Seven years ago I wrote about how a hundred million cars were running curl and as I brought up this blog post in a discussion recently, I came to reflect over how the world might have changed since. Is curl perhaps used in more cars now?

Yes it is.

With the help of friendly people on Mastodon, and a little bit of Googling, the current set of car brands known to have cars running curl contains 47 names. Most of the world’s top brands:

Acura, Alfa Romeo, Audi, Baojun, Bentley, BMW, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Citroen, Dacia, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Ford, GMC, Holden, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jeep, Kia, Lamborghini, Lexus, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercedes, Mini, Nissan, Opel, Peugeot, Polestar, Porsche, RAM, Renault, Rolls Royce, Seat, Skoda, Smart, Subaru, Suzuki, Tesla, Toyota, Vauxhall, Volkswagen, Volvo

I think it is safe to claim that curl now runs in several hundred million cars.

How do we know?

This is based on curl or curl’s copyright being listed in documentation and/or shown on screen on the car’s infotainment system.

The manufacturers need to provide that information per the curl license. Even if some of course still don’t.

Some brands are missing

For brands missing in the list, we don’t know their status. There are many more car brands that we can suspect probably also run and use curl, but for which we have not found enough evidence for it. If you do, please let me know!

What curl are the running?

These are all using libcurl, not the command line tool. It is not uncommon for them to run fairly old versions.

What are they using curl for?

I can’t tell for sure as they don’t tell me. Presumably though, a modern care does a lot of Internet transfers for all sorts of purposes and curl is a reliable library for doing that. Download firmware images, music, maps or media. Upload statistics, messages, high-scores etc. Modern cars are full-blown computers plus mobile phones combined, of course they transfer data.

Brands, not companies

The list contains 47 brands right now. They are however manufactured by a smaller number of companies, as most car companies sell cars under multiple different brands. So maybe 15 car companies?

Additionally, many of these companies buy their software from a provider who bundles it up for them. Several of these companies probably get their software from the same suppliers. So maybe there is only 7 different ones?

I have still chosen to list and talk about the brands because those are the consumer facing names used in everyday conversations, and they are the names we mere mortals are most likely to recognize.

Not a single sponsor or customer

Ironically enough, while curl runs in practically almost every new modern car that comes out from factories, not a single of the companies producing the cars or the software they run, are sponsors of curl or customers of curl support. Not one.

An Open Source sustainability story in two slides

Yes they are allowed to

We give away curl for free for everyone to use at no cost and there is no obligation for anyone to pay anyone for this. These companies are perfectly in their rights to act like this.

You could possibly argue that companies should think about their own future and make sure that dependencies they rely on and would like to keep using, also survive so that they can keep depending on these components going forward as well. But obviously that is not how this works.

curl is liberally licensed under an MIT-like license.

What to do

I want curl to remain Open Source and I really like providing it in a way, under a liberal license, that makes it possible to get used everywhere. I mean, if we use the measurement of how widely used a software is, I think we can agree that curl is a top candidate.

I would like the economics and financials around the curl project to work out anyway, but maybe that is a utopia we can never reach. Maybe we eventually will have to change the license or something to entice or force a different behavior.

One of my hobbies is to collect information about where curl is used. The following car brands feature devices, infotainment and/or navigation systems that use curl – in one or more of their models.

These are all brands about which I’ve found information online (for example curl license information), received photos of or otherwise been handed information by what I consider reliable sources (like involved engineers).

Do you have curl in a device installed in another car brand?

List of car brands using curl

Baojun, BMW, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Ford, GMC, Holden, Hyundai, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan, Opel, Renault, Seat, Skoda, Subaru, Suzuki, Tesla, Toyota, VW and Vauxhall.

All together, this is a pretty amazing number of installations. This list contains eight (8) of the top-10 car brands in the world 2017! And all the top-3 brands. By my rough estimate, something like 40 million cars sold in 2017 had curl in them. Presumably almost as many in 2016 and a little more in 2018 (based on car sales stats).

Not too shabby for a little spare time project.

How to find curl in your car

Sometimes the curl open source license is included in a manual (it includes my name and email, offering more keywords to search for). That’s usually how I’ve found out many uses purely online.

Sometimes the curl license is included in the “open source license” screen within the actual infotainment system. Those tend to list hundreds of different components and without any search available, you often have to scroll for many minutes until you reach curl or libcurl. I occasionally receive photos of such devices.

Related: why is your email in my car and I have toyota corola.

Update: I added Tesla and Hyundai to the list after the initial post. The latter of those brands is a top-10 brand which bumped the counter of curl users to 8 out of the top-10 brands!