[The Mercedes S-Class] is, in short, a stealthily semiautonomous computer on wheels. “There are tens of thousands of processes running in parallel,” Jungwirth says. A car like this boasts upwards of 60 ECUs, or electronic control units, handling everything from automatic braking to automatic trunk opening. The technology trade magazine IEEE Spectrum notes that a premium-class automobile runs 100 million lines of computer code, more than Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Intellectual property lawsuits, the bane of the technology industry and until recently a rarity in the car business, have been proliferating. As futurist Paul Saffo says, for a company like Mercedes nowadays, “the value add is the software and the computers. The wheels are primarily there to keep the computers from dragging on the ground.
