"There's a huge potential. You may not have tested, as a car manufacturer, all the potential scenarios of how these applications work together," Koslowski said.

Automotive-related customers of Coverity include Denso, which builds automotive parts such as dashboard control systems, and Xanavi, which builds telematics offerings such as navigation systems.

Coverity also has developed plug-in support for Prevent to function inside the Eclipse and Rational Software Architect IDEs. Another improvement in Prevent 2.3 is better support for C++ virtual function calls. With virtual function calls, calls are selected to run at run time. Version 2.3 finds more bugs in these instances, Chou said.

Version 2.3 reduces the number of false positives in error reporting and adds Mac OS X as a supported platform, the company said.

Shipping by the end of the year, Prevent 2.3 is sold on an annual subscription basis, with costs determined by the number of lines of code being tested. A subscription for a 1 million-line program costs US$80,000.