ZF TRW says failure rates of certain technologies could reach one in a hundred million as industry and consumers look to ensure the safety of ever-rising vehicle content.

Legislation still has to catch up with rapid advances in technology, but in anticipation of potential strict oversight from governments, particularly as partial and fully-automated driving becomes a reality, ZF TRW is mulling ever-tighter rates of failure.

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“Most vehicles we are working on now are globally for the big companies,” ZF TRW global director ADAS, Peter Austen, told just-auto at the supplier’s radar facility in Brest, Western France. “We make the same camera in China as we make in America as we make in England.

“OEMs push it [quality] pretty hard – certain of them are using it as a marketing advantage. The rest of the manufacturers can’t afford to let them get ahead. Validation is changing dramatically. Reliability of the products, we now try and have a failure rate of one in a million. We going to have failure rates of one in 100m to be able to say we are doing our bit and then we have to put in fail-safes.

“In order to make sure we don’t suffer from the same failure, they [OEMs] insist software is written by two different companies.”

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The ZF TRW global ADAS director was making his comments as the supplier revealed a EUR2.9m (US$3.2m)cash injection at its radar factory in Brest, France. The money will be used for new equipment, tooling and components in the development of a new sensor as well as a 500 square metre expansion of the warehouse.

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ZF’s radar systems are designed, assembled and tested at Brest which currently occupies 2,200 square metres.

The factory produces around 300,000 units per year and the company anticipates this figure will exceed 1m by 2020.