There once was a time when most cars on the road did not have air bags as a standard under federal law. It took until 1998, in fact, for every vehicle on the round to have an airbag as required by federal law — that’s over 100 years after the invention of the first automobile and roughly 30 years after airbags were first invented as a safety measure. Something like that is playing out again, except this time with robotaxis and cyber protections.
Louay Abdelkader, director of product management at QNX, identified it as a huge problem for the sector, “of course … keep in mind that in automotive safety, it took a while for it to adopt.” Abdelkader told Fortune lawmakers should make cybersecurity a primary consideration akin to airbags, noting that every connected vehicle introduces some degree of cyber risk.
