Quote:

There are a couple things automotive companies want; CAN, MOST and FlexRay.

The i.MX35 implements the CAN bus and it's a very reasonable little chip with equivalent performance to the MPC5121e (just without the dumb multi-port memory controller).

MOST is a horrible automotive media communications bus which makes absolutely no sense in the modern world, but it has to be around for compatibility.

FlexRay is pretty new and replaces CAN with a higher performance bus, and most automotive products with display will end up using something different.

If you're designing a car from scratch and not just plagiarising chassis from old models and components from old models, any i.MX chip would do the job. For components such as OnStar (GM), MPC5xxx is already well in use and needs to be supported. For vehicle safety, you cannot just swap chips inbetween models..