While everyone is looking forward for an era of self-driven Smart-cars, the recent verdict of a jury against Toyota holding it responsible for a crash in which a passenger was killed and the driver injured due to faulty firmware in their car raises some serious questions about software bugs causing fatal accidents.

Recently, Google revealed using customized version of Ubuntu Linux for their Smart cars. And after this verdict the big question which needs to be answered is - isn't like any other software platform the embedded smart-brain of these future cars suspectable to hardware/software defects and also vulnerable to already demonstrated car hacking/hijacking?