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The Mercedes-Benz EQS is like a data center on wheels. Its MBUX (Mercedes-Benz User Experience) Hyperscreen, for example, merges multiple displays seamlessly into an impressive, 141-centimeter wide curved screen offering infotainment, facial recognition, and more. Behind the scenes, eight CPU cores and 24 GBs of RAM running at 46.4 GB per second monitor up to 350 sensors, provide speech processing for “Hey Mercedes” in 27 languages, and use AI to make sure driver and copilot alike never need to search for the most relevant infotainment, comfort, or vehicle functions. 

With millions of lines of code powering this experience, Mercedes-Benz is more than a high-end automotive manufacturer, it’s a state-of-the-art technology company—and GitHub has been part of the company’s digital transformation in recent years.

Like many companies going through a digital transformation, Mercedes-Benz did not have a unified solution for managing code in the beginning. Instead, their IT department managed their source code with multiple tools. They soon realized that they needed a unified platform to accelerate software delivery and promote collaboration through leveraging innersource and open source. So Mercedes-Benz chose GitHub for enterprise IT, because many of its developers are already familiar with GitHub. 

“We are digitally transforming as a company,” explains Mercedes-Benz Senior Principal Software Engineer Andy Krieger. “We want to be a software-driven car manufacturer, and GitHub supports us on our way forward.”

1,000,000 lines of AI-powered code in the first year with GitHub Copilot

Mercedes-Benz unified their DevOps platform on GitHub, and in July 2023 adopted GitHub Copilot to accelerate productivity and innovation, boost collaboration, and improve developer experience. Today, more than 5,000 developers at Mercedes-Benz use Copilot and Copilot Chat to write code faster, with fewer errors, and employ a more diverse set of possible solutions. To date, they have accepted more than two million lines of code.

“GitHub Copilot emerged as the preferred choice. Through its ability to automate coding tasks, provide astute code suggestions, seamlessly integrate into workflows, grasp development context, offer versatility, promote collaboration and leverage cutting-edge technology, it greatly speeds up the development” says Krieger.

When choosing to adopt AI, Mercedes-Benz made a strategic decision to embrace the technology early, recognizing its transformative potential within the automotive industry.

“Advanced AI-driven software development tools have the potential to reshape the automotive industry, offering the promise of faster development cycles, enhanced code quality, and greater innovation,“ says Dionysios Satikidis, head of developer experience at Mercedes-Benz.

With the time savings Copilot unlocks, our developers are empowered to spend more time on the tasks they enjoy the most — creative-problem solving, innovative projects and experimentation.

Mercedes’ developers report they’re able to code faster with fewer errors, saving at least a half hour every week with Copilot, as they are less susceptible to disruptions and able to stay in their flow state longer. Copilot acts as an AI pair programmer and collaborator that is always available to answer questions, explain code, make suggestions, and act as a sounding board—in addition to writing code.

“With the time savings Copilot unlocks, our developers are empowered to spend more time on the tasks they enjoy most — creative-problem solving, innovative projects and experimentation,” says Jasmine Ramos, an IT principal product manager at Mercedes-Benz. “More time for creativity, less boilerplate.”

Uniting 55,000+ developers on GitHub’s unified DevOps platform for collaboration and innersource

Mercedes-Benz now hosts a majority of the enterprise IT source code its developers have created over the last decade on GitHub, where more than 55.000 developers can collaborate across divisions. “GitHub helps collaboration between different business units within Mercedes-Benz,” says Wolfgang Gehring, FOSS Ambassador with Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation.  “Having everyone together on the GitHub platform is a great advantage for innersource.” 

Mercedes-Benz’s Developer Experience team operates a hybrid architecture on GitHub Enterprise, with around 115,000 repositories across ~4,300 organizations (August 2024, internal statistics), where the company can host its open source and innersource projects side-by-side. 

During the last few years, several promising innersource initiatives have emerged from this. For example, one library provides infrastructure components that can be reused across the company’s many divisions. Previously, each division may have had to build, secure, and maintain its own code, but now developers can work together to use and improve a centrally maintained innersource project. 

Now developers from across the company can work together and avoid reinventing the wheel. GitHub Copilot makes it even easier for developers from different teams to dive into each others’ code thanks to its ability to explain chunks of unfamiliar code as well as generate documents and comments to improve code readability. 

This boosts developer efficiency by preventing duplicative code and fosters internal contributions from outside the core developer team. Even marketers, sales, and HR teams can collaborate using GitHub Issues for project management and running daily meetings.

Doubling down on open source

In 2021, Mercedes-Benz published their FOSS Manifesto, emphasizing the value of open source and innersource for both the company and its developers. 

“GitHub is the enabler that opens the door to the open source world,” says Gehring. “We hope that this connection to the open source world will also help us to attract new talent.”

Internally, the company encourages employees to participate in FOSS activities and works to spread awareness of the benefits of both innersource and open source by hosting “FOSS Fridays.” Externally, Mercedes-Benz showcases its open source repositories to the community using e.g. GitHub Pages, which allows developers to quickly stand up full-fledged sites for their projects without leaving GitHub. 

“You can’t develop software anymore without using open source.”

“You can’t develop software anymore without using open source,” says Gehring, pointing to the company’s simultaneous use of and contributions to the Kubernetes open source project. “We want to be good citizens of the open source world, not just consume and take open source for granted. As a large enterprise, we have a responsibility to give back and drive open source forward.”

As part of Mercedes-Benz’s efforts to give back to open source communities, it also contributes to the GitHub Sponsors program, to help fund open source projects, developers, and maintainers. Gehring says that it’s important to do more than benefit from open source software. “Crucial parts of the open source infrastructure are maintained by a few hardworking individuals that often do it for free.” says Gehring. “Mercedes-Benz and many others use this code. Heartbleed and Log4Shell affected tools for example are used by a huge number of people and enterprises. It should be in the interest of all of us that we can rely on the foundational tools. That’s the reason why Mercedes-Benz supports the work of these people.”

CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code with GitHub Actions

Mercedes-Benz has adopted GitHub Actions to build, test, and deploy software, as well as to automate infrastructure using Terraform. Application manager Fabian Faulhaber says that GitHub Actions helps to streamline developer workflows and save time because it unifies everything into one system and it's well documented.  

Greater ease and efficiency

From automating onboarding to faster build processes across its ~115,000 repositories to enhancing the entire software development lifecycle with AI, Mercedes-Benz builds the software behind the world's most desirable cars with greater ease and efficiency. “It helps us onboard new software engineers and get them productive right away,” says Faulhaber. “We have all our source code, issues, and pull requests in one place. GitHub is a complete platform that frees us from menial tasks and enables us to do our best work.”