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The current trend toward electronic system integration will soon bring active and passive safety systems together inside a single electronic control unit. The processing capability of microcontrollers and digital signal processors make it feasible to integrate many systems together on a single chip or fewer chips than before. Increased integration however, can increase the consequences and reactions to common mode failures. Failure mode management associated with this type of integration will be critical to provide the expected benefits while balancing the failure effects on these traditionally isolated systems. This paper examines tradeoffs that can occur when various active and passive safety systems are integrated together. Alternative designs are compared and the effects of various failure modes are analyzed.

Infrastructure systems such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) communication can theoretically prevent nearly all accidents by gathering the speed, locations, and travel directions of traffic participants, and intervening to control vehicle motion as required to help prevent collisions. However, during the phase-in of the communication systems, there will be many vehicles and many roads that do not have the communication systems in place, and therefore the system will not be effective in those cases. This lack of availability is likely the main disadvantage. On-board sensing (autonomous) systems such as cameras and radar sensors may not detect all potential hazards (e.g. due to weather, or hidden hazards), but they are effective in many situations and can help prevent crashes without depending on communication with infrastructure or other vehicles.