I’ve gotten 2 products UL certified, and I don’t think it’d be very useful for self-driving cars.
The process seemed to be mainly reactive: only things that had caused frequent problems in the past were part of the standard.
For instance, plug-in devices must have fuses. The standard gives no guidance about the right size of fuses, but a reasonable engineer would of course pick a good size. The standard’s main effect is to avoid cutting safety features to save cost.
We shipped a mobile office robot. We sweated the details of it not running into people or crashing, but the UL cert only verified that we had fuses and flame-retardant plastics and the like.
