As the automotive industry evolves towards interconnected and intelligent vehicles, the integration of complex electronic and software components has become paramount. However, this increased complexity brings new challenges in ensuring system safety, security, and life-cycle management. In this article, we focus on virtualisation (virt.), particularly containerisation (cont.), as a solution to mitigate integration stress in multi-node environments. We present a detailed review of the automotive constraints and ecosystem, along with the selection criteria for virt. technologies, justifying the scope of our study. Our main contribution is a two-phased evaluation of cont. tools. Firstly, we assess popular single-node container engines (Docker, Containerd, and Linux Containers LXC) based on CPU, RAM, and file I/O overhead over multiple hardware configurations. Secondly, we evaluate their multi-node scalability. The results show that Docker performs in average better than the other solutions for automotive on-board architectures.