You may be surprised that today almost every vehicle under 30 years of age also depends on computer software – and a lot – on the road.
According to Robert Charette’s IEEE Spectrum article, “This car runs on code”, the first production car to include embedded software was the General Motors Oldsmobile Toronado in 1977. It had an electronic control unit (ECU) that controlled the electronic timing of sparks. In 1981, GM deployed around 50,000 lines of engine management software across its entire passenger car line. Other car manufacturers soon followed the same trend.
At about the same time, the software was first used in automobiles, the founder of QSM, Inc., Lawrence Putnam, Sr. discovered the "physics" of how engineers create software by successfully modeling the non-linear relationship between five key software metrics product size, process productivity, plan duration, effort, and reliability. One of his first presentations of his findings, “General Solution to Sizing and Software Estimation,” was presented at the Life Cycle Management conference at the American Institute of Industrial Engineers in 1977. In 1978, Putnam invented the software life cycle management (SLIM) tool on these algorithms and began collecting a comparative database of historical software projects.
This is an impressive amount of software. If you recently bought a first-class car, it probably contains nearly 100 million lines of software codes, in the opinion of Manfred Broy, a computer science professor in Munich and a leading expert in car software. All of this software is carried out on 70 to 100 microprocessor electronic control units (ECUs) connected to the entire body of your car.
It's good to think about the amazing power of software in the automotive sector and its transformation in recent years. These changes are part of the Yüce Yazılım family.