Is Your Ford More Technically Complex than a F-22 Raptor

[aussiblue]

See http://news.discovery.com/tech/toyot...ware-code.html

The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, ”it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code,” says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.

As Much Software Code as an Airbus


Alfred Katzenbach, the director of information technology management at Daimler, has reportedly said that the radio and navigation system in the current S-class Mercedes-Benz requires over 20 million lines of code alone and that the car contains nearly as many ECUs as the new Airbus A380 (excluding the plane’s in-flight entertainment system). Software in cars is only going to grow in both amount and complexity. Late last year, the business research firm Frost and Sullivan estimated that cars will require 200 million to 300 million lines of software code in the near future.

Even low-end cars now have 30 to 50 ECUs embedded in the body, doors, dash, roof, trunk, seats and just about anywhere else the car’s designers can think to put them. That means that most new cars are executing tens of million of lines of software code, controlling everything from your brakes to the volume of your radio [see ”How and Where Is Software Used in Cars? "].

”Automobiles are no longer a battery, a distributor or alternator and a carburetor; they are hugely modern in their complexity,” says Thomas Little, an electrical engineering professor at Boston University in Massachusetts, who is involved in developing intelligent transportation systems. ”The goals to save energy, reduce [emissions], and improve safety have driven the specialization and adoption of electronics in particular.”

I got led to this by a table in an Harvard Business Review article (HBR Reprint F1006A) which also said an average Ford automobile had 10 million lines of code driving it up from 2.4 million lines in 2005 and 6 million in 2008.