Modern automotive development is fragmented by design. Teams are structured around domains, components, or electronic control unit (ECU) responsibilities. Chassis software lives in one team, infotainment in another, and powertrain elsewhere. They work asynchronously, with separate priorities, tools, and timelines, as shown in figure 1. However vehicle functions don’t care about teams, they span them. When these components are brought together for integration, the mismatch becomes visible.

Interfaces break, timings collide, and assumptions fail, Integration turns into firefighting, and it’s not because the developers were careless. It’s because their context was incomplete. Why not fix the organization? Because that’s a years-long transformation with high risk and low immediate payoff. Change management, communication breakdowns, and loss of focus would follow. We’re not proposing to fix the org chart; we’re proposing to fix the effect