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Automotive industry compartment is undertaking a massive technology revolution. ADAS systems and infotainment promise to change the way that customers mean travel and transportation radically, through several use cases. The key enabling technologies for this trend are Ethernet and its newly standardized physical layer, IEEE 802.3bw 100BASE-T1 (a.k.a. BroadR-Reach). From an architectural point of view, the evolution of the applications that rely on Automotive Ethernet resembles in many ways the evolution that the IT has had in the last decades. In the IT world, increased throughput and computational power to the end-user enabled technologies like multimedia streaming; scalability and availability requirements, together with the increased complexity of IT infrastructure, led to the “Anything as a Service” paradigm and Software Defined Networks.

Functional safety requirements and solutions are more expensive when it comes to lower cost machines with less power but same functionalities with respect to big machines. The paper will show a real Electronic Control Unit (ECU) design of a machine controller, controlling both engine working point, transmission, and other utilities like PTO, 4WD, brakes and Differential Lock; the ECU was designed in accordance to ISO 25119 regulation, to meet AgPL = C or even D for some functionalities. The unit is a fully redundant electronic control unit with two CAN networks and some special safe state oriented mechanism, that allow the Performance Level C with less software analysis requirements compared with traditional solutions. All safety critical sensors are redounded and singularly diagnosable, all command effects are directly observable and most of commands are directly diagnosable.

Alongside with the increasing vehicle complexity, the functionalities related to the safety, diagnosis and maintainability have become critical. The operators of special machines such as agricultural, mining, construction vehicles might be overwhelmed by this increased complexity and, as a result, operations for the recovery or maintenance of their vehicles become difficult. The Augmented Reality (AR) seems to be a very promising technology both if applied to traditional smart-phones or to the upcoming glasses, that has been just presented to the market by several manufacturers. This paper reviews some use cases of applications created in Institute for Agricultural and Earthmoving Machines (IMAMOTER) of the National research Council of Italy (CNR) engineers laboratories, which propose a novel approach for assisted maintenance, recovery or training.