Industry Expert Blogs

Reliance on electronics and software is big business in the automotive industry and has driven significant focus on quality and reliability of vehicles and their components. Alongside this, the aim of safe, secure and accident-free driving has been given significant attention, with the publication of ISO 26262 for functional safety and ISO/SAE 21434 for cybersecurity for electronic and electrical systems (E/E Systems) of road vehicles.

In this blog our focus will be primarily on aspects of functional safety, but have no doubts, without addressing security, safety has no foundation. As an aside, the scope of road safety is much broader than vehicle E/E systems, and only with the collaboration of all stakeholders can all aspects of road safety be addressed successfully.

Back in the day, E/E systems were introduced to replace mechanical control systems to increase accuracy and precision of control but also to increase reliability and reduce costs. Today however, the complexity of E/E systems, and our reliance on them continues to increase, with control being taken out of the hands of humans in the form Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) to fully Autonomous Vehicles (AV). This is resulting in an increase of the vehicle boundary that is being extended into collaborative vehicle systems and the ‘Intelligent Transport System.’ Even prior to the AV systems, a typical high-end motor car would include more than 100 electronic control units (ECUs) executing over 100 million lines of code. Even low-end cars would contain up to 50 systems distributed throughout the vehicle.

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