[LINK] Standards, please! The third coming of electric vehicles

[Stephen Wilson]

On 23/04/2012 10:11 AM, jim birch wrote:
> In a fairly short a time - maybe a few decades - it will be unnecessary or
> even illegal to drive your own car in a city on account of the systematic
> unreliability of human drivers.
Illegal?  Not in my lifetime.

In the late 80s I worked on the first software controlled implantable 
defibrillator.  40,000 lines of C, produced at a rate of one debugged 
line per developer per day.  Our system had a very small set of 
one-dimensional asynchronous real time inputs (one cardiac signal, one 
serial telemetry input, one safety magnet reed switch input) and a few 
synchronous internal interrupts (for logging and self-checks).  And this 
was a very very hard problem.

I know 23 years is a long time since that experience but I don't know 
that software engineering is ready for controlling a real car on a real 
street.  Is it?
> ...there will be a push to
> get the remaining human-controlled killer vehicles off the streets.
What do you think the reaction will be to the first fatal accident by a 
robot car?  How will it be handled - socially, professionally, politically?

Cheers,

Steve Wilson
Lockstep
http://lockstep.com.au/blog/software-engineering