In 1986 Bosch introduced the automotive world to something called “Controller Area Network”, which we all commonly now refer to as CAN. In the early 1990’s we were presented to CDs in production vehicles. In 1997 Mercedes offered us GPS. In 2002 Honda provided a DVD player so that we could go on those long family trips without hearing, “are we there yet?” When we fast forward some years, it is today’s commonplace to have adaptive cruise control, lane centering, automated parallel parking, among many other new features on a vehicle. It is clear that automotive may not change as fast as a mobile phone, but technology is continually advancing.

Standards are in place to protect the user of products. But they are only valuable if they are kept to date, kept to the current state-of-the-art. ISO 26262, a standard on functional safety for automotive, was first released on November 15, 2011. Now, nearly 6 years later the question arises, is it still valid?

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) generally updates standards every 5 years. This means that ISO 26262 is on the cusp of being updated. Luckily yes, the authors are hard at work to update the standard. We were previously provided insights of a release date for the second edition in January of 2018. However, this has been shifted.

The Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) will be available to authors early in November 2017. The publication of the FDIS is planned for January of 2018. Generally the FDIS is fairly close to the released version of the standard, but still not the released version. One caution for everyone is that the current Draft International Standard (DIS) that is available has over 5000 comments moving to the FDIS; so plan on changes!

The published second edition isn’t slated until June or July of 2018.

We are all excited to start digging into the second edition of the ISO 26262 standard, but we should walk with caution until the FDIS is available, as this will be our first real glance of the final standard.

Any development started before the release of the second edition should use the first edition of the ISO 26262 standard. Please feel free to contact us with any specific questions.

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