Practical Experience Report: Automotive Safety Practices vs. Accepted Principles

Abstract

This paper documents the state of automotive computer-based system safety practices based on experiences with unintended acceleration litigation spanning multiple vehicle makers. There is a wide gulf between some observed automotive practices and established principles for safety critical system engineering. While some companies strive to do better, at least some car makers in the 2002–2010 era took a test-centric approach to safety that discounted non-reproducible and “unrealistic” faults, instead blaming driver error for mishaps. Regulators still follow policies from the pre-software safety assurance era. Eight general areas of contrast between accepted safety principles and observed automotive safety practices are identified. While the advent of ISO 26262 promises some progress, deployment of highly autonomous vehicles in a non-regulatory environment threatens to undermine safety engineering rigor.