10 million lines of code in Ford's new GT

Steve McQueen, the actor and sometime racing driver, was a fan of the Ford GT. His iconic sky-blue and orange 1968 Ford GT40 sold in 2012 for $11 million dollars. He was also part of the great "petrol head" tradition of car tuning; during his time in the US Marines Corps, he is reputed to have wrecked a tank trying to "soup up" the engine by re-boring the cylinders. What would he make of Ford's new GT?

Ford has been releasing details of a 50th anniversary GT edition. While the new incarnation shares the original’s stunning lines and overall appearance, it could not be more modern below the surface. The car has 25 microprocessors connected to 50 sensors, running 10 million lines of code and processing 300Mb of data per second.

Earlier this year, John Deere, the tractor manufacturer, highlighted the intellectual property implications of on-board code, bringing a US claim on the basis that owners who tinkered with such code unlawfully circumvented digital rights management (DRM). The owners may be avoiding authorised channels for diagnosis and repair or – like McQueen – changing the performance of their vehicles. This has been reported as bringing into doubt whether consumers “own” their cars at all. It certainly highlights that the distinction between hardware ownership and software licensing, so familiar in computing, may increasingly apply to modern vehicles.

The US Copyright Office has now recommended an express exception to allow such activities:

“Computer programs that are contained in and control the functioning of a motorized land vehicle such as a personal automobile, commercial motor vehicle or mechanized agricultural vehicle, except for computer programs primarily designed for the control of telematics or entertainment systems for such vehicle, when circumvention is a necessary step undertaken by the authorized owner of the vehicle to allow the diagnosis, repair or lawful modification of a vehicle function; and where such circumvention does not constitute a violation of applicable law.”

This would be an issue under the laws of many countries and will be an important issue to watch. The Ford GT, though an extreme example, reflects a general trend of vehicles - from tractors to supercars - becoming computers on wheels. The importance of code will increase with the spread of more and more aspects of self-driving technology, such as self-parking, automatic breaking, lane control and GPS-triggered gear changes.

Wragge Lawrence Graham's Tech Team has been following the rise of self-driving cars closely for years and is a partner in UK Autodrive, a consortium aiming to establish the UK as a global hub for the development of driverless cars. Please get in touch if you have a question.