Safety: Electronics to monitor electronics?
After a car crash, a lawyer goes into the trunk a retrieves a black box. He’ll pull a black handle from his briefcase, attach it to the box, and start cranking. After 10 seconds or so, a stream of paper starts sliding out – ACCEL +0.2, ACCEL +0.5, DECEL +0.8. With this piece of paper, the lawyer can claim that you were accelerating mildly before hitting the brakes hard and crashing.
If the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gets their way, car electronics may be monitored like this one day. As a software engineer, I think this is brilliant in concept. I think of it as an audit trail for everything the electronics does. Unfortunately, I also think it’s a complete waste of money and time. Let me explain.
Adding additional oversight for electronic systems is hogwash. The additional complexity won’t track anything that current systems don’t already track. It’s one thing for several automakers to band together to reduce development costs, but it’s completely another for a government entity to come in and dictate a standard. Safety is already high on the priority list when consumers buy cars, and companies are aware of this. That’s why companies optimize their designs to earn full crash test ratings. But what does complying with electronics oversight buy you? It doesn’t avoid crashes, it doesn’t lessen crashes, it doesn’t do anything except force engineers to check off another item. I’d rather have those engineers spend their time innovating on new safety systems rather than falling in line with bureaucratic mumbo jumbo.