Most OEMs building software-defined vehicles are targeting upwards of 140 markets. Most are currently delivering connected services in around 50. That SDV globalisation gap does not close by adding more local teams or more regional partnerships. It closes when the platform beneath the vehicle treats global delivery as the default rather than an edge case.
That was the argument at the centre of the DSP Leaders Forum panel on 19 May, and it is one Cubic3 has been making to customers for some time. André Schlufter, our Director of Automotive Connectivity Innovation, joined practitioners from General Motors, Aptiv, Orange Business and Jaguar Land Rover for a 45-minute session, moderated by Guy Daniels of TelecomTV and co-hosted by 5GAA CTO Maxime Flament, that worked through the practical obstacles in some detail.
The gap between ambition and delivery
The obstacles are well known to anyone operating in this space. Fragmented connectivity models vary by region. eSIM lifecycle management adds complexity at scale. Data sovereignty rules force localised processing in markets where centralised architectures do not comply. Compliance requirements diverge across jurisdictions in ways that resist standardisation. Taken together, these constraints mean that a single SDV product vision tends to fragment into multiple incompatible regional implementations, each requiring its own integrations, operational overhead, and maintenance burden.
The cost of getting it wrong
Camille Voisin from General Motors framed the commercial stakes plainly. A country-by-country strategy cannot keep pace with demand. For safety-critical services such as battery monitoring on BEVs or the guaranteed connectivity that higher autonomy levels will require, inconsistency is not just an operational inconvenience. It is a product failure.
What a real solution looks like
The panel’s conversation about solutions kept returning to the same principle: the platform layer should abstract from market complexity rather than replicate it. That means a global abstraction layer that handles the eSIM lifecycle, OTA updates, observability, and compliance without requiring custom integration work for every new jurisdiction. As vehicle-side compute becomes a requirement rather than an option, it also means managed services covering billing, policy and content that can run locally on the vehicle with or without a live connection.
One platform, everywhere
This is where Cubic3’s architecture is designed to operate. Our global platform is standards-agnostic, unifying the different eSIM and connectivity standards OEMs encounter across markets under a single management layer. The goal is straightforward: one platform that works everywhere, rather than many platforms that each work somewhere.
The SDV opportunity is real, but it will not be captured by OEMs who treat connectivity as a regional procurement exercise. The winners will be the ones who solve it at the platform level.
