Automotive electronic design is certainly one of the most attractive and promising application domains for hybrid system techniques. Some successful hybrid system applications to automotive model development and control algorithm design have already been reported in the literature. However, despite the significant advances achieved in the past few years, hybrid methods are in general still not mature enough for their effective introduction in the automotive industry design processes at large. In this paper, we take a broad view of the development process for embedded control systems in the automotive industry with the purpose of identifying challenges and additional opportunities for hybrid systems. We identify critical steps in the design flow and extract a number of open problems where hybrid system technology might play an important role.