The Car of Tomorrow Has a Payroll Department

At an open evening in May 2023, visitors to INSTART group could try something rather more interesting than collecting a brochure. The data specialists at ip camp let them investigate a fault in a real vehicle. Nearby, e.telligent displayed an onboard charger and a battery management system. digitalwerk brought self-driving model cars. The exhibits offered a small lesson in how much work hides beneath the phrase “the future of mobility.”

A car can be presented as a single object. Developing one is a crowd activity. INSTART’s proposition is to gather several of the people that activity needs, give them distinct businesses, and connect their work. The unexpected member of the crowd is the company handling administration. Someone still has to arrange payroll while everyone else is arranging the future.

A network with an unusually practical fifth member

Five businesses came together in early 2018 to form INSTART group. Today, the group’s advertised network comprises e.telligent, digitalwerk, ip camp, CUBE brand communications and INSTART consult. Its headquarters are in Eitensheim, Bavaria, near Ingolstadt. The group works across the path from an initial concept through development and industrialisation to series production.

Its customers include familiar automotive names: Volkswagen Group, BMW, Daimler, Bosch and Continental. These are organisations with considerable engineering resources of their own. An outside specialist therefore needs a more precise invitation than “we understand cars.” INSTART’s constituent businesses offer recognisable pieces of the development process, along with products that can become part of a customer’s working environment.

The structure gives the group an interesting market position. It spans engineering services, software tools, brand communications and outsourced administration. A customer’s alternatives vary with the job: internal developers, a dedicated testing vendor, an independent agency or a payroll provider. The argument for this network depends on whether connections between those jobs are useful to the buyer.

The test is over. Where did the evidence go?

Consider the less cinematic part of developing a driver-assistance function. Engineers need to organise tests, collect what happened and relate the result to what the system was supposed to do. A collection of tools can help with individual steps while leaving someone to join the records afterwards. That handover is a sensible place to inspect INSTART’s claims about cooperation.

At the October 2025 transform.10 event, digitalwerk demonstrated its Supertester on a vehicle. Its December account describes a connection to ADTF, the Automotive Data and Time-Triggered Framework, for capturing signals, followed by automated evaluation in Supertester. It also describes integration with e.telligent’s e.CoSys so that test planning, execution and documentation can be managed together.

That connection makes the group’s proposition concrete. One business supplies testing software; another supplies the environment in which the work is tracked. Their products meet at a task an engineering team actually performs. The practical attraction is continuity: the result should remain attached to the planned test rather than becoming another file somebody must chase.

e.CoSys is an Atlassian-based package intended to connect requirements, development and acceptance tests. Its stated audience includes smaller companies entering automotive work and established firms improving a particular part of their process. The appeal is easy to understand: if a requirement changes, knowing which test belongs to it should not depend on remembering who built the spreadsheet.

Batteries have opinions. Data needs an interpreter.

e.telligent works on battery management, power electronics and energy algorithms, alongside development tooling and cloud services. Its portfolio reaches into hardware and software, the processes used to build them, and the handling of energy data. This gives INSTART an electrification business concerned with both physical components and their digital surroundings.

ip camp tackles another stubborn problem: communication from complex systems does not explain itself. Its German team specialises in vehicle testing, trace-data analysis and data management. The company describes using its own tools and automation for root-cause investigations, then covering analysis cases with regression tests to reduce repeated manual problem solving.

Its products include Mercury, for automotive trace-data work, and RED, an AUTOSAR editor. The published RED manual describes projects as collections of ARXML files representing an AUTOSAR model. It is a rather specific form of software housekeeping, and precisely the kind of specificity that distinguishes a tool someone uses from a slogan someone applauds.

“Without proper software there is no autonomous mobility!”digitalwerk’s statement of purpose

The expertise is useful when a customer’s difficulty lies in the development machinery: interpreting communications, maintaining models, organising engineering evidence or linking tools. Buyers can start with the piece of work they need. The breadth of the group becomes valuable where a project crosses more than one of those boundaries.

The back office becomes an outside offer

INSTART consult gives the arrangement a second story. In May 2024, it announced that evidanza.BI had been introduced across the group, with access for management and executives from the end of the first quarter. Its responsibilities included connecting the ERP system, preparing data, administering users and producing reports and dashboards.

Those are concrete operating tasks. A dashboard needs somebody to maintain the connection that feeds it. A shared system needs somebody to organise access. INSTART consult was doing that work inside its own network, where the users and the administrative consequences were close at hand.

On 19 December 2025, it announced a strategic partnership with CSS AG. The new Process Driven Solutions offer combines CSS’s eGECKO ERP with implementation, ongoing services, standardised processes and business intelligence. It targets SMEs and startups in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. INSTART consult remains a CSS customer while also becoming a partner.

The announcement invited interested companies to apply for a free test phase. The commercial model brings software and people together: customers need a system introduced and maintained, as well as administrative work performed. Elsewhere in the group, revenues come from engineering assignments, software offerings and support, or marketing services. These are different purchases, sold through specialist businesses.

And then somebody hands you a motorcycle

CUBE supplies the outward-facing part of the network. Its work includes experiential marketing and brand building, from planning to implementation and monitoring. The agency serves automotive manufacturers and suppliers through brand experiences, while also offering branding work to smaller companies and startups.

Its Riding Experience Alto Adige brand provides a particularly tangible example. For the 2024 season, it became an official BMW Motorrad partner and opened a motorcycle test centre in Bolzano. Training, touring and trying a motorcycle bring the customer into direct contact with the product. Engineering gets its audience, and the audience gets handlebars.

CUBE also organises occasions inside the group. Its account of the 2023 summer party describes a six-team “triathlon” involving stand-up paddling, volleyball and table football. The combination suggests a healthy suspicion of taking the word triathlon too seriously. In September that year, the group added a Hansefit fitness partnership to its employee offering.

Copy the connection, then inspect the fit

The portable idea here is modest and useful. Keep specialist knowledge close to the task, then make the handovers explicit. INSTART’s testing integration connects capture, evaluation and records. Its shared-services business centralises repeatable administration. The two examples address different work, but both ask where an output needs to go next.

For a buyer, fit turns on the existing tools, the interfaces that need maintaining and the willingness to adopt shared processes. A team with a settled development environment may need one integration rather than a wider package. A small business seeking outsourced administration needs to decide which processes it is ready to standardise. These are practical purchasing questions, not objections to specialisation.

The pleasing detail about INSTART is that its ambition leaves room for ordinary work. Battery systems, autonomous-driving tools and data analysis share a network with brand events and payroll. Each has its own customer and its own demands. The future car may arrive with remarkable capabilities; getting it there still requires people who can make the work join up.