What is Safety?

Automotive Safety versus Automotive Functional Safety

Vehicles have a number of different systems including hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, electronic, and chemical. There are a variety of automotive standards covering topics about safety and also design best practices. You can find some examples on the Society of Automotive Engineers website .

Governments even have their own safety standards such as the United States government's Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the United Nation's World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulation .

Functional safety, which only looks at electrical and electronic system malfunctions, is just one part of overall vehicle safety.

Functional Safety and Nominal Performance

Functional safety also does not look at nominal performance. For example, nominal performance of an automatic braking system could be that a vehicle traveling 60 miles per hour should come to a complete stop in 5 seconds. Functional safety does not determine whether or not the vehicle brakes within 5 seconds.

Instead, functional safety would look at malfunctions like if the braking function engaged when it wasn't supposed to or if the system brakes too hard causing injury to the driver. Nominal performance issues can still lead to safety problems, but nominal performance is not part of the functional safety standard.

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