ISO 26262 When You Are Not an Automaker

An automotive supplier portal can ask a perfectly reasonable question in the wrong vocabulary.

The form says, “Is your product developed to ISO 26262?” The product is an industrial robot installed inside a body shop. It is not a road vehicle. Clicking “not applicable” is accurate and often unhelpful.

The customer is trying to learn if the supplier controls safety-related development or handles it informally. ISO 26262 is the framework their purchasing and safety teams know, so that is the label on the form.

Begin with the actual scope

ISO 26262 covers safety-related electrical and electronic systems in series-production road vehicles, excluding mopeds. It also says that unique E/E systems in special-purpose vehicles, such as vehicles designed for drivers with disabilities, are not within its claimed applicability.

That wording does not create a broad published list excluding every off-road, military, or special-purpose vehicle. The intended use and the item still need to be classified.

An industrial arm bolted to a factory floor is the easier case. So is an automated guided vehicle that never becomes a road vehicle. Machinery standards and the general functional safety framework are the relevant starting points, not ISO 26262 merely because the end customer manufactures cars.

Write that answer down. Name the standards the product actually follows. Do not imply ISO 26262 compliance if the development was not run against it.

Then answer the question the customer meant to ask.

What the customer needs to see

Automotive safety teams are accustomed to a controlled chain from hazard analysis through requirements, architecture, implementation, and verification. They also expect assumptions about use and integration to be explicit.

A non-automotive supplier can show the comparable evidence without relabeling it. Provide the product's intended use and hazard analysis. Show which safety requirements came from which risks. Identify the design assumptions a customer must preserve. Connect verification results to the requirements they demonstrate.

If the supplier has IEC 61508 evidence, lead with it and explain the mapping carefully. ISO 26262 grew from the same broad functional safety tradition, but similar structure does not make the two standards interchangeable. An ASIL is not a SIL with different letters, and an IEC 61508 file is not automatic proof of ISO 26262 compliance.

The component question needs the same care

Supplier questionnaires sometimes ask for the ASIL of a component as if it were an intrinsic rating printed on the housing.

ASIL originates from vehicle-level hazardous events. A component can be developed and assessed as a safety element out of context, with assumptions about the safety requirements, environment, diagnostics, and integration. The vehicle manufacturer still has to confirm those assumptions in the actual application.

For a robotics supplier, assumptions are the useful bridge. State what the product does, the safety functions it supports, the conditions under which the claims hold, and what the integrator must provide around it. That is more useful to the customer's engineer than a confident scope label with no technical record behind it.

When the questionnaire exposes a process gap

Sometimes the supplier has the right scope answer and still cannot produce the requested evidence. The hazard analysis is two years old, requirements share a tracker with feature work, and the test results do not say which safety requirement they verify.

In that case, the form has found the useful problem. Arguing about ISO 26262 will not fix it, and neither will a better paragraph in the supplier portal. The evidence has to be brought under control.

ASAP keeps the hazard analysis, safety requirements, assumptions, design decisions, reliability work, and verification evidence connected. A supplier can retrieve the record in the customer's vocabulary without pretending the product was developed under a standard that does not apply.

The methodology was developed over five years inside Amazon Robotics and supports a large autonomous mobile robot fleet in continuous operation.

If an automotive questionnaire has exposed evidence that exists but cannot be retrieved, Fennec can help put the record back together.