The ISO 26262 standard remains critical for automotive manufacturers developing new vehicles and seeking to establish a secure and reliable identity for their brands. The standards were initially implemented in 2011 to protect critical electrical components of the vehicle’s management and monitoring system.
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Since then, it’s forced the industry to unify the safety and reliability standards of its electronics, which has yielded impressive results in the following decade. A 2021 McKinsey study found that while the complexity of onboard software and electronics has quadrupled since 2010, reliability has increased by 60% over the same period. However, the standard may be growing outmoded. Software is quickly usurping traditional microchips as the industry shifts towards fully software-defined architectures, something the standards are unable to deal with effectively, despite updates to the standard as recently as 2018.

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