Prof. Dr.-Ing. Steven Peters
Dear Readers, we sum up a challenging year as public funding kept shrinking. But, in these days we experienced the unique “Darmstadt Spirit” at its very best. Truly, all parts, incl. presidium, legal and HR department, student councils and all colleagues across all entities joint forces again and again. Together, we built up strong ideas – combining the megatrends “software-defined vehicles” and “circularity”, ready to be launched whenever money is back.
In this context, I like to express our sincere thanks to our industrial partners, who remained on the throttle and even started new projects with us during this “double” crisis.
In the dawn of End2End-Automated Driving we keep on raising our open (research) questions about the safety approval strategy of these well performing huge black boxes. We believe that the safety strategy defines the architecture of the overall stack – especially in End2End systems – and therefore has to be defined first. Safety first means architecture first.
In 2025, we pushed forward new academic partnerships. In research, we started new cooperations across Europe with TU Graz and KTH Stockholm within our alliance Unite!.In addition, we joined forces with Stanford University and published two joint papers on Foundation Models this year. However, we also shut down the last US-focused student program (AESG) due to a lack of interested students.
Once again, it was education which gave me the most purpose and motivation. Roughly 50% of all students choose in their bachelor's degree our lecture “Motor Vehicles” which is not the easiest subject but earns outstanding evaluation results every semester. My colleague Prof. Klaus Hofmann from the Integrated Electronics System Lab and I taught for the very first time our new lecture “Software Defined Vehicles”, which tackles the major challenge of today’s automotive industry. The lecture is designed to be attractive for students of Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics and Computer Science and was enriched by guest speakers from Silicon Valley, German OEMs and Startups.
With interdisciplinary trained and open-minded experts and leaders, we will continue to support our industry in its transformation to software defined enterprises.
Best regards from Darmstadt
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Steven Peters in September 2025
