Proprietary CAN database (DBC) files isolate vehicle telemetry across OEMs and suppliers. COVESA VSS introduces an open, human-readable, and strongly-typed tree schema standardizing vehicle speed, battery state of charge, and steering angle into a uniform API hierarchy for cloud services and third-party developers.
VSS signals are defined in declarative YAML or JSON files. Each leaf node defines its datatype (uint8, float), physical unit (kilometer-per-hour, percent), access permissions (read-only for sensors, read-write for seat memory position), and valid numeric bounds. This allows compilers to generate zero-overhead C++ structs, Rust interfaces, and GraphQL endpoints automatically.