The automotive industry has used many different processor architectures over the years. RISC-V is particularly interesting given the freedom from any one supplier, the ability to use a single processor architecture over the range of automotive applications, and the option to customise for specific use cases. Counterbalancing the benefits of RISC-V are the challenges, both business and technical. First, the automotive industry is risk averse and can take a long time to adopt new technology. Second, automotive software stacks are complex and often involve multiple vendors, making integration, debug and testing on a new architecture challenging. This talk will describe how these challenges are addressed through the use of virtual platforms. Virtual platforms allow software teams to iterate faster and test more rigorously than they can with RTL, and start work before the hardware design is complete. Early software development reduces time to market, improves quality and reduces risk. Since a virtual platform runs production binaries, software developed on a virtual platform “just works” on production silicon.