The EU Data Act: the first domino of the software-defined vehicle

Ask most carmakers what their customers actually pay for and the answer is not 'data'. It is services: the navigation that reroutes around traffic, the maintenance that arrives before the breakdown, the feature that improves after the car is sold. Data is only the raw material. The question the EU Data Act forces is who gets to turn that raw material into value — and under what conditions.

The Data Act — the EU regulation on fair access to and use of data — entered into force on 11 January 2024 as a central pillar of the European data strategy. Where the earlier Data Governance Act set up the structures for voluntary data sharing, the Data Act sets the rules: it clarifies who can create value from data, and how. For connected products, that means they must be designed and built so users — businesses or consumers — can easily and securely access, use and share the data those products generate.

For a vehicle, that is a significant shift. The data a car produces can no longer sit locked inside one company's systems by default. When that data has to be made available, more parties can build on it — and the competitive question moves from who holds the data to who does the most useful thing with it.

Opening up vehicle data is not a self-contained compliance exercise. To share data securely and usefully across a product's life, a manufacturer needs the data to be structured, the software that produces it to be governed, and the whole system to be updateable and verifiable in the field. Those are precisely the foundations of the software-defined vehicle: a clear separation of hardware, middleware and application; one common way to communicate; and one aligned tool chain across the life cycle.

In other words, the regulation that obliges carmakers to free their data also pushes them towards the architecture that makes the rest of the software-defined vehicle possible. The Data Act is the first domino; the ones that follow — modular software, continuous updates, data-driven services — fall more easily once the first has been pushed.

The honest answer is that the Data Act is more opportunity than threat — but only for the companies ready to act on it. The work is concrete: structure the data the vehicle produces; establish one source of truth and one tool chain across research, manufacturing and the aftermarket; and put the diagnostics, software-download and verification discipline in place so that data can be trusted when it is shared.

That is the ground Diadrom has worked for more than two decades — the diagnostics and embedded-software backbone that lets a manufacturer know exactly what software is in the field, prove it, update it and learn from the data it produces. The Data Act simply turns that backbone into a business advantage rather than a back-office cost.