This is a great question :] It’s very relevant to some value stream assurance standards work I’m a part of at the moment. I assume the issue applies to both electric and combustion engines as they’re both software controlled. Part of what we’re investigating is capture and reconciliation of all change activity, and the possibility of immutable ledger tracking for the flow of work (and subsequent changes) incorporating identity as first-class criteria. Having multiple layers of immutable tracking. verification, and reconciliation could add a layer of assurance that only the right types of changes are happening. I imagine that there could be a ‘black box’ implementation that discouraged tampering and preserved evidence if it were to be located within the vehicle, but with 5G and multiple sensor capture and broadcast for terrestrial vehicles, there are more options for data transfer in both directions.

Love the question. I'm guessing we make similar (but usually not life threatening) precautions with microservices. Distributed micro systems that we've decided to treat as "cattle" for the purpose of failing gracefully. Centralized logging for the purpose of distributed tracing could be scraped in increments, but there is always a window of time where the only place the data lives is locally. Good call on the "black box" treatment. And in this case that box can probably be very small and be expected to hold small amounts of data (relatively). As far as the overrides...isn't that already in place in electric vehicles? Driver takes over with traditional controls.

to @michael_winslow point and “traditional controls”. Not sure how many systems are built with the redundancy of new and old (thought I did see that in a cruise ship bridge one time—joystick navigation on one side, sextant on the other). e.g., “fly by wire” being the only system or the system defying manual control eg 737 MAX.

I'm a cynic. If that level of tracking isn't mandated by law, then it would not happen.

For an IC car, the computer controlling the ignition will usually be under the hood or inside the dash for ease of access unless it's an exotic car or a BMW. 🙂 I'd be surprised if there were a forensic attempt to review the firmware of the car in case of an accident. Car accidents aren't exactly rare and they aren't treated the same way as airplanes.

@james.simon1165 what's the answer?

It depends, if the car is not autonomus Bryan is correct, unless there is reason to suspect it as cause) For autonmous vehicles every incident no matter how minor is reported and audited.