ISO 26262, titled "Road vehicles – Functional safety", is an international standard for functional safety of electrical and/or electronic systems that are installed in serial production road vehicles (excluding mopeds), defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2011, and revised in 2018.
The first edition (ISO 26262:2011), published on 11 November 2011, was limited to electrical and/or electronic systems installed in "series production passenger cars" with a maximum gross weight of 3,500 kilograms (7,700 lb).
The second edition (ISO 26262:2018), published in December 2018, extended the scope from passenger cars to all road vehicles except mopeds.
[1] The standard aims to address possible hazards caused by the malfunctioning behaviour of electronic and electrical systems in vehicles.
Like its parent standard, IEC 61508, ISO 26262 is a risk-based safety standard, where the risk of hazardous operational situations is qualitatively assessed and safety measures are defined to avoid or control systematic failures and to detect or control random hardware failures, or mitigate their effects.
That is, each hazardous event is assessed in terms of severity of possible injuries within the context of the relative amount of time a vehicle is exposed to the possibility of the hazard happening as well as the relative likelihood that a typical driver can act to prevent the injury.
[13] These Severity, Exposure, and Control definitions are informative, not prescriptive, and effectively leave some room for subjective variation or discretion between various automakers and component suppliers.