Vehicle electronics safety standards updated

From the days of manually winding down windows, vehicles now come with a vast array of electronics that operate usually by touch or voice command.

To ensure any risks with the new technology are mitigated, a series of international standards for functional safety of electrical and electronic systems in road vehicles has just been updated for the automotive industry.

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 26262 series of standards for vehicle electronics provides guidelines and requirements for the functional safety of electrical and electronic systems in today’s vehicles.

The series is published in 12 individual parts.

Functional safety for electrical and electronic systems in road vehicles is essential for overall quality and product safety, as well as for the manufacturer’s reputation, says Susumu Akiyama, chair of the ISO subcommittee that developed the standards.

“Therefore, the ISO 26262 series of standards is a useful tool for the automotive industry to ensure safety of the vehicle and is generic enough to still allow some flexibility for innovation in its development,” he says.

Changes to the newly revised versions include the addition of important specific requirements for semi-conductors as well as new requirements for motorcycles.

Functional safety features form an integral part of each automotive product’s development phase, from specification and design to implementation, integration, verification, validation, and ultimately production release.

ISO 26262 defines functional safety for all automotive electronic and electrical safety-related systems, covering their entire life-cycle including the development, production, operation, service and decommissioning.

The series also details an automotive-specific, risk-based approach for determining risk classes, known as automotive safety integrity levels (ASILs).

ASILs are established by performing a risk analysis of potential hazards based on three variables – severity, probability of exposure and controllability by the driver.

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