20 Functional Safety (ISO 26262) Interview Questions for EV Engineers

ISO 26262 functional safety is part of every interview for BMS + inverter + ADAS + brake-by-wire roles at Indian EV OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers. Casual familiarity isn't enough — interviewers test through specific scenarios. Here are the 20 questions and the answer patterns that signal professional-grade fluency.

Core concepts

• Walk through the four ASIL ratings and what drives an item from QM to ASIL D.
• Define HARA (Hazard Analysis + Risk Assessment) and walk through the SEC parameters.
• What's the difference between a safety goal and a safety requirement?
• Walk through the V-model lifecycle phases of ISO 26262.
• What's the difference between systematic faults and random hardware faults?

BMS-specific scenarios

• Walk through an HARA for a BMS overcharge-protection function. Derive the ASIL.
• What hardware redundancy do you typically need for an ASIL D BMS function?
• How do you decompose an ASIL D safety goal into ASIL B + ASIL B sub-functions?
• Walk through the safety-validation strategy for a new BMS firmware release.

ADAS + autonomy

• How does ISO 21448 (SOTIF) complement ISO 26262 for ADAS functions?
• Walk through the safety-element-out-of-context (SEooC) workflow for a perception module from Mobileye.
• What's the difference between fail-safe and fail-operational design?

Process + documentation

• Walk me through the safety-case argument structure (GSN).
• What's an Item Definition and why does it matter at the start of the lifecycle?
• How does FMEDA relate to FMEA in the functional-safety context?
• Walk through PMHF + SPFM + LFM metrics + the typical ASIL D targets.

Behavioural questions

• Tell me about a time you found a safety issue late in development. How did you handle it?
• How would you push back on a product manager who wants to ship without a safety case?
• Describe a deviation you proposed from a safety requirement and how you got it accepted.
• What's the most common ISO 26262 mistake you've seen in industry?

Where to go from here

Functional-safety interviews reward both standards-fluency and pragmatic experience. Prepare two specific war stories from your past — a successful ASIL decomposition and a recovered late-stage safety finding. Pair with the metric vocabulary (SPFM, LFM, PMHF, FIT) and the senior-band offers convert.

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