The CentOS Automotive SIG is backed by Red Hat and appears to be more about having an open-source home for the company's automotive Linux efforts rather than directly pushing for CentOS within automobiles. Red Hat has been investing into in-vehicle infotainment and other efforts around Red Hat Enterprise Linux within automobiles. The CentOS Automotive SIG in turn would help drive this.
The CentOS Automotive SIG page explains, " The purpose of the Automotive SIG is two-fold. First, it is meant to be a neutral public space for collaboration between third parties interested in open development of software targeted at in-vehicle automotive use cases. Second, it is meant to provide such projects with build and test infrastructure. The goal of the SIG is to provide an open-source home for RHEL-oriented automotive work, and to attract and encourage open development of automotive software between commercial and non-commercial partners. "
The CentOS Automotive SIG will work on creating open-source software around automotive, incorporating upstream automotive open-source projects, and building a CentOS variant for automotive based on RHEL for Edge.
More of the initial plans around the Red Hat backed CentOS Automotive SIG can be found via the CentOS Wiki . The CentOS Board of Directors gave the official go-ahead for this special interest group during their meeting last week.