
We found incredibly valuable conclusions last year about how people across the industry were driving ahead towards software-defined vehicles, what they felt was important and value-creating, what are some positive signs, and what are some warning signs about how technologies are being deployed. In this week's episode, we talked with Maitê Bezerra, who's principal analyst for software-defined vehicles from Omdia. We go through the important conclusions of the SDV survey and look at it from a lens of different regions, different subgroups, and what we can take from it to learn about the evolution of software-defined vehicles. It's a very exciting update to this year's survey compared to last year. We look forward to sharing with you.
Let's go!
Welcome to The Garage. We're so excited to have Maitê Bezerra here with us today. Maitê, welcome to The Garage.
You have the distinct honor to be the first three-time guest of The Garage. Because you've been here many times talking about this SDV survey a year ago and so on. But before we jump into that, I want to give you a chance for our guest to introduce yourself and tell us about your company and your role. Thank you, John. First of all, thank you for having me for the third time.
So I'm a principal senior analyst, in software-defined vehicles, and I lead the digital mobility coverage for Omdia. So I have been looking at software-defined vehicle as a transition for the automotive industry for quite a while now, and pretty happy to be working in the survey with you. So, you know, I know you were with Wards Intelligence for a long time, and I think maybe you want to explain for people the kind of changes that have taken place over the past couple years. Of course. That's a very good point. So we were all Informa companies. Right? But I was with Wards Intelligence before, but now we transitioned the name to Omdia because we merged with the Informa Research Group. But we are essentially the same company now, just a different name. Okay. Fantastic. So the SDV survey, you've been running this for quite some years. This is our second year sponsoring the survey with you. Last year, one of the things we did was expand the sample size so we were covering more geographies and more people. So can you begin by telling us about the survey methodology and how many responses we got as part of the survey? Of course. Well, it's interesting you say this because we are at COVESA, and I was in COVESA in 2024, and presented the survey. The sample size was a hundred. So I'm very pleased with the sponsorship because now we have a five hundred and fifty nine sample size, which we had last year and we repeated this year.
And with our sample, we always try to get, an equal distribution of automakers and suppliers. Right? So we have 50% automakers and then 50% divided between tier one suppliers and tier two suppliers. We also try to get representative geographical distribution.
So we have seven countries in North America, in Europe, and in Asia as well. That's phenomenal. And we recognize it was so important to be across the world. And we also saw that the data was so valuable, we really wanted to get a good sample size. Now we both have our iPads here because there's so much data, and we have to go into the saying that what we're gonna cover is a tiny tiny fraction of this total survey content, but we tried to pull out some things that we thought were really relevant. First, what are some of the key conclusions we took away? So I would say the first conclusion is about the state of the industry. So if you think about software-defined vehicle as a technology that has zero to five levels, our respondents really think that we are in the zero to two levels today. Right? So level two is the max that we have achieved today. Right. And we're not talking about self-driving, SAE self driving levels. This is SDV maturity levels, which we'll introduce on the next slide. But sorry, please tell us. No. I'm glad you make this difference in between the two. And our respondents think that we're gonna reach SDV level three by 2030 So, really, we are the inception of this transition. The second thing we noticed was we kind of called the great rebalancing.