Bodo Seifert, Principal Automotive Functional Safety Engineer and Practice Lead at TÜV Rheinland, joins Erik Reynolds to share what certification bodies actually see when companies come in for assessment.

They cover the organizational and technical red flags that assessors look for, and why good engineering practice and a formal safety case are not the same thing. Bodo draws on experience across automotive, robotics, and autonomous trucking to explain what separates companies that certify successfully from those that do not.

The conversation also gets into the shift from deterministic functional safety to AI-enabled systems. Bodo explains what ISO/TR 5469 and ISO/IEC TS 22440 mean for teams building physical AI, and why transparency and explainability remain the hardest requirements for machine learning developers to accept. They also discuss why strategic collaborations like the one between Reynolds & Moore and TÜV Rheinland matter for companies navigating certification for the first time.

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