Altia Powers the Winner of 2026 German Car of the Year (Luxury)

Image courtesy of Cadillac. © 2025 General Motors. Cadillac VISTIQ interior. Source: Cadillac.com

Altia's Human-Machine Interface (HMI) Graphics are the Foundation of the Award-Winning Digital Cockpit in the All-Electric Cadillac VISTIQ.

Altia, a global leader in human-machine interface (HMI) development software, proudly announces its contribution to the Cadillac VISTIQ, which has been named the 2026 German Car of the Year (GCOTY) in the Luxury category.

The all-electric, three-row Cadillac VISTIQ secured the prestigious title from a jury of 40 leading automotive journalists. The vehicle earned top marks for its visionary design, innovation, everyday usability, performance and value – key areas where Altia’s advanced, immersive digital experience excels.

Powering the Award-Winning Digital Cockpit

At the heart of VISTIQ’s lauded cabin is its sophisticated digital cockpit, powered by Altia’s production-proven HMI software.

  • Seamless Integration: Altia’s graphics drive the high-resolution displays including the immense 33-inch curved display that spans the dashboard, seamlessly integrating the digital gauge cluster and infotainment system.
  • Intuitive Control: Additional eight-inch screens located below the dash and in the rear seat provide intuitive control over features such as HVAC and ambient lighting, enhancing both driver and passenger comfort.
  • Futuristic Safety: Beyond the dash, Altia’s HMI technology also enables the augmented-reality head-up display (AR-HUD). This system overlays critical navigation and safety information directly onto the windshield, delivering a futuristic and distraction-free driving experience that impressed the GCOTY jury.

“We are honored to support Cadillac and General Motors in delivering such a bold and innovative luxury experience,” said Mike Juran, Altia CEO. “The VISTIQ is a testament to GM’s exceptional design and engineering teams, who continue to push the boundaries of electric mobility. Altia is proud to provide the HMI tools that help bring their vision to life, ensuring that the visual experience is as high-performing and luxurious as the vehicle itself.”

This award marks a historic achievement for GM, as the VISTIQ delivers the first-ever back-to-back Luxury category win for any automaker in the German Car of the Year competition—following the Cadillac LYRIQ’s win in 2025. This success strongly underscores the growing global recognition of Cadillac’s resurgence as a standard bearer of luxury and innovation.

About Altia

Altia is a software company that provides graphical user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final production code. Our GUI editor, Altia Design, offers development teams the capability to implement a model-based development process enabling clear team communication and accelerated user interface development. Our code generator, Altia DeepScreen, supports a vast range of low- to high-powered processors from a variety of industry-leading silicon providers. Altia generates pure C source code that is optimized to take full advantage of hardware resources. Graphics code generated by Altia is driving millions of displays worldwide – from automotive instrument clusters, HUDs and radios to thermostats, washing machines and medical devices. 

Our mission is to get the best automotive, medical and consumer interfaces into production in the shortest time on the lowest cost hardware. 

Altia was founded in 1991. Its customers include automotive OEMs and Tier 1s like Continental Automotive, Denso, Stellantis, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Renault, Valeo, Visteon and more – plus leading consumer device manufacturers like Electrolux, Whirlpool, Medtronic, NordicTrack and many others. 

For more information about Altia, visit www.altia.com or email [email protected]

Follow Altia on LinkedIn, X and YouTube

Altia: The Complete HMI Platform for Automotive Cockpit Displays

As the automotive industry moves closer and closer to fully autonomous, even lower end vehicles are evolving into rolling computers—with ever-increasing interconnectivity and complexity in the vehicle cockpit. Car buyers now expect to be connected to the outside world—and OEMs are responding to their requirements. It is estimated that by 2030, 95% of all new vehicles will incorporate intermediate or advanced infotainment, telematics and V2X capabilities to communicate between vehicles, users and infrastructure.

With these dramatic shifts in technologies from more mechanical and analog controls to those that are partially or fully digital, automotive OEMs are challenged with anticipating how customers interact with their vehicles, namely through the human-machine interface (HMI).

The HMI acts as a hub of the wheel for the vehicle cockpit’s connected user experience, integrating the spokes that provide information to the driver while sending commands to the various systems both inside and outside the car. The considerable shift toward electrification and autonomous vehicles has resulted in new regulatory requirements. These requirements have compelled OEMs and suppliers to invest more R&D into user interface hardware and software lifecycles and integration, whether their digital cockpits include a multitude of dedicated displays in a single vehicle to just a single in-dash touchscreen.

But the simplicity of a well-architected UI masks great complexity. Cockpit software design includes many considerations, such as how to integrate multiple compute domains and vehicle applications across varying operating systems. Customers have grown accustomed to smartphones being at their side—so how can OEMs keep them connected to their communication and entertainment while adhering to regulations for driver safety and attention? How can OEMs maintain brand continuity between native HMI screens, multiple connectivity solutions and those of the passengers’ personal devices? This is a complex challenge encompassing a vast number of varying requirements, especially given the increase in autonomy. OEMs can embrace these challenges by leveraging a production-proven platform to bring this all together efficiently.

Meeting OEM Challenges with Proven Innovation

Altia delivers a single, comprehensive platform to meet OEM’s cockpit software challenges and the needs and expectations of their customers. They provide a complete end-to-end cockpit software solution for OEMs by combining the best design tools, advanced technology, customization capabilities and expertise within one unified platform.

Altia has helped some of the largest OEMs create custom HMIs in various vehicles as well as develop and deploy their entire software stack—from sedans, SUVs, semis and motorcycles to electric construction-agriculture equipment and everything in between. The integration of Altia’s powerful features and hardware flexibility in over 100 million production vehicles on the road have been shaping the industry. Altia’s software solution is at the heart of over 375 vehicle dashboards for the upcoming generation.

A Comprehensive Collection of Tools and Expert Service

Altia’s cockpit software platform sets the standard for designing, developing and deploying innovative, first-class automotive user experience. The platform enables display design and deployment on any screen within a car, including instrument clusters, HUDs, infotainment displays, passenger displays and rear passenger entertainment systems. No matter how grand and challenging your vision is, Altia can enable a seamless look and feel in your vehicle cockpits to provide an immersive experience that is representative of the brands across your fleet of vehicles. By reusing the core of your work, Altia enables you to keep design cost-efficient while enabling endless opportunities to differentiate. Providing the tools and expert support you need to bring your UI from concept to production quickly and efficiently, Altia’s HMI development platform saves time and reduces production costs.

Altia Advantages for Automotive

  • Hypervisor operations — HMI cockpit operates on both sides of your hypervisor
  • Code generation — Quick conversion of HMI prototypes and graphics to deployable graphics code across a wide range of hardware
  • Integration and display management — Guidance on how to manage and integrate cockpit real estate to create cohesive and intuitive signature UIs for customers while maintaining brand identity
  • Head-up display expertise — Best-in-class HUDs integration to show system information and advanced driver-assist system (ADAS) warnings to keep drivers’ eyes on the road
  • Automated testing solutions — Reduction in time-to-market HMI testing costs, minimizes human error

Integrations

Altia’s cockpit HMI platform can seamlessly integrate the following services and applications into your displays:

  • Android Auto and Apple CarPlay
  • Third-party mapping programs
  • ADAS
  • Media players
  • Telematics units
  • Automotive infrastructure integrations via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X)

Altia Software Tools and Services Support Every Step of Your HMI Process

With the increasing complexity in the automotive world and increasing demand for OEMs to pull user experience and data ownership in-house, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with an approach to managing it all. Altia is here to bring all the pieces together and help OEMs to realize their automotive user experience goals. Altia guides OEMs through designing, developing and deploying their custom automotive cockpits.

Altia’s complete automotive software platform supports every step of the development process, from concept design through delivery. Altia automotive solutions enable OEMs to meet their digital cockpit goals today and in the future. Altia understands these system complexities and has the proven tools to help you with your automotive software challenges.

Ready to start your automotive cockpit development journey? Altia delivers the expertise, software and services to guide you throughout the process to meet your needs and realize your goals. We would love to hear about your project and how we can help you get it on the road.

Visit www.altia.com/get-started.

Altia ON: 2025 Cadillac ESCALADE IQ

The 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ is an innovative electric SUV that will combine top-tier luxury with cutting-edge technology. GM relies on Altia for getting its most advanced, intuitive graphics into production – and this cutting-edge redesign of Cadillac’s flagship turned EV will definitely deliver. 

Here’s what we’re most excited about in the Escalade IQ. 

The cockpit interface is incredibly user-friendly, with intuitive menus and rapid responses. Multi-tasking is a breeze, allowing drivers to simultaneously view navigation, play music and monitor vehicle stats without switching screens. Voice recognition, augmented reality navigation and integration with popular apps ensure that drivers are safe, comfortable and connected.

The dash is composed of a sprawling, curved pillar-to-pillar 55″ total diagonal LED display powered by a Snapdragon Cockpit platform from Qualcomm Technologies. Spanning the entire front row, it provides a stunning visual experience for driver and passenger. This massive display is segmented to serve the different needs of front seat passengers—with 35″ dedicated to the driver and 20″ dedicated to the passenger. The passenger side of the display is polarized—making it less visible to the driver thus reducing distraction and clearing the regulatory hurdle that will let passengers stream video or surf the internet while the electric Escalade is on the move. The display can be customized with different themes, widgets and apps, including voice-controlled services like Google Assistant, Google Maps and Google Play.

Beneath the 55″ screen combination sits an 11″ touchscreen where driver and passenger can access five-zone climate controls, ambient lighting and even the doors (if equipped with the power open-and-close feature).

That cool, connected experience of the Cadillac Escalade IQ extends to the back seat. For models with the Executive Seating package, second-row passengers get two 12.6″ personal screens plus a rear command center screen to control comfort, lighting and more.

Designing, developing and deploying this kind of brand-defining innovation in cockpit displays is exactly what Altia does. We work with automotive OEMs and Tier 1s all over the world—including General Motors—to deliver first class cockpit experiences for production vehicles. Let us help you with your next generation production program. Visit www.altia.com/get-started today.

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