I'd heard that BlackBerry software was what ran most of the world's car dashboards. So I went looking for it in my own car, a 2023 Nissan Leaf, expecting to find the same embedded software running underneath half the industry. Here's what I found.

The operating system running a quarter-billion cars

It's not one you'd recognize by name

Android Auto running on a Pixel.

Blackberry is, indeed, everywhere in the auto industry. It's just not called that. QNX, the real-time operating system BlackBerry acquired back in 2010, is now embedded in more than 255 million vehicles worldwide, according to the company. It can be found in cars made by companies like BMW, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo, among others. The OS manages digital instrument clusters, advanced driver assistance systems, and the infotainment screen itself.

BlackBerry leaned into its new car-powering identity in January 2025, when it rebranded its former "BlackBerry IoT" division back to the QNX name entirely, betting that decades of automotive trust in QNX outweighed whatever baggage the BlackBerry name still carries from the smartphone era. Part of the appeal is that QNX is built as a real-time operating system with functional safety certifications, which matters a lot more for a digital instrument cluster or a driver assistance system than it does for an app that mirrors your phone's map screen. That's a very different job than what my Leaf's touchscreen is doing when I pull up Android Auto to check the weather or skip a podcast episode.

My Leaf isn't one of them

A security researcher already checked

Android Auto screen in car

In my own case, Nissan has since moved to a Linux-based system, leaving QNX behind in more modern Leafs.

I couldn't confirm QNX in my own dashboard, so I went looking for anyone who'd actually opened one up. A cybersecurity firm called PCAutomotive did exactly that, tearing down the infotainment ECU in a Nissan Leaf ZE1, the same body and electronics generation sold through 2023, and published a detailed advisory on what they found. The infotainment unit was built by Bosch, and its main processor runs Linux, not QNX, while a separate RH850 chip handles communication with the car's other systems over the CAN bus.

That same research turned up a handful of real vulnerabilities in the process, unfortunately, including ones that let an attacker who'd paired over Bluetooth reach steering and door lock functions at low speed. Nissan and Bosch were both notified well before the findings went public. It's a reminder that whatever software sits behind your dashboard, Linux included, is still worth patching promptly.

Beyond the Leaf specifically, BlackBerry's own list of named QNX automotive customers doesn't include Nissan in any of its recent announcements, which lines up with what the teardown found. That's a change from where Nissan started. Back in 2010, when QNX was still an independent supplier, its own press releases named both Nissan and Infiniti among roughly 20 brands shipping QNX-based infotainment and navigation systems. Somewhere between then and now, Nissan moved on.

Every automaker picked a different path

There's no single standard under the hood

One of the big reasons I think Android Auto and CarPlay do so well is that they standardize the in-car interface across all models. Trying to learn a new system every time you hop into a different car can be frustrating.

Toyota is also an AGL member, and it built the platform into the 2018 Camry's infotainment system using a Renesas chip. Ford, meanwhile, dropped QNX entirely for its newest Lincoln Nautilus, switching to Android Automotive, the same Google-built platform that's steadily expanding into more brands' dashboards separate from the Android Auto phone-mirroring most drivers already know.

QNX, embedded Linux, and Android Automotive are three completely different foundations, all delivering what looks like the same feature from the driver's seat. None of it is visible unless something breaks, gets hacked, or a nerd like me goes looking for it out of pure curiosity.

It also means the update story is different car to car. A vehicle running Android Automotive can lean on Google's existing security and feature update pipeline, similar to how a phone gets patched. A Linux-based system built by a Tier 1 supplier like Bosch depends on that supplier and the automaker coordinating a fix, which is exactly the slow, multi-party process the Leaf disclosure timeline shows: the researchers reported their findings in August 2023, and the advisory didn't go public until March 2025. QNX sits somewhere in between, since BlackBerry ships the platform, but each automaker still controls what runs on top of it.

The odds still favor BlackBerry, but maybe not for long

I went in expecting a tidy answer, that my car ram BlackBerry, just like a huge chunk of the industry. What I got instead was a much messier picture. Two hundred fifty-five million vehicles is a genuinely staggering number, but it's still a fraction of what's actually on the road worldwide. The entire automotive industry didn't sign onto BlackBerry's version of in-car software. That choice depends entirely on which supplier a given automaker picked for a given model year, and the choice is essentially invisible to the person driving. My Leaf runs Linux under a Bosch badge, my next car might run QNX, and neither one will ever tell me so on the dashboard itself. I'll likely stick with my phone via CarPlay or Android Auto.