Engineering Beyond Human Scale: Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies selects Flow as their hardware development platform.

Over the next three years, RV Tech and Flow are building the engineering stack for the software-defined vehicle, where AI helps engineering teams keep requirements, architecture, and verification aligned across multiple brands, dozens of models, and millions of vehicles.

What RV Tech is building

RV Tech is a joint venture between Rivian and the Volkswagen Group, building the architectural platform for the next generation of software defined vehicles.

At the core of that platform is a zonal architecture, a simpler way to wire and run a car. Rivian’s previous generation of vehicles spread their functions across seventeen electronic control units; the zonal design cuts that to seven, strips out about 1.6 miles of wiring per car, and puts a few powerful central computers in charge instead. That lowers cost and improves reliability, and it leaves enough compute to support over-the-air updates and the automated-driving features these vehicles are built for.

The same architecture is built to scale across Volkswagen Group’s brands, underpinning next-generation EVs across an expanding number of Group programs.RV Tech is writing one software foundation built to carry many different badges forward.

The Challenge

RV Tech is designing the shared software-defined vehicle and electrical architecture for both Rivian and Volkswagen Group’s automotive brands. The VW Group spans ten brands, and the next-generation EV platform these vehicles run on is engineered to carry a wide range of models across markets and segments. Each model arrives in multiple variants, built for different markets, bodies, and drivetrains, so validation has to happen one vehicle at a time across a wide range of configurations. That supports a platform engineered to scale across the Group’s full vehicle lineup and all the markets it reaches. The architecture is shared; the validation is not, so a single requirement can branch into a separate test campaign for every program that adopts it.

Across that scope, traceability is the hardest thing to hold onto. Tying every requirement to the architecture it shapes and the tests that check it is demanding inside one company; doing it across many brands and many vehicle programs at the same time is a different magnitude of complexity. And the complexity is not abstract: the architecture has already moved into real-world validation, where every function tested traces back to the requirements behind it. Managing that web of dependencies can consume critical engineering time. Older requirements tools were made to record a design once it settles, not to keep up with a design that never stops moving.

One Connected System

Flow brings RV Tech’s requirements, architecture, and tests into one live system, linked so that the effect of a change shows up the moment someone makes it. Everyone reads from the same current picture rather than a private copy. In Flow, they keep documentation in one place and can see what a change touches, instead of stitching those links together by hand or running into the conflict in a review weeks later.

Flow also reaches into the rest of the tool chain.

Built for Agentic Systems Engineering

RV Tech is betting that AI is becoming part of everyday systems engineering, and that AI works best with access to connected data. Its zonal architecture already centralizes compute, so the car itself can run AI and automated-driving features, making an AI-heavy approach to engineering familiar ground for its teams. Flow keeps requirements, architecture, and tests linked, and gives RV Tech’s engineers richer context for the AI tools they’re already building workflows around.

That hands the most tedious part of systems engineering, the constant upkeep of traceability, to the software, so engineers get their time back for the engineering itself.

A Strategic Partnership

The three-year partnership goes deeper than a software license. Flow’s team works alongside RV Tech’s engineers to adapt workflows and support adoption as the rollout grows, and the two companies meet regularly to review progress and steer the roadmap together. As milestones arrive, the system of record has to move with them. Whatever RV Tech learns in the field feeds back into the product.

Looking Ahead

As the architecture spreads across a growing share of Volkswagen Group’s brands and onto the millions of cars planned for the Group’s future platform, the engineering behind it has to grow without coming apart. One connected system lets RV Tech keep everyone aligned across teams, brands, and continents, and it leaves the program ready for the AI agents that will take on more of the work over time.

Flow is proud to partner with Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies as they shape how the software-defined vehicle gets built.