When is a development vehicle ready for public road usage regarding functional safety aspects?

Inhalt:
The goal of producing a defect free and safe car is everyone’s expectation. How can we guarantee a safe vehicle within the development phases? This is especially challenging because there are different stages (e.g. Mule Cars, Integration Vehicles and Product & Process Validation Vehicles) of development vehicles. Naturally, the following question arises: Why should a mule car or integration vehicle be less safe for a driver (e.g. a validation engineer or a manager)than a series production vehicle? This paper explains how to achieve a high level of system safety within development vehicles. In the following the basics about build phases, software baselining and the criteria for safety approvals are explained. Then we focus on safety testing and variant handling and how we can be sure that built prototypes are sufficiently safe.