Skip to content
Cobalt Rentals

How Mercedes-Benz uses GitHub

Automotive excellence at Mercedes-Benz and seamless developer experience on GitHub go hand in hand.

  • 90% Source code on GitHub
  • 2M lines of code accepted with GitHub Copilot
  • 30M+ weekly time savings per dev with Copilot

Play video

Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Industry: Automotive
Number of Seats: 55,000+

The Challenge

Mercedes-Benz's scattered technology stack created silos and slowed collaboration across the company. Like many organizations undergoing digital transformation, they managed source code with multiple tools rather than a unified solution. They needed a platform to accelerate software delivery and promote collaboration through innersource and open source initiatives.

The Solution

Mercedes-Benz adopted GitHub's platform to unify source code, promote collaboration and efficiency, and drive innovation with AI-powered software development tools.

The Mercedes-Benz EQS exemplifies the company's evolution into a technology leader. Its MBUX (Mercedes-Benz User Experience) Hyperscreen merges multiple displays into a 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 optimize driver and copilot experience. 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.

"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."

AI-Powered Development with GitHub Copilot

In July 2023, Mercedes-Benz adopted GitHub Copilot to accelerate productivity and innovation. Today, more than 5,000 developers 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.

Mercedes-Benz made a strategic decision to embrace AI 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.

Developer Impact

Mercedes' developers report they're able to code faster with fewer errors, saving at least a half hour every week with Copilot. They're 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."

Unified Collaboration Across 55,000+ Developers

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. The Developer Experience team operates a hybrid architecture on GitHub Enterprise with around 115,000 repositories across approximately 4,300 organizations (as of August 2024).

"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."

Innersource Benefits

Several promising innersource initiatives have emerged from this unified approach. 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.

Developers from across the company can now work together and avoid reinventing the wheel. GitHub Copilot makes it even easier for developers from different teams to dive into each other's 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.

Open Source Commitment

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 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," 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. "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 Automation

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 approximately 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."