The trend toward self-driving and electric vehicles will add hundreds of millions of lines of code to cars. Can the auto industry cope? From a report: Ten years ago, only premium cars contained 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of a car, executing 100 million lines of code or more. Today, high-end cars like the BMW 7-series with advanced technology like advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) may contain 150 ECUs or more, while pick-up trucks like Ford's F-150 top 150 million lines of code. Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code as more features that were once considered luxury options, such as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking, are becoming standard.
Vard Antinyan, a software quality expert at Volvo Cars who has written extensively about software and system complexity, explains that as of 2020, "Volvo has a superset of about 120 ECUs from which it selects to create a system architecture present within every Volvo vehicle. Altogether, they comprise a total of 100 million lines of source code." This source code, Antinyan says, "contains 10 million conditional statements as well as 3 million functions, which are invoked some 30 million places in the source code." How much and what types of software resides in each ECU varies greatly, depending on, among other things, the computing capability of the ECU, the functions the ECU controls, the internal and external information and communications required to be processed and whether they are event or time triggered, along with mandated safety and other regulatory requirements. Over the past decade, more ECU software has been dedicated to ensuring operational quality, reliability, safety and security.
"The amount of software written to detect misbehavior to ensure quality and safety is increasing," says Nico Hartmann, Vice President of ZF's Software Solutions & Global Software Center at ZF Friedrichshafen AG, one of the world's largest suppliers of automotive components. Where perhaps a third of an ECU's software was dedicated to ensuring quality operations ten years ago, it is now often more than half or more, especially in safety critical systems, Hartmann states. Which ECUs and associated software end up going into a Volvo like its luxury SUV XC90 model, which has approximately 110 ECUs, depends on several factors. Volvo, like all auto manufacturers, has variants of each model offered for sale aimed at different market segments.
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