Automotive is certainly one of the most attractive and promising application domains for hybrid system techniques. Indeed, some hybrid models and algorithms have already been successfully applied for automotive control designs. 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 opportunities for hybrid systems in the design flow.