An apparatus to implement functional safety control logic (FSCL) in an autonomous driving system comprises a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) comprising logic elements to be partitioned into a first section to implement one or more safety cores and a second section to implement one or more non-safety cores, a memory to couple to the safety core or to the non-safety core, and a trusted execution environment (TEE) to couple to a remote administrator via a network and to apply a configuration received from the remote administrator to the FPGA. The safety core is to function as an active agent for FSCL during operation, and the non-safety core is to function as a failover agent during operation, and wherein the non-safety core is to perform a liveliness check on the safety core to monitor for a failover and to take over as the active agent in the event of a failover.