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2026 State of Automotive Software Development Report
- Chapter 1 - Top Market Challenges
- Chapter 2 - Leading Concerns
- Chapter 3 - Development Areas
- Chapter 4 - Shift-Left Adoption
- Chapter 5 - Recalls and Vulnerabilities
- Chapter 6 - Automotive Software Security
- Chapter 7 - Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs)
- Chapter 8 - Automotive AI Trends
- Chapter 9 - Standards Compliance
- Chapter 10 - Key Coding Standards
- Chapter 11 - How Teams Manage Their Work
- Chapter 12 - Software Dev Tools
- Chapter 13 - Open-Source Software
- Chapter 14 - Essential Perforce Solutions
- About the Survey — Appendix
Report > 2026 State of Automotive Software Development Report
Chapter 11 - How Teams Manage Their Work
C and C++ Are Still the Most Commonly Used Programming Languages
Based on our survey results, C now takes a slight lead over C++ compared to the previous year, increasing by 6%, though both are still leading programming languages for automotive software development.
For the first time in our annual results, the use of Python, which is the preferred language for AI and ML applications, increased over C++ use, with 48% of teams using Python, an increase of 12% year over year.
The use of Rust also saw a slight increase of 2% since last year, while other languages had similar results as last year. The Rust language is growing in importance for safety-critical environments, including automotive, because of its native mechanisms that help prevent the writing of unsafe code.
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