Ask HN: Risk of unsafe software in automobiles?

75 points

3 years ago

I may buy a car (new or used) soon and am a little worried about all the software in cars these days. Software can control pretty much every aspect of a modern vehicle, and so the idea of bugs in a vehicle's software scares me from a safety perspective. Poor software engineering has been implicated in automobile safety incidents in the past[1].

I'm aware of the NASA/JPL rules for developing safety-critical software[2] but I'm not sure if any car manufacturers follow anything similar.

Does anyone here have any knowledge of the software development practices of any automakers and what they do to ensure safety and reliability? And is there anything else I can do to mitigate this risk (short of buying a very old car, which would have other safety downsides)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration [2] http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/P10.pdf

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