LEAVE THE ‘CEMENT APPROACH’ AT HOME

LXF: So why aren’t there self-driving cars yet?

Dan Cauchy: My personal opinion is that the technology is already here. We have the compute power, we have the software capability, we have the AI capabilities to do these things. The things that are missing are government approvals. And government rules: if I’m inebriated sitting in my autonomous car, and I hit your car, am I at fault, or is the car at fault? And what if two autonomous cars hit each other? Who’s at fault insurance-wise? These kinds of rules… new laws have to be figured out and put together. To me that’s the biggest hurdle for autonomous – not the technology, but governments getting involved.

With the functional safety stuff, it’s my opinion that as an industry we need to go to the governments and ask them to change the way to do this. And what I mean by that is, the old way of getting something functional safety certified is you build something, you pour cement on it, and then you never change it. And if you change it, you have to go through another complete testing phase and then pour more cement on it. That might have worked well when code was 50 thousand lines of code, but now that code might be 10 or 20 million lines long. You will have defects and you need to fix those defects, and you need a mechanism to be able to do that. Cement is not the option.

I believe as an industry we need to convince government authorities to change the way they feel about software. That way of doing things is not the way forward. The way forward is to patch things. And show that you’re patching things in a responsible way, you’re testing them and that the outcome is a safe system. I think that’s the future for functional safety.