“New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider” – according to the New York Times ‘Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood’.
Complexity is there – many different parts with various codes that need to communicate so that everything works. Results can be quite unpredictable. Cheating can even be hidden inside the code, as the recent Volkswagen scandal showed.
The issue of code safety is a tremendous challenge to manufacturers and regulators alike. A strong position would require to remove all code lines that are not used in a particular model, but that is extremely costly as it goes against standardization. At some point it will be difficult to avoid unpredictable behavior of the system if there are various computing centers performing different functions in the car. Today, access to the proprietary code used by automakers is not even granted because of copyright protection. This will certainly evolve, and a framework for guaranteeing a minimum level of code reliability will have to be put in place.
