The ID.Polo stands out as the youngest member of the Volkswagen BEV family. This vehicle incorporates a range of innovative features, especially in its low voltage (LV) and high voltage (HV) wiring harness systems. Notably, electronic architecture has been carried over from other well-known vehicles in the ID.family, ensuring consistency in ECUs and software.

One of the key innovations is the introduction of a new nozzle that enables the LV wiring harness to be designed as a single, one-piece harness for both the interior and the front of the vehicle. This eliminates the need for interconnections and simplifies the process of threading the harness. The advantages of this design are significant. Beyond creating a one-piece harness, it delivers cost reductions in both logistics and manufacturing. Additionally, it offers clear benefits for harness routing, making it easier to accommodate both left- and right-hand driving cars.

For the high-voltage wire harness it was decided at a very early stage of development to design the wire harnesses for automated production. To achieve this goal, one of the key factors was the very close collaboration of all project partners and the strict adherence to design rules and specifications in every project stage. The wire harness design, in combination with innovative automation equipment, are the key points to realize this high-voltage wire harness production close to the Volkswagen plant in Spain with high quality standards, traceability and reproducibility.

The improvements shown extend beyond the ID.Polo itself. All brands within the Volkswagen Brand Group Core are set to benefit from the increased efficiency and innovations.

Sustainability considerations are an area of growing attention in the automotive industry, contributing to evolving discussions around operations, product development, and value chain management.

In parallel, evolving regulatory requirements, particularly within the European context, are contributing to transformation efforts while also introducing additional complexity and execution challenges.

Beyond regulatory and technological dimensions, the transition toward more sustainable mobility is unfolding within a broader market and economic landscape. Shifts in resource availability and market conditions may influence how companies assess risks, build resilience, and adapt within an evolving ecosystem.

At the same time, challenges such as supply chain visibility and the management of indirect emissions remain areas of ongoing focus across the industry. These factors highlight the need for new approaches to collaboration, transparency, and performance management.

Considering these uncertainties, this paper aims to provide a high-level perspective on key trends, exploring how sustainability can act as an enabler of transformation in the automotive sector.

The shift of car manufacturers toward Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) significantly impacts the Electrical/Electronic (E/E) Architecture, which is moving from distributed to domain- and vehicle-centralized structures. Simultaneously, data rates are increasing, as described by Edholm’s law, add-ing complexity, raising security and safety due to autonomous driving functions. These factors will strongly influence wiring harnesses and ECU requirements.

To meet these new challenges for connector systems, standardized, scalable and robust integrated solutions are proposed that handle both high-frequency and mechanical functions while meeting installation space and competitive targets.

The presentation includes design approaches, simulations, validation and thermomechanical testing outcomes along with application examples of multi-hybrid connector systems.

Based on these findings a standardization strategy for connector system interfaces—utilizing existing high-speed data modules—will be introduced, highlighting their benefits in terms of modu-larity and scalability.

The introduction of a modular connection system provides Volkswagen with a scalable foundation for future E/E and wiring harness architectures. Today’s vehicle platforms rely on more than 1000 connector variants. Even with a high carry-over-part percentage, new requirements lead to new developments and therefore costs, long lead times, and limited flexibility. 

The modular connection system introduces a standardized, cross‑brand toolbox of unsealed power and data modules that can be combined into more than 200,000 configurations. This approach significantly reduces development time, investment costs, and complexity while enabling automated production processes and more compact ECU designs. 

Beyond cost efficiency, modularity supports quality improvements, platform consistency, and faster onboarding of new control units into SDV architectures. The presentation concludes by highlighting the future potential of modular connectors for next‑generation 48V systems, inline connectors, and expanded automation opportunities across the value chain.

New E/E architectures, increasing functional integration within the vehicle, growing product diversity, and dynamic market volumes provide the wiring harness industry with significant opportunities to develop innovative production concepts, unlock automation potential, and rethink value creation—closer to the OEM than ever before.

The funded project Next2OEM, driven by ten partners from industry and academic sector, demonstrates for the first time a fully integrated approach to automating the wiring harness production process from the individual wire all the way to vehicle assembly, thereby enabling OEM‑proximate and highly resilient wiring harness manufacturing—both technically and economically.

Within the project, the entire process from wiring harness development through manufacturing to final assembly in the vehicle—was redesigned for the center console harness of a current Audi model and implemented in a linked demonstrator line at the Ingolstadt plant. Next2OEM thus demonstrates full automation across the entire value chain, covering all key process steps: the production of twisted data pairs, automated block loading, splice automation, automated taping, permanent wireless inline testing of the harness, robot‑assisted pre‑assembly, and automated installation into the vehicle body.

A central success factor is the consistent application of Design for Automation, implemented for the first time in the project at both harness and component level, providing the foundation for stable and reproducible automation processes. Equally crucial is the end‑to‑end digital information model: a semantic, graph‑based data ecosystem that interlinks all product and machine data and demonstrates how digitalization meets robotics to enable real‑time quality assurance, traceability, and future AI‑supported analysis capabilities. This clearly highlights that Design for Automation and a continuous digital ecosystem are key enabling technologies for the automated wiring harness production of the future.

The Next2OEM demonstrator provides compelling evidence of the technical feasibility of a largely automated wiring harness production system. At the same time, the project identifies the essential prerequisites for industrialization: automation‑ready product design, full digital continuity within a cross‑company data space, and close collaboration among all stakeholders along the wiring harness value chain. The results show that OEM‑proximate, highly automated wiring harness production is not only technically feasible but also economically viable, contributing to faster and more resilient supply chains.

The presentation introduces the Next2OEM demonstrator, explains the technological key innovations and the resulting design guidelines, and highlights the cross‑industry benefits of the digital ecosystem. Finally, it outlines perspectives for the transition to series production as well as future standardization approaches within the wiring harness industry.

As the automotive industry advances toward electrification, autonomous driving, and higher production automation, grommets are evolving into strategic components. This presentation introduces innovative grommet concepts that enhance sustainability, automation readiness, and overall system efficiency.

We will showcase an eco‑design approach supported by benchmarking, including a case study where a serial‑production part was redesigned to reduce both CO₂ footprint and cost. Sustainable material solutions—such as recycled and bio‑based polymers—will also be highlighted.

Finally, we present a new generation of smart grommets designed for automated wiring‑harness assembly, featuring extensible and modular solutions that address key automation bottlenecks. Attendees will gain a clear view of how material innovation, eco‑design, and automation‑oriented features converge in next‑generation grommets for future mobility.

We are amid a profound transformation of the automotive wiring harness and E/EDS industry. With the final breakthrough of electromobility in Europe, traditional wiring harness architectures and time-consuming, design-driven development processes are increasingly being replaced by agile methods driven by vehicle software. Suppliers thus face the key challenge of consistently aligning their development and manufacturing processes with new system architectures and establishing digitalization as a foundation essential for survival. What remains decisive for long-term reliability is not so much the choice of a specific material or joining technology, but rather the careful development and industrialization of complete contacting and joining systems. This can only be achieved through close cooperation between system and material suppliers, machine builders and wiring harness manufacturers.

In the field of ultrasonic metal welding, it is evident that most systematically induced defects can be controlled through appropriate preventive and detection measures. The greatest challenge, however, arises where multiple systematic influences overlap with random outliers - such as in surface conditions - and cause sporadic defects. Reliably detecting such effects without generating unnecessary scrap is a central development goal. A focus solely on individual process signals such as power, distance and force is not sufficient for this. Only a comprehensive analysis of all process data using specifically developed machine learning models provides the necessary flexibility and depth of detection, with every hour of production yielding valuable additional data.

The goal of zero-defect production can only be achieved if every step in the process is consistently geared toward error prevention and process monitoring systems serve primarily as a safety net. At the same time, our generic modeling approach for generating a digital signature of the target welding process prevents the emergence of an unmanageable jungle of parameters: model data is calculated on an application-specific basis, continuously optimized with verified production data, and can be updated in a reproducible manner with minimal effort. This results in a scalable, robust solution for model-based quality monitoring.

Physical AI will open a new chapter for automated wire harness assembly. With the shift in robotics from teach-and-repeat to the novel learning-based paradigm, dexterous tasks like wire harness assembly are unlocked. For true end-to-end assembly automation, however, the factory itself must evolve. Currently, production is hindered by "communication taxes" - data silos and manual handovers at every interface, from initial quoting and supply ordering to final delivery.

Just as physical AI shifts the paradigm in robotics to learning, end-to-end automation requires that the same is applied to the entire value chain. We propose a framework where every single interface is empowered through AI agents. By initially serving as co-pilots in tasks such as wire harness refinements in the quoting stage, agents will learn from human expertise and the tribal knowledge in the factory. Through this learning-based process, agents become more and more autonomous and will resolve the communication bottlenecks for the true end-to-end autonomous factory of the future.