Yes, new cars are evolving in terms of ECU architecture, and we are targeting small chips for two use cases:
First - as "edge components" get smarter - you still have small microcontrollers all over the car (for example - you need a local MCU and a complex PCB for running a headlight with dozens of LEDs with minimum wiring to a central command unit);
Secondly - you now have multi-core, multi-arhitecture controllers - and you need small OSs for some of these cores in order to run embedded apps efficiently.
Hi! This is Daniel from OxidOS Automotive (stating this for disclaimer purposes).
Yes, our OS is based on TockOS, and our CEO (Alexandru Radovici) is #7 in the contributors list (https://github.com/tock/tock/graphs/contributors), with other colleagues contributing in the past years.
Of course, we also push anything that we fix / that is useful for the general Tockos community upstream.