On September 14th, it was reported that the State Administration for Market Regulation (National Standards Committee) recently approved the release of the national standard "Specification for Quality and Defect Management of Automotive Software" (GB/T 48140-2026). Experts say that the release of the new national standard provides a unified guideline for software quality and defect management in the automotive industry, and further improves the security system of the intelligent connected vehicle industry.
Currently, "software defined cars" have become the core trend in the development of the automotive industry. While software endows cars with intelligent experiences, it also brings new security risks. The trend of frequent software defects and the normalization of software iteration and upgrading have put forward stricter systematic requirements for the quality and defect management of automotive software.
The relevant person in charge of the State Administration for Market Regulation introduced that this standard uses the PDCA cycle (planning implementation inspection disposal) and risk-based thinking to establish a vehicle grade software quality and defect management standard covering the entire lifecycle of automotive software requirements analysis, design implementation, integration, verification and confirmation, release management, upgrade and maintenance, providing unified compliance for software quality and defect management in the automotive industry.
Ji Xuehong, Director of the Automotive Industry Innovation Research Center at North China University of Technology, stated that in the past, the management of the automotive industry focused more on areas such as mechanical failure and collision safety. With the automotive industry entering the era of intelligent electric vehicles, software functions are becoming increasingly important, and the scale of software code has reached billions of lines, directly affecting vehicle operation safety, driving safety, and comprehensive experience. For this reason, it is necessary to standardize the management of potential quality issues and product defects, requiring timely recall after problems occur, rather than shirking responsibility and transferring risks to consumers.
The new national standard aims to implement full process control over software issues in intelligent electric vehicles, and to achieve pre emptive prevention as much as possible on the basis of post recall, avoiding software testing that should have been done but not done, or avoiding quality function defects through subsequent push methods, so as to promote the development of intelligent electric vehicles more steadily and provide a systematic guarantee for the healthy and sustainable development of the industry, "said Ji Xuehong.
The relevant person in charge of the State Administration for Market Regulation stated that the standard was drafted by the recall center of the State Administration for Market Regulation, and is in line with the mandatory national standards "Technical Requirements for Information Security of Automobile Vehicles" (GB 44495-2024) and "General Technical Requirements for Automotive Software Upgrades" (GB 44496-2024). The release and implementation of standards are conducive to advancing the identification and prevention of software defects in automobiles, and further improving the software security governance system for intelligent connected vehicles.