The Challenge
Automotive faces a fundamental bottleneck hindering SDV: qualifying and certifying software for safety-critical applications.
- Certification ≠ Quality: The industry often conflates these concepts, creating barriers to innovation. Many treat ISO 26262 certification as a guarantee of quality.
- Misuse of flexibility in standards: ISO 26262 provides mechanisms like SEooC and ASIL decomposition, but we often misuse them as workarounds due to limited collaboration.
The Dependency Dilemma
In our fragmented, non-collaborative market, developing safety-critical components as part of a larger system you don't control forces you to make assumptions about unknown system contexts. This creates a spectrum from over-engineering to oversimplification.
Regardless of your approach, you inevitably depend on foundational elements: certified operating systems, qualified toolchains, and utility libraries (STL, Eigen, etc...). This dependency traps companies in one of three problematic paths:
- Self-qualify everything → Divert resources from product development to non-differentiating activities
- Pass responsibility to customers → Lose competitive advantage while creating integration complexity
- Rely on proprietary solutions → Accept vendor lock-in and dependency risks with outdated qualified tools
The Open-Source Solution
Other industries recognized this early and invested in collaborative qualification of foundational projects. In automotive, proven technologies like LLVM and its ecosystem, along with established libs, warrant collective industry investment.
The benefits are transformative:
- Reduced individual qualification costs
- Accelerated innovation cycles
- Most importantly: Healthier competitive ecosystem. Competition based on actual product value, not survival with outdated tools
The Path Forward
Industry-wide collaboration on qualifying foundational elements is essential for the sector's advancement. Let's compete on innovation, not on who can best navigate outdated infrastructure.
The future of automotive software depends on the willingness to collaborate on the foundation while competing on the innovation that matters
Originally posted on LinkedIn
