Vitesco Technologies, a leading international supplier of advanced drive technologies and solutions for e-mobility has joined the Catena-X Automotive Network. Catena-X, founded in 2021, is the first comprehensive, collaborative and open data ecosystem along the entire automotive value chain.

In June, Catena-X reported that it had grown to 104 members. The central communication component of the Catena-X architecture is the Eclipse Data Space Connector (EDC)—the connection for sovereign, cross-organizational data exchange.

The guiding principles in the development of the EDC are independence, simplicity, and the preservation of a small and efficient core. The functionality required for this is bundled in the open-source project “Eclipse Dataspace Connectors”, to which the Catena-X partners contribute.

Vitesco says that it sees great added value in this network created by the automotive industry, for example in areas such as material compliance and social sustainability, but above all also for life cycle engineering. To optimize the environmental footprint of new products, Vitesco Technologies is currently rolling out this method in all of its development and production processes.

As a member of Catena-X Automotive Network e.V., we now have access to much more numerical data and are able to provide informative data. This will enable us to examine our products even more closely in future with regard to their CO₂ footprint and derive suitable measures for CO₂ reduction based on the knowledge gained or hotspots identified.

—Khosrau Heidary, Head of Life Cycle Engineering at Vitesco Technologies

Calculating the product carbon footprint (PCF) requires data from all phases of the life cycle—i.e., from the extraction of raw materials from the environment, through the production and use phases, to the end of a product’s life. Data exchange in the automotive value chain is currently difficult because there is no harmonized method for calculating PCFs, which means that the PCFs from different companies are not comparable. Moreover, there is no standardized data format for the exchange of PCF data that ensures the data sovereignty of the companies. A standardized interface for the exchange of PCF data has also been absent until now.

Catena-X Automotive Network e.V. wants to solve these problems with a promising approach that is of great benefit not exclusively, but in particular for the automotive value chain.