Guess what requires 150 million lines of code….

Roberto Saracco January 13, 2016 Blog 4,906 Views

I am often saying that a car is just a bunch of computers with wheels. The amount of software embedded in a car plus the one that is used to design, manufacture and provide operation and maintenance support has kept growing and has now reached some amazing volumes. 
According to Motor Authority a Ford GT has over 10 million lines of code, that is much more than what an aircraft needs to fly (2 million lines of code for the Lockheed F-22 Raptor and 7 million lines for the 787 Dreamliner). But don’t think that is the top!
Actually, there is an amazing (at least for me) infographics outlining the number of lines of codes in a variety of products and the car software tops them all, reaching the 100 million mark (along with the mouse DNA pairs in a genome that can be considered as the mouse software coding…).
At CES 2016, Ford indicated that they have 150 million lines of code in their new pickup, the F150!
Interestingly, it appears that one of the reason for this explosion is the aggregation within a "car" of several components, each one bringing along its baggage of lines of code. In the aircraft industry there has been a strong drive to integrate the various components from a software point of view and this has resulted in a decrease in the volume of lines of code over the last ten years.
If you take a look at the infograph Google estimates in 2 billion lines of code the amount of software providing internet services. Here again I suspect that there is a huge overlapping in these lines of code…

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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