What is ISO 26262? All 12 parts at a glance

ISO 26262 Road vehicles — Functional safety spans 12 parts covering the complete lifecycle from concept to decommissioning. This page explains what each part governs in a few sentences.

Part 1 · Vocabulary: the shared language of the series

Defines the vocabulary and abbreviations used across ISO 26262 — the dictionary for every other part. Terms such as fault, error and failure carry strict definitions here that differ from everyday usage.

Part 2 · Management of functional safety: organisation and project

Specifies the organisational and project-level conditions for managing safety activities: safety culture, governance, competence management, and safety planning with confirmation measures across the lifecycle.

Part 3 · Concept phase: from hazards to safety goals

Starting from the item definition, HARA derives safety goals, which are refined into a functional safety concept and allocated to the system architecture.

Part 4 · Product development at the system level

Refines the functional safety concept into technical safety requirements and the system architecture, then integrates, tests and finally validates the item against its safety goals.

Part 5 · Product development at the hardware level

Covers hardware architectural design and the quantitative evaluation of random hardware failures — the SPFM, LFM and PMHF metrics and their target values are defined here.

Part 6 · Product development at the software level

Organises software development along the V-model — safety requirements, architecture, unit design and implementation, testing and integration — with method tables per ASIL.

Part 7 · Production, operation, service and decommissioning

Keeps functional safety intact during production, operation, service and decommissioning, including customer instructions and the handling of field monitoring results.

Part 8 · Supporting processes

Defines the cross-cutting processes the other parts keep citing: distributed development interfaces (DIA), requirement management, configuration and change management, documentation, and confidence in the use of software tools.

Part 9 · ASIL-oriented and safety-oriented analyses

Provides the method requirements for ASIL decomposition, dependent failure analysis (DFA) and safety-oriented analyses such as fault tree analysis and FMEA.

Part 10 · Guidelines (informative)

Informative guidance on reading and tailoring the normative parts; it introduces no new mandatory requirements.

Part 11 · Application to semiconductors

Applies the methods to semiconductor components: dependent versus independent fault partitioning, failure mode distribution, and the evaluation of hardware elements.

Part 12 · Adaptation for motorcycles

Adapts the series to motorcycles: MSIL replaces ASIL, with the corresponding parameters and exemptions adjusted.

Want to go deeper?

FuSaCert offers clause-level companions and reviewed deep dives for all 12 parts — start reading after registration. Register free →