The Challenge
A leading automotive manufacturer needed a way to comprehensively test remote software updates for their vehicle fleet without requiring access to physical vehicles. The variety of vehicle generations, gateway types, and update protocols made manual testing impractical. At the same time, updates had to be reliably validated before being rolled out to customer vehicles.
Our Approach
We developed a cloud-native simulation platform that fully replicates the behavior of real vehicles towards the update backend. The platform enables testing of various vehicle configurations and update scenarios in a controlled environment — including targeted failure cases and edge cases.
Architecture Highlights
- Multi-Gateway Simulation: Support for over 10 different gateway types with distinct communication protocols and vehicle generations
- Test Orchestration: Central test engine with REST API for configuring, executing, and monitoring test runs
- Real Vehicle Infrastructure: Usage of authentic vehicle identification numbers and certificates — fully transparent to the backend system
- Virtualized Vehicle Software: Integration of real onboard software via QEMU virtualization with simulatable vehicle signals
- Web Cockpit: Vue 3 / TypeScript frontend for test run management, monitoring, and result analysis
Key Features
- Self-service portal for configuring and executing test scenarios
- Automated provisioning of test vehicle data (VINs, certificates, inventory data) at the push of a button
- Parallel simulation of multiple virtual vehicles within a single test run
- Snapshot feature: populate simulations with data from real vehicles
- VIN locking and role-based VIN management
- Integration into CI/CD pipelines for automated regression testing
- Nightly tests for early defect detection
Results
- 10+ gateway variants simulated through a unified platform
- Production-critical deployment issues could be reproduced and resolved promptly
- Nightly tests detect defects before they surface in production
- Provisioning of new test VINs reduced from days to seconds
- Platform used by multiple teams for development, QA, and end-to-end testing
- Project running for over 5 years in close collaboration with the customer