Dr.-Ing. Thomas Scharnhorst holds a degree as a Master (Dipl.-Ing.) in Physical Engineering SC and a Ph.D. in Engineering (Dr.-Ing.) from the Technical University of Berlin as well as a Master in Aero-Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. For more than 25 years, he was working for Volkswagen AG, amongst others as head of electronics development and vehicle system architecture. From 2005 to 2007 Thomas Scharnhorst was CEO of Carmeq in Berlin before partnering with WiTech-Engineering for management and technology consulting in Braunschweig, Germany.

Since 2017, Dr. Thomas Scharnhorst has held the post of AUTOSAR Spokesperson.

Driven by the advent of innovative vehicle applications, contemporary automotive E/E architecture has reached a level of complexity which requires a technological breakthrough in order to manage it satisfactorily and fulfill the heightened passenger and legal requirements. This need is particularly acute for vehicle manufacturers and their leading Tier 1 suppliers who are faced with often conflicting requirements from: Legal enforcement – key items include environmental aspects and safety requirements Passenger convenience and service requirements from the comfort and entertainment functional domains Driver assistance and dynamic drive aspects – key items include detection and suppression of critical dynamic vehicle states and navigation in high density traffic surroundings Leading OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, having recognized this to be an industry-wide challenge, decided to work together to meet the challenge. Their common objective is to create a development base for industry collaboration on basic functions while providing a platform which continues to encourage competition on innovative functions. To this end a development partnership called Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) has been formed with the goals of: Standardization of basic software functionality of automotive ECUs Scalability to different vehicle and platform variants Transferability of software Support of different functional domains Definition of an open architecture Collaboration between various partners Development of highly dependable systems Support of applicable automotive international standards and state-of-the-art technologies The AUTOSAR scope includes all vehicle domains. The AUTOSAR standard will serve as a platform upon which future vehicle applications will be implemented and will also serve to minimize the current barriers between functional domains. It will, therefore, be possible to map functions and functional networks to different control nodes in the system, almost independently from the associated hardware.