The Era of Cars Running a Single Computer and Operating System Is Here

Motor Trend

a day ago

Is China really 'there' already, producing cars with centralized computers and a hypervisor? Coming out of CES 2025 earlier this year, we covered a Snapdragon innovation Qualcomm was pitching to automakers, capable of running an entire car on a single chip. Now we just returned from China where we drove a similar system by Chinese EV maker Nio—which designed, developed, and manufactured its own chip in-house, along with the software that runs on it.
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Chinese Smart-EV startup Nio's Shenji NX9031 Chip--the world's first Automotive 5nm chip.
How are these newish Chinese car companies (Xpeng has designed its own chip, too) able to pull this off? By prioritizing digital development. Nio's engineering workforce of between 10 and 11,000 engineers is split about 70/30 between software versus other branches of engineering, so they do their own electrical architecture, for example, while leaving some hardware-based tasks such as suspension design and development to third parties. Tesla's engineering mix is similar in scope to Nio's, but most legacy automakers reverse those percentages.
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Nio SkyOS Operating System Schematic
SkyOS
The name may conjure frightening references to SkyNet from the Terminator movies, but this comprehensive vehicular operating system is designed to oversee all systems onboard Nio's entire range of cars—from its simple, compact Firefly EV to the all-singing, all-active-suspension-dancing Nio ET9. We asked whether there was a measurable difference in the number of lines of code or the computing power between a Firefly application and ET9 and were told that no, one SkyOS system fits all. There will simply be fewer features on some models, all connected via an ethernet backbone. A huge benefit touted for SkyOS is its extremely low latency (response time), which is said to be far less than a millisecond. That's considerably quicker than competing Linux systems, and drivers can appreciate such an improvement in latency through touchscreen responses and shorter ABS stopping distances.
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Nvidia's Orin chip has been one of the auto industry's top-performing chips.
Nvidia Orin or Shenji NX9031?
SkyOS is designed to run on various chipsets, so cars demanding fewer features can utilize less expensive existing chips, while full-featured cars like the ET9 get Nio's new Shenji NX9031—hailed as the automotive world's first production 5nm chip. (Note: 5nm is simply a chip-marketing term that refers to the next step in the evolution of transistor density—the gates are not physically 5 nm apart, but the chip houses more than 50 billion transistors.) Billed primarily as an autonomous driving enabler, the chip reportedly possesses at least double the processing power of two Nvidia Orin chips with a pixel processing capacity of 6.5GB/s and a response time of less than 5 ms, yet it draws considerably less power than an equivalent Nvidia array. Such processing power improves things like the vision systems' ability to recognize objects in low light and for AI personal assistants like Nio's NOMI to process large-language models.
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Schematic comparing and contrasting domain-based versus zonal electrical architecture.
Isn't Rivian Basically Right There Too?
Close. Rivian's electrical architecture is in the vanguard of American manufacturers, but its system still largely qualifies as zonal, in which various zones aggregate signals from nearby sensors and send them (via simpler communications) to the central computer. Rivian runs an OS from QNX Blackberry. Nio employs zones, as well, but generally fewer of them. Low-feature-set cars like the Firefly might employ one or two zones while a fancy ET9 needs four.
What About Tesla?
The other vanguard player in America's SDV universe is Tesla, which still employs considerably more than a handful of zones in its more centralized zonal architecture. It also runs open-source software (OSS) such as Linux, GNU toolchain, and other community-based projects such as Ubuntu.
SkyOS is Also Open Source
Perhaps a future Tesla may leverage Nio's SkyOS, which the company has announced it has made 'open source.' What does that mean? Mostly the software development community is free to look under the hood and develop products and apps to run on the SkyOS system. This is the main motivation for Nio making the software opens source: to improve the user experience with more potential over-the-air updatable features and Easter eggs developed out-of-house. (For reference, Android is open source, while Apple's iOS is not.)
Might Americans Ever Experience SkyOS?
Barring outright bans on Chinese software, there's every possibility that, say, a domestic or European automaker could leverage Nio's open-source software. Perhaps that possibility is highest with McLaren, which has a technology sharing agreement with Nio. It would certainly seem wise to leverage the development expense of those NX9031 chips by selling them to other automakers, but a lot of strategic calculus goes into making any such decision.