Workers inspect a Hyundai ix35 car at the Kia Motors Slovakia factory in Teplicka nad Vahom on January 15, 2010.
EDUARD GENSEREK/AFP via Getty Images
South Korea’s ETRI has done something no research institution from Detroit, Stuttgart, or Tokyo managed first: it wrote the binding international blueprint for what a software-defined vehicle must technically do. A United Nations standards body adopted that blueprint last month, and Seoul has now installed its own engineer in the chair of the committee that will write everything that comes next.
South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT announced Thursday that the world’s first international standards for software-defined vehicles (SDVs) had been formally adopted at the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), following a plenary meeting of Study Group 21 (SG21) held in Geneva, Switzerland. The two documents — a binding technical Recommendation and an accompanying Technical Report — were co-developed by the ministry, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), and the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP). Once referenced by national governments, they will apply across all 194 member states of the ITU.
The standards land in a market in which nearly half of OEMs worldwide now rank the SDV transition as their single top strategic priority — above autonomous driving, above electrification. For an industry that has been building toward SDV capabilities without an agreed-upon technical vocabulary, the ITU-T adoption creates the first internationally recognized baseline for what that capability must actually look like.
What a Software-Defined Vehicle Is — and Why No One Agreed Before Thursday
The term “software-defined vehicle” has circulated in automotive engineering circles for more than a decade, but no globally agreed-upon definition existed until this week. At its core, an SDV is a vehicle whose features and performance are governed and upgraded through software rather than fixed hardware — delivered wirelessly, long after the car leaves the factory, the way an iPhone’s camera capabilities can improve through an iOS update.
The enabling mechanism is over-the-air (OTA) software delivery, which exists in two distinct forms: Software OTA (SOTA) updates applications, maps, and AI models, while Firmware OTA (FOTA) updates lower-level controllers governing braking, power management, and other safety-critical systems. The distinction matters for certification: FOTA updates in safety-critical systems require the kind of rigorous integrity verification and rollback guarantees that SOTA updates for infotainment do not, and the regulatory frameworks that have begun to mandate OTA capability — most importantly UNECE UN Regulation No. 156, now in force across the EU, Japan, and other contracting parties — have had to define those tiers without a common technical vocabulary to work from.
That vocabulary gap is precisely what the Korean-led ITU-T documents are designed to close. An SDV is not simply a vehicle that can receive an app update. Under the VDA taxonomy’s five SDV levels, a vehicle qualifies as an SDV from Level 3 onward: a point at which a central operating environment exists that allows software modules to be added, adjusted, or replaced across vehicle functions — not merely in the infotainment stack — and where those modules can be updated remotely. Prior to Thursday, no ITU body had codified that threshold, or specified what the technical architecture underneath it must look like.
What the Standards Actually Say
The ITU-T Recommendation — the more authoritative of the two outputs — defines the core functional requirements for implementing SDV services. According to ETRI’s announcement as reported by Korean media, it covers service management capabilities and requirements for internal and external connectivity — the software systems linking vehicle components to outside networks and infrastructure.
That language maps precisely to the three-layer architecture that the SDV transition requires. The first layer is the centralized compute platform: replacing the 70 to 100 or more dedicated electronic control units (ECUs) that a traditionally architected vehicle contains with fewer, more powerful central processors running software as modular services. The second layer is the OTA update management system: the software pipeline that delivers changes to that compute platform wirelessly, with the security verification and rollback capabilities that safety-critical updates require. The third layer is the external connectivity interface: the V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communication system, through which the vehicle exchanges data with infrastructure, other vehicles, cloud services, and network providers.
The Recommendation provides what ETRI researchers describe as a “common blueprint” for implementing SDV services across all three layers. The accompanying Technical Report is designed differently — as a reference guide for governments formulating national SDV policy and for companies setting R&D priorities. If the Recommendation is the architectural rulebook, the Technical Report is the executive briefing that explains why those rules exist and where the field is heading.
Why OEMs Have Been Building Blind — and What Changes Now
The practical problem the standards solve can be measured in market geography. Software-defined vehicles promise continuous feature upgrades and new revenue models, but that business case collapses when services cannot be delivered consistently across markets. Most OEMs currently deliver connected services in roughly 50 first-tier countries, while their SDV product ambitions target 140 or more markets. That gap exists because fragmented connectivity models, divergent regulatory requirements, and uneven technical environments force a single SDV product vision to fragment into dozens of incompatible regional implementations, each requiring its own integrations and maintenance burden.
Without a common technical baseline, manufacturers have been forced to develop bespoke software platforms or negotiate against whichever market’s de facto standards their trading partners happen to impose. According to Roland Berger’s SDV cost analysis, OEMs spent nearly €40 billion (approximately $46 billion) on vehicle software in 2024, up from €26 billion (approximately $30 billion) in 2021, with fragmented architectures a primary cost driver. A standardized platform approach could reduce that projected €59 billion (approximately $68 billion) spend in 2030 to €42 billion (approximately $49 billion) — saving approximately €17 billion (approximately $20 billion) through architectural alignment.
For developing economies — the 140-plus nations that the SDV globalization gap currently excludes from consistent connected vehicle services — the ITU-T adoption matters in a different way. Governments formulating SDV policy, type-approval requirements, or procurement rules for connected vehicles now have an internationally agreed technical baseline to work from, rather than defaulting to whichever country’s proprietary architecture their major trading partners’ manufacturers happened to build.
The People Who Wrote the Standards
ETRI’s Intelligent Information Standards Research Laboratory led the standards effort. Kim Seong-han served as editor of the SG21 Recommendation, while Hong Jeong-ha led the Technical Report, according to Korean media citing the ETRI announcement. The laboratory is headed by Cha Hong-ki, who was simultaneously appointed as the new international chair (rapporteur) of ITU-T SG21’s Question 10/21 working group — the body responsible for standardization of autonomous driving, vehicular AI, and vehicular multimedia.
Cha’s appointment is the more consequential of the institutional outcomes. Question 10/21 is the ITU-T working group that will continue developing future SDV-related standards. Its mandate covers the full stack of technologies that will define the next generation of connected cars: V2X communication systems, autonomous driving communications, and vehicular AI applications. Whoever chairs that working group through the 2025–2028 study period holds an editorial position over the standards specifying how vehicles communicate with infrastructure, how OTA security certification works at scale, and what AI-driven autonomous driving systems must technically demonstrate.
Korea’s Playbook Has Been Run Before
The pattern at ITU-T is not unprecedented for Korea. It is, in fact, the documented strategy that ETRI applied to 5G. A former ETRI researcher, Chaesub Lee of ETRI, served as Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau — the sector’s permanent secretariat — from January 2015 through December 2022. That institutional presence did not produce Korea’s 5G leadership by itself, but it created the relationships, credibility, and procedural familiarity that made Korean researchers effective contributors to international standards work.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published an analysis in February 2024 examining Korea’s digital standards coordination strategy, specifically how the Ministry of Science and ICT, ETRI, and Samsung had coordinated 5G standardization contributions. The SDV standards win follows that template: government ministry funding, a quasi-governmental research institute authoring the technical work, and a national researcher placed in the rapporteur’s chair to shape what comes next.
What makes the automotive application different from telecom is the direct alignment with Korea’s largest export industry. Samsung and LG benefited from Korean influence in 5G, but they were already globally competitive before the standards effort. Hyundai Motor Group and Kia are now building SDV product strategies directly shaped by how the ITU-T baseline defines the architecture — and both companies are investing at a scale that makes the standards question financially material.
What It Means for Hyundai and Kia
Kia announced in April 2026 that it was expanding its four-year SDV investment by 30 percent, to KRW 41.4 trillion (approximately $28 billion) for 2026 through 2029. The investment funds the development of Kia’s first dedicated SDV architecture — built from the ground up to support a unified software stack rather than retrofitting software onto existing hardware platforms. Kia’s first SDV launch was pushed back approximately one year to 2028, with a more advanced version following in early 2029.
Hyundai Motor Group’s global software center, 42dot, has been building an SDV platform since receiving a KRW 500.3 billion strategic investment (approximately $351 million) from Hyundai and Kia. The group committed KRW 18 trillion (approximately $12.6 billion at the time of announcement) by 2030 when it launched its SDV initiative in October 2022.
Both companies’ SDV architecture decisions — what centralized compute platform to build around, what OTA management system to implement, what V2X interfaces to support — will be made against the ITU-T Recommendation that ETRI authored. The alignment is not coincidental. It is structural: a Korean research institution writing the international definition of what an SDV must do creates favorable conditions for Korean automotive manufacturers whose compliance pathway was shaped by the same institution’s technical framework.
What Comes After the Recommendation
The ITU-T SG21 study period runs through 2028, and Korea’s Cha Hong-ki will chair the Question 10/21 agenda that determines what standards work the working group undertakes. The logical candidates for next-generation standardization include detailed specifications for V2X communication architectures within SDV platforms, standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) for third-party software integration, and security certification frameworks for OTA update pipelines — the specific gap that UN R156 identified without prescribing a technical solution.
The SDV globalization problem will sharpen the urgency: OTA connectivity, eSIM lifecycle management, and data sovereignty compliance all require standards that abstract away from market-by-market variation. None of that work has begun in earnest at ITU-T. The engineer who chairs the committee that does it works for ETRI.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is a software-defined vehicle, and why did it need an international standard?
A software-defined vehicle is one whose core features and performance — including braking calibration, driver assistance, range management, and connectivity — are controlled and upgradeable through software rather than fixed hardware, delivered wirelessly after the car has been sold. Before Thursday’s ITU-T adoption, no international body had defined what technical architecture that requires: what the centralized compute layer must look like, how over-the-air update management must be structured, or what interfaces must exist for external network connectivity. Without that baseline, every OEM was building to its own specification, and every developing country formulating SDV regulations was defaulting to whichever vendor’s proprietary architecture its trading partners happened to use. The ITU-T SDV Recommendation establishes the first internationally recognized technical floor for all of this.
What does Korea’s rapporteurship at ITU-T SG21 actually mean in practice?
ITU-T Study Group 21’s Question 10/21 working group is the body that will write the follow-on standards to Thursday’s Recommendation — covering V2X communication architectures, OTA security certification, and vehicular AI systems through the end of the 2025–2028 study period. The rapporteur sets the working group’s agenda, chairs its meetings, and shapes what work items are initiated, prioritized, and brought to approval. Korea’s ETRI researcher Cha Hong-ki now holds that position, meaning the engineer who chairs the committee writing the next layer of SDV standards — the V2X interfaces and OTA security specifications that will affect every connected car sold in 194 ITU member states — is from the same institution that wrote the foundational Recommendation.
How does this ITU-T Recommendation relate to UN R155 and R156, which are already in force?
UN Regulations 155 and 156, developed under UNECE’s WP.29, are the binding type-approval requirements that mandate cybersecurity management systems and software update management systems for vehicles sold in the EU, Japan, South Korea, and other contracting parties. They require the capability without fully specifying the architecture: R156 says vehicles must have a secure OTA update process, but does not define the technical stack that process runs on. The ITU-T SDV Recommendation sits above those regulatory mandates and provides the architectural guidance that manufacturers can use to comply with multiple national frameworks simultaneously, without having to re-engineer their platform for each jurisdiction.
What does Korea’s SDV standards win mean for Hyundai and Kia’s competitive position?
Both manufacturers are in the middle of multibillion-dollar transitions to SDV architectures — Kia’s 2026–2029 investment plan totals approximately $28 billion — and both will architect their centralized compute platforms, OTA management systems, and V2X interfaces against the ITU-T technical baseline. Because ETRI authored that baseline and now chairs the working group extending it, Korean manufacturers’ compliance pathway is likely to be shaped by technical frameworks their own national research institute designed. In a market where IDTechEx forecasts central compute and quasi-zonal SDV platforms will generate approximately $755 billion in hardware revenue by 2029, the standards authorship advantage compounds with each successive Recommendation the working group produces.