Tag

sotif

4 articles

Driver's view down a wet motorway. Heavy spray from the traffic ahead hangs over the carriageway in a low backlit sun, and the painted lane markings fade out well before the cars do.

The Automotive Safety Standards Map: Beyond ISO 26262

A modern car can cause the same accident four different ways. Only one of them is a malfunction. Lane centering steers into the next lane. Same severity, same exposure, same controllability. One hazard. Now ask why. A solder joint opened. Or the camera worked perfectly and lost the markings in low sun. Or someone forged a steering frame on the bus. Or the model met a road marking that was never in its training data. ISO 26262 owns the first one, and it says so itself. The other three each got a document: ISO 21448, ISO/SAE 21434, ISO/PAS 8800. The hard part is not learning four standards. It is that one item definition and one hazard list have to feed four arguments that must not contradict each other. New article on where the backbone ends.

7 minSep 3, 2026

Plan view of a road. In the next lane an overtaking vehicle is drawn twice: a dashed grey outline where the mirror panel still shows it, and a solid red one further ahead where it actually is, with the gap between them marked.

Technical

Interior and Mirror Cameras: The Stale Frame Problem

A mirror-replacement camera rarely fails by going blank. It fails by showing you a well-formed picture of a road that has moved on. Most of the chain answers a different question. A link CRC proves the pixels arrived intact. A register readback proves the sensor is configured. A watchdog proves the imaging task is scheduled, and a task republishing its last buffer is scheduled perfectly. So teams add a frame counter, usually in the software that receives frames. That proves only that this software is running: it keeps counting while the sensor sits dark. Even minted at the sensor, a counter is metadata: it travels next to the pixels, not inside them. A stage that re-stamps on publication can attach a fresh number to old pixels, and a header-only check waves it through. Placement earns you sequence coverage. Claiming the picture is current is a bigger claim than most safety cases support. New article on what that costs in detection budget and where the ISO 21448 boundary falls.

8 minAug 31, 2026

Comparison table showing the differences between traditional ISO 26262 functional safety and ISO 21448 SOTIF hazard analysis methodologies.

Miscellaneous

SOTIF for Functional Safety Engineers: An Exploratory Guide

Automotive systems now fail due to complex environmental factors, not just broken hardware. Discover how functional safety engineers can bridge the gap between ISO 26262 and SOTIF to ensure autonomous vehicle safety.

6 minJun 10, 2026

Technical

Demystifying AV Safety: Integrating ISO 26262, SOTIF, and ML

Traditional safety standards are no longer enough for autonomous vehicles. Discover how to build a unified safety architecture by integrating ISO 26262, SOTIF, and Machine Learning to handle unpredictable real-world scenarios.

8 minJun 5, 2026