Automotive Safety Practices vs. Accepted Principles (SAFECOMP paper)

I'm presenting this paper at SAFECOMP this today

2018 SAFECOMP Paper Preprint

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 nonreproducible 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 nonregulatory environment threatens to undermine safety engineering rigor.

See the full paper here:
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman18_safecomp.pdf

Note that there is some pretty interesting stuff to be seen by following the links in the paper reference section.
Also see the expanded list of (potentially) deadly automotive defects.

Here are the accompanying slides:  https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman18_safecomp_slides.pdf

Automotive Safety Principles vs. Accepted Practices from Philip Koopman