Automotive System Safety

5Safety Culture

Background

ISO 26262 discusses safety culture as being the enduring values, attitudes, motivations, and knowledge of an organization in which safety is prioritized over competing goals in decisions and behaviors. This is a clear view that implies a bias for action to ensure safety whenever a decision is made in the automotive industry about what action to take next. Cost, schedule, and political urgency must not be valued above ensuring that the general public bears no unreasonable risk due to an enterprise's actions or omissions.

While this is with respect to automotive functional safety, no new definition has been proposed for safety of the intended function (SOTIF) by ISO PAS 21448. Safety is still the absence of unreasonable risk when used in the context of SOTIF. Therefore, a safety culture implies a bias to ensure no unreasonable risk. Thus, this concept of safety culture seems broadly applicable to system safety. The purpose of system safety is to ensure the safety of the product when operating without failure as well as in the presence of failure. The organization is motivated to achieve safety, and the safety culture provides empowerment.

ISO 26262 discusses positive and negative indicators of a safety culture that show whether the persons responsible for achieving or maintaining functional safety have dedication and integrity, as well as the persons performing or supporting safety activities in the organization. It is difficult or impossible to measure ...