The screen stopped being a device and became an allocation problem
1 / 8
The most developed part of the stack is the display fabric. Application windows migrate between panels at the frame-buffer level, so the number of physical displays becomes an output of the architecture rather than a constraint on it. Above that lives a seat-ownership rule that decides which occupant controls which panel.
The cabin is sold as a certified regional product, and the certificate is the product
2 / 8
Desay SV carried Li Auto's cockpit into Europe for the Li 6, and the work described is localisation: eight European languages, Amap, Spotify and Apple CarPlay, digital radio for Europe and the Middle East, an emergency-call module certified to EN 17240:2024, and distraction and drowsiness warnings written to Euro NCAP criteria. The company counts 32 international qualification certificates across 35 countries and regions behind that one programme.
Strategy
Chinese automakers carry the current record, and the European group holds a large older one
3 / 8
FAW is the largest single filer in the field with 38 patents, and most of them published in 2025 and 2026. PSA is second with 36. Chery appears under two recorded names that together account for 25. Ford holds 24, XPeng 20, Geely 17, Xiaomi 8 and Great Wall 7, and all seven of Great Wall's were published in 2026.
Research
Permission is now computed, and it is where the newest filings concentrate
4 / 8
The recogniser itself is settled and largely published: streaming decoder fixes, forced-alignment training, decoding shortcuts. The recent work scores whether a request should be honoured. Geely combines acoustic, visual and vehicle-context evidence into a single confidence value before answering a stranger's voice. A second filing returns execute, delay, confirm, downgrade or refuse from a graph of conflicting intents. A third filters audio by sound zone and issues an authorisation request before acting.
Market
The margin is abroad, and the supplier keeps it
5 / 8
Desay SV reported 2025 revenue of ¥32.56bn, with smart cockpits at ¥20.59bn, or 63% of the total. Overseas revenue reached ¥2.41bn, up 41.1%, at a 27.3% gross margin against 18.4% at home. A broker note on the first half of 2026 puts overseas revenue at ¥1.62bn, up 55.7% and now 11% of the total, at a 31.3% margin.
Strategy
Each carmaker files on a different part of the stack
6 / 8
The totals hide a clean division. PSA puts 21 of its 36 patents into interaction and control, which is the single largest company position in that area. FAW files across four of the five areas, which no other organisation does at this volume. Ford concentrates on comfort, with 11 of its 24 in that area and the largest holding there of any organisation. XPeng splits between interaction (10) and occupant experience (9).
Research
The loop runs on consolidated silicon, with the safety partition bought in
7 / 8
Cockpit and driving control now share one system-on-chip, and the cost arithmetic is why: a single-chip implementation is reported to cut hardware expense by 20 to 30 percent and shorten the development cycle from 18 months to 8. The separation between safety-critical and non-critical workloads has become a purchasable component, with ECARX running the instrument cluster on QNX 8.0 inside a mixed-criticality SoC and ThunderSoft pairing a real-time processor with application compute in a reference design.
Market
Single-chip fusion has a customer list before it has volume
8 / 8
Horizon Robotics launched the Starry 6 in April 2026 as a single system-on-chip running cabin AI and driving models together, and reported letters of intent from more than ten carmakers including Volkswagen, BYD, Changan and BAIC, plus Bosch and Denso as suppliers, with iCAR named first to production. Pateo then took a designation from a large domestic new-energy vehicle maker to build a high-end cockpit on that chip, described as the first such award for a system running entirely on a domestic cabin-driving-integrated part. Volume production was scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2026.