Topic starter
06/09/2026 5:18 pm
TL;DR: Connected vehicles now ship with tens of millions of lines of code, OTA updates, and expanding app ecosystems, and Arxan Technologies says that shift is turning software quality into a safety issue as much as an engineering one. The control gap is no longer whether cars run apps, but whether testing, release governance, and rollback discipline can keep pace with software-defined vehicles.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Arxan Technologies: “Why the Automotive Industry Deserves More Focus on Software Quality”.
Key questions
Q: What fails when connected vehicle software is tested only on physical hardware?
A: Manual vehicle labs cannot keep up with frequent software changes, multiple operating systems, and many display configurations.
Q: Why do over-the-air updates raise the risk of software defects in vehicles?
A: OTA updates shorten the distance between code change and real-world exposure, so defects can affect drivers before teams have enough operational feedback.
Q: How should teams measure whether connected vehicle testing is actually working?
A: They should measure whether the testing process can prove safe change at the pace software is released, across operating systems, device types, and user flows.
Practitioner guidance
- Expand release governance beyond functional testing Define quality gates that include compatibility, regression, rollback readiness, and user-impact validation for every OTA change.
- Automate cross-platform in-vehicle test coverage Use automation to exercise Android Auto, Android Automotive, Apple CarPlay, and other connected interfaces across OS versions and display types.
- Measure the safety impact of software defects Track which defects can affect driver attention, feature availability, or connected-service reliability so severity reflects real-world vehicle use.
Bottom line: Connected vehicles are becoming software platforms, so defects now carry safety implications as well as usability and reliability consequences.
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06/09/2026 5:19 pm
Software quality has become a safety control because the vehicle itself is now a governed software environment. Once a car behaves like an app platform, release quality affects more than user satisfaction. It influences the trust boundary between the automaker, the app developer, and the driver. Practitioners should stop treating automotive software as a narrow engineering issue and manage it as a safety-relevant control surface.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should automakers treat software quality as part of safety governance or product engineering?
A: They should treat it as both, but safety governance must lead. In a connected vehicle, quality defects can affect driver attention, reliability, and the behaviour of features that are active on the road. That means release approvals, rollback plans, and compatibility checks belong in the same governance conversation as engineering standards.
👉 Read our full editorial: Software quality is now a safety control in connected vehicles