[staunch]

1. Cars have had computers in them for a very long time now.

2. The code, in many cases, is probably an unmaintainable mess. Embedded programming is not always modern programming, for good and bad.

3. Today, the computers in cars are doing more, and the systems are more complex. It's reasonable to expect more serious problems as a result.

4. Companies do safety testing, of course, but there's no such thing as as "100%" test coverage for complex physical machines running outside of a lab.

5. The best way to judge the safety of cars is the best way to judge safety for airplanes: let other people test them out for a while and then check whether or not they report problems.

[f1shy]

This is absolutely the case. Until more or less now, the software was made with systems like simulink (but much much simpler), where a mechanical engineer could build blocks of very simple functions, using AND, NOT, OR gates, and mathematical operations.

Now the companies are migrating to real programming in C++, and it is a terrible mess. There are just not enough people with software competence to drive it.

I've seen people trying to do L4 automated systems with this blocks. Pages and pages and pages of boxes (which can only be the basic logical function, and the 4 basic arithmetic operations!!!). Of course the project didn't go anywhere!

[fmntf]

Your comment is pretty accurate. Just remove "probably" from point 2.