A significant reason for the success of FlexRay was the foundation of the FlexRay Consortium, under whose guidance the two automotive OEMs DaimlerChrysler and BMW joined together with the two chip producers Motorola and Philips in the year 2000.

The goal of this consortium was to develop an OEM-independent, deterministic and fault tolerant FlexRay communication standard, which each member of the consortium can use without having to pay licensing fees.

As main fields of application safety-critical and time-critical automotive applications were focused. Due to its high data rate of 10 Mbit/s, plans also call for establishing FlexRay as a data backbone in the automobile.

The FlexRay consortium published version 3.0.1 of the specification in 2010 and began transferring it to an ISO standard. Currently the ISO 17458 is available. It describes the FlexRay protocol, the physical layer and conformance tests to check both of these. The complete standard can be obtained via the ISO.

ISO

ISO Website - International Organization for Standardization