Guest Editorial Special Section on Automotive Embedded Systems and Software

Today, most of the innovation in the automotive domain is in the areas of electronics and software. Modern cars have already been transformed, from largely mechanical entities, to complex embedded systems running on four wheels. High-end cars currently have around 100 electronic control units (ECUs), each with one or more, possibly multicore, processors. These ECUs communicate using different communication buses such as CAN, FlexRay, LIN, and more recently also Ethernet, and are connected to various cameras, radars, ultrasonic sensors, and also to a host of actuators. Such architectures are used to run several millions of lines of software code spanning across safety-critical, driver assistance, comfort, and entertainment related applications.