COVESA

COVESA (Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance) is an industry alliance developing open standards and code for connected vehicles. Formerly GENIVI (founded 2009 around in-vehicle infotainment), it rebranded in 2021 to focus on vehicle data and connected services.

Its best-known deliverable is the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS): a standardized, hierarchical data model naming vehicle signals — speed, battery state, door status and thousands more — independent of any manufacturer’s internal formats. VSS gives apps, cloud services and fleet systems a common vocabulary for vehicle data, and underpins related work on data expression and API layers.

A common signal model becomes strategically important as vehicle data gets regulated and monetized. The EU Data Act gives users rights to data their vehicles generate; standardized signals like VSS are the practical route to serving such data across brands, which is why COVESA output shows up in OEM platforms, fleet APIs and regulatory discussions alike.