On April 15, 2025, Qualcomm organized a workshop at its headquarters in San Diego, California to explain and demo its evolving range of automotive hardware and software solutions enabling a wide range of automotive use cases ranging from cockpits featuring large displays to various levels of autonomous vehicle operation.
Qualcomm’s Ongoing Expansion into Automotive
With a legacy of over 20 years in automotive connectivity, Qualcomm has systematically expanded its fast-growing automotive portfolio, initially with connectivity platforms for telematics, cockpit infotainment solutions, and immersive in-vehicle experiences, to more recently, developing driver assistance and End-to-End (E2E) driverless technology stacks.
It offers these solutions under the Snapdragon Digital Chassis portfolio, which includes Snapdragon Cockpit Platform, Snapdragon Ride, Snapdragon Auto Connectivity Platforms, and Car-to-Cloud services, all of which are developed in-house. The latest additions include the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite Platforms, which feature the Hexagon NPU for accelerated Artificial Intelligence (AI) performance, Qualcomm Oryon CPU tailored for automotive, and the latest generation of Adreno GPU. Snapdragon Ride represents a fast-growing share of Qualcomm’s automotive business with key customers like General Motors (GM) and BMW, and in other regions primed to become key markets for the San Diego-based technology vendor.
Recent Snapdragon Ride and Cockpit platforms partners, announced at the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show, include Visteon, PATEO, Desay SV, ECARX, and Nebula-Link. Overall, Qualcomm automotive technology powers more than 350 million vehicles globally. Since 2023, 149+ vehicle models launched with Snapdragon Cockpit Platform onboard.
The Technology: E2E AI, SDV, Mixed Criticality, and Cloud-Based Toolchains
Unsurprisingly, edge and cloud-based AI is increasingly embedded into Qualcomm’s entire automotive portfolio and toolchains ranging from the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) for personalized interactions with the driver (“AI-driven cockpit experiences”) to advanced AI models for path planning, trajectory decision-making, and cloud-based AI software development. Qualcomm’s extensive AI capabilities suite and related nomenclature include E2E AI models, Multimodal AI (Reasoning model), Agentic AI Orchestrator, Compound AI, Decision Transformer, multi-modal Gen AI experiences, and AI Safety Guard Rails, indicative of the increasingly pervasive nature of AI across its portfolio. Interestingly, Qualcomm claims its AI-based approach for autonomy levels 2, 3, and 4 only requires Standard-Definition (SD) maps, which are more scalable and cost-effective compared with High-Definition (HD) maps used by Alphabet’s Waymo in its robotaxis.
Equally ubiquitous is the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) concept underpinning all Digital Chassis solutions. Specifically, it includes software architectures for mixed-criticality and safety virtualization enabling running multiple stacks concurrently on the same central compute hardware under the Flex brand. This approach enables developing lower-cost solutions that are attractive for non-premium vehicle models. However, for level 3 and 4 autonomy, ASIL-D integrity requirements mandate trajectory validation on a secondary path.
Moving outside the vehicle, Qualcomm offers a wide range of Data Simulation Factory (DSF) developer tools, including environmental models based on real-world data, automated annotation capabilities and synthetic data, smart scenario mining, as well as AI model training and validation. The Snapdragon Digital Chassis Workbench offers development, test, agile, and deployment infrastructure tools such as Code Collaboration, virtual Systems on Chip (SoCs) for Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) testing (Snapdragon Virtual Cockpit and Ride digital twins), the Qualcomm AI Hub for onboarding AI models, and various cloud services.
The Drive Demos
Multiple drive demos were available to experience Qualcomm’s automotive technology firsthand.
“Assist”—L2 Mass Market (Eyes-on and Hands-on)
Lincoln Aviator vehicle running In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and L2 Autonomous Driving (AD) stacks concurrently, combining map displays and high-fidelity road views with lane-keeping and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) functionality on the same hardware (mixed criticality/Flex).
“Pilot Plus”—L2+ Address-to-Address Urban Navigation (Eyes-on and Hands-off)
Lincoln vehicle featuring highway + urban AD based on E2E, AI-first, stack architecture. Fully autonomous operation not requiring any manual intervention from the driver.
Rivian R1T
Rivian EV featuring IVI based on Unreal Engine 4 (Epic Games) and Snapdragon Cockpit Platform enabling advanced User Interface (UI) design and dynamic graphics (console displays for maps, vehicle status, etc.).
Connected Services
With its Car-to-Cloud connected services platform, Qualcomm aims to unlock the value of SDVs while leveraging its automotive connectivity heritage. Snapdragon Connected Services offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to an ecosystem of partners commercializing a wide range of services such as in-vehicle wallets for EV charging payments (J.P. Morgan payments, Visa), predictive maintenance, tire solutions (Michelin), fleet services, Human-Machine Interface (HMI) personalization (Unreal Engine), as well as Gen AI-driven services such as hotel reservations and food pickup. While monetizing this part of its automotive capabilities does not seem to be a priority yet for Qualcomm, it is an important framework to highlight and showcase the richness of automotive use cases that its platforms can enable.
In Conclusion
Qualcomm is serious about automotive, leveraging its 20-plus-year legacy in this segment to enable the ongoing autonomous revolution. It does this in a responsible, strategic, realistic, safe, affordable, and incremental way, enabling automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier One suppliers around the world to seamlessly embark on the AD revolution through one-stop shop, E2E, and turnkey solutions, with future-proof, scalable, open, and software-defined platforms, spanning the entire spectrum from low- to high-end vehicle models. While Qualcomm offers the whole gamut of hardware, software, and testing tool chains, at the same time, it also allows clients to bring their own partners to the table, a key automotive industry requirement from a branding and customization perspective.