[owalt]

It's worth noting that ISO 26262 is mostly concerned with preventing faults due to system failure, e.g. spurious hardware faults, hardware degradation over time, etc. As an example, it doesn't have much to say about preventing a child from being misclassified as a bollard. It's a quite robust standard, and one most auto makers (certainly the European ones) have spent a lot of effort processing and following for quite some time now (in my limited experience).

There's a separate standard (ISO 21448) trying to address issues with safety of intent, i.e. maintaining safety when there's no actual fault in the system. (Like the misclassification example.) This one's newer, much less effort has been spent developing it, and even less has been spent trying to follow it. Frankly it doesn't have as much to say. (And how could it? Nobody knows how to solve general classification problems, and especially not with something running on some 20 W max control unit.) This part of the problem space is basically the wild west. Some auto makers do a good effort trying to create safe solutions. Others not so much.

In summary, some of the electronics solutions in the car can probably be trusted to do what they're meant to (e.g. airbags). Others (e.g. lane keeping assist, emergency braking) are still still mostly be safe but certainly warrant keeping your hands on the wheel. Anything approaching fully self driving is at best quite dubious at this point though.