Part of the problem might be poaching high title people from embedded tech companies while not doing anything for developer compensation.
I’d probably add that the pay scale for software vs. electrical/mechanical people probably wasn’t notably different in the 90s or so. And California rates didn’t compensate for CoL in general. Very different.
New car is basically a computer on a simple chassis with an equally simple drive train. Software and battery tech is everything.
OTOH, ABS and ESP systems can achieve similar or even better results with less complexity because motor torque control is inherently low-latency, which can also complement brake deployment (hydraulics is not as well behaved as e-motor).
You do get rid of emissions control and tiny little sensors / flap actuators sprinkled all around the engine bay, so yeah, probably overall still a simplification win, but I doubt you can get very far without "massive amounts of [Mechatronics] engineering".
Both Google and Apple have car software, and who knows if Apple actually developed a full stack of the way Tesla did. But anyone can download and play with android automotive. It's unclear what getting one of the android automotive developers would do for you.
Whoever convinced the people writing requirements documents for car user interfaces that they needed to use Unreal Engine to show you what your own car looks like and spin it around in. 3-D deserves some kind of salesmanship Nobel prize. That is the most pervasive useless thing I've seen in a long time.
And so did traditional manufacturers, they just had the benefit of being able to phase it in if they so chose. Or they could have done a hard cutover, either way, the failure is on them for ignoring the benefits of the Software Defined Vehicle discussed in the article.
> It's unclear what getting one of the android automotive developers would do for you.
Do they do vehicle control systems or just infotainment?
> they needed to use Unreal Engine to show you what your own car looks like and spin it around in. 3-D deserves some kind of salesmanship Nobel prize.
I mean that's exactly the kind of thing that makes Tesla fanboys rave endlessly about their car. It just needs to be decoupled from the actual software system, like any UI.
All that stuff adds up. As Volkswagen found out.
Green Hills supports running android in a VM so you can do all of the safety critical things like traction control, and ABS in a secure environment.
Now I read that Stellantis is behind on the software game and I wonder if there is a relation. Seriously, I'm all for cost-effective cars but reading the article I do not get the feeling that so-called SDV are in the interest of me, the consumer.
Also, since I've worked on military systems a lot, I suppose a military grade firewall is just iptables for which someone has written a shitty gui (that might as well just be a webshell) and packaged it into a green rugged box.
Consider this. Almost every car on the road today has an unsecured bus going back to like the 1980s. However you need to actually access the car to do something malicious so the threat vector is zero; since if you have access to the car you can also just cut brakes or put in a pipe bomb.
The only reason why this paradigm changes in the EV era is because the insistence on having EVs phone home. Now you can concievably hack all EVs of this model at once and that is now realistic and even attractive to do. But again not a necessity for running a car. Just something that modern software focused companies want to see that leads to a host of expensive security issues that didn’t exist before. The car could be airgapped with the dealer network used to flash software updates like they do with most other cars before EV era.
Sure someone in that situation could also "just cut brakes or put in a pipe bomb" but car theft is a lot more common than assassination, at least where I live.
See [1] from 2023, where popping the headlight gives access to the bus. Lack of internal security then gives a way to steal the car.
The threat just isn't the same as the one you are modeling.
Security will come eventually, if only to prevent bad publicity.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/04/crook...
ETA: Just as the sibling says...
"military grade" is often used as a marketing term used for things that pretend to be built to be extra strong.
In this case it is a stupid term to use to describe a firewall cause a firewall either works or it does not.
Data streams are converted into a sequence of objects that are required to have and satisfy certain formally verifiable properties as a pre-condition of forwarding. Any data or objects that cannot satisfy formal analysis requirements are dropped. Forwarding policies are only applied to objects that meet the prerequisite of being rigorously analyzable.
This behavior is bidirectional. It applies equally to data egress to mitigate internal threats and accidental data leakage. The internal mechanics can be pretty complicated and they necessarily operate on a store-and-forward basis. The data objects may be “laundered” by the firewall, what you send may not be exactly what the other side receives.
To make this work, the wire protocol, data representation, etc must be designed specifically to allow this kind of rigorous analysis and work well within these constraints. It usually won’t work on a random web stream and the data representation often sacrifices efficiency of storage for efficiency of verification and analysis at runtime.
In reality, virtually no one uses this type of tech outside of defense and intelligence because it won’t let almost any of the standard web stack slop through.
I don’t know what constitutes a “military grade firewall” but presumably something that stops that. Or at least tries to.
No clue about firewalls though.
Some unexpected Kierkegaard in there (I only recently learned Dune was referencing it).
Part of me thinks the reason they are doing an integrated system is a combination of economics and convenience for 3 letter agencies to remotely assassinate ppl.
Basically sitting inside a Windows that can kill you.
They all lost their minds putting stakes on software makers. I intentionally avoid the word engineering, engineering is far far away what is built up by the software making industry that is now tasked with being the babckbone of vechicles you put your and your family's life into. The cultures are incompatible.
(disregard mission critical software, their engineers are not proud members of the 'do not finalize, fix it later' bunch, not at all, they are nowhere here)
Software for steering or braking systems is of high quality. It's not the same team that does the infotainment.
It states that consumer reports, (a for profit company providing independent reviews, and not a regulatory body) said the Model 3 stopping distance was not good. Allegedly due to a “bad ABS calibration”. Tesla released an OTA SW update.
Why wasn’t the bad calibration and degraded performance caught by regulators testing automobile safety standards?
The article also posits that this ability to make OTA updates expands the (IMO very very bad) SWE perspective that “it’s OK to ship unfinished and buggy products” into safety critical systems.
It sounds like their ABS system wasn't designed as carefully as conventional systems if there was such poor braking performance. Reading around, it might have been related to the emergency brake assist functionality not being calibrated properly.
Another consequence is that ISO-26262 and most other standards are completely, 100% norm-based in the US. They're used because the industry expects them, not because there's a legal requirement. You can deviate all you want and the only consequence is that regulators might take a closer look at your paperwork in the event of issues because they look unusual.
I disable the "land assist" every time (which often tries to steer me into wildlife or other cars and was clearly not built for use on a single track country roads with hedges and random verges), but this was the first time in 3 years that the "front assist" caused problems.
If that's "high quality", I dread to think what low quality would be.
I'm one of them. Yet I still haven't had a situation where "lane assist" or "front assist" has actually been a good thing.
I am now of the opinion that a car should never under any circumstance drive for you. If a car has cruise control it should cruise control you into a wall. That I can at least anticipate.
The decision to do an emergency break is the same problem fully self-driving cars need. You need to interpret sensory input and have a model of the environment.
Ironically some genius made these systems mandatory despite them being a safety concern. Granted, they tend to work if someone really falls asleep behind the wheel.
On one of our cars, it is fine. On the other, it’s so bad they should have to buyback the last N years of vehicles. I hear the same high-variance story from friends.
The standards for this stuff are completely inadequate.
That is a piece of paper.
> Software for steering or braking systems is of high quality.
There's literally no way for me to know that before I trust my life with it.
I do not. A more charitable way to phrase that is "We are all expected to." And yes, well spotted, this problem extends well beyond vehicles. Or are you suggesting that this is somehow indicative that there are no problems? How would we all know if there _was_ an error in a device?
> those that conform to “piece of paper” standards, such as ISO 15708
That standard deals with non destructive testing and has no material that is related to the practice of medicine or the use of medical imaging scanners. It's not even the right piece of paper.
Is this then logic that gets airlines to buy from The Boeing "Are door plugs supposed to stay in?" Company?
In the fully autonomous future the car I want to own and drive will still be my 6MT 911! :-)
If I want to be driven, I’ll just book a waymo.
So move to one of the 2 or 3 cities in the US that have Waymo?
We aren’t there yet.
Also, you can just buy older cars, that works too.
BTW, I thought about buying a Lada Niva, because I love the looks, but I heard it is not that reliable as you would assume, and they are pretty pricey for a car that is basically the same for forty years…
Anywhere I can read more about this? Sounds terrible.
As I understand it, yes the system worked as designed, but the design still managed to kill several hundred people.
I'm not qualified to evaluate the design of the system itself. Was it inherently flawed or would everything have been fine if the optional backup sensor had been mandatory, making this another example of corporate greed causing tragedy?
Either way, I don't think blaming the pilots is fair.
Definitely not trying to be Boeing friendly fwiw.
So, is it really sane to put similar features in cars, where you get your driving licence at 16/18, and then that's it?
This also goes for the huge screens on the console. A pilot has been trained for each commercial aircraft model they fly to navigate their way around the numerous controls. But putting a tablet in front of an untrained driver? It sells well because it makes you feel as a pilot. But at the same time, it is a huge distraction and there is zero training to cope with it.
Is this how we get the Butlerian Jihad? Because part of me sure does want to learn how to identify cars built like this and learn ways to disable them when I see them parked somewhere around town, before one of them fails to recognize me on my bicycle as something that should be avoided.
Give me a car that is perfectly 100% autonomous, or give me a car with three gauges and basic controls only. Everything else is an uncanny valley: all the downsides of complex tech without being useful enough to justify it.
Until then I like my Nissan Leaf: physical controls, phone just docks with infotainment screen, and reliable.
You can an intuition pretty quickly for what it does and what it doesn't, and in certain situations it really takes a lot of attention off your plate (stop-and-go traffic, and long distances on the highway).
Edit: maybe my information was old - some sources say it costs nothing
USB-C is so powerful, it can do everything Bluetooth does while charging, but for some reason that's just not an option in a lot of cars? Make it make sense.
This is with USB, too.
I want the car to start and CarPlay to be operational; we have no time to be wasting on whatever formalities software wants to have.
Maybe someday wireless CarPlay could start syncing with the system before you even get to the car, so it's already loaded when you sit down and start.
Also, during short stops, the screens go black but the connection is kept up, so when you re-start, there is no delay.
Whereas I really did take wired CarPlay into consideration when buying our minivan, there are only so many options that I may have had to compromise.
It has a phone holder where other trim levels would place the screen, and USB power around there.
Other than that, the car is mostly Bluetooth a speaker.
They actually have an app that allows you to tune the FM radio, otherwise I don't think you can listen to radio broadcasts.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dacia.dngo
I just mean I'd totally buy a much higher end car that is like this, I don't need a screen with all the nonsense on it.
Give me a car with no computer, but a phone stand and charger built in!
Oh oh, we could even use a standard like monitor stands.
It does cost time/money to integrate, like any feature
I was annoyed enough that our used/new-to-us 2020 vehicle only supported wired that I bought a wired-to-wireless adapter and brought it with me on test drives to ensure that whatever I bought would work well in wireless mode [or else I was buying a different car].
I installed a wireless charger under one of the cubbies that was well sized to hold my phone on long drives. No need to faff around with cables.
Yes, for the main reason that I have a Starlink Mini on my roof rack.
My phone can connect to the vehicle via wifi, or it can connect to the internet over Starlink via wifi, but not both simultaneously. With wired CarPlay, that problem is solved.
You can't, it's required for eCall which is a mandatory feature in Europe.
Unfortunately, it's fraught with issues, especially for the very first eCall modules where the hardware supported only 3G (HSPA)... which is being phased out across Europe together with GPRS (1G)/EDGE (2G), leaving these cars without a working eCall system - and no upgraded hardware modules in many cases.
Unlikely to happen, but possible (not 100% safe, but good enough).
But remote controlling the car is something different.
That’s…terrible
Hopefully those same people know what ANPR is and how does it affect them.
And “modern” is going back over a decade. So most cars on the road.
Other than having some vested interest in denying people's right to choose between positive and negative aspects of progress, or having a Stockholm syndrome towards those who have such interest, I got no plausible explanations to this psychological phenomenon
You seem to be wasting your precious “armchair psychologist skills” here on hn.
And of course it's a tracker. It reports my location to a third party. There is no other definition for it. That it purportedly only does this during an "emergency" is not something I can verify nor trust.
Yes: it reports your location to a third party. When you have an accident. So you can get help.
And of course it can be verified. At the end of the day it’s a sim card in a passive mode. Maybe you don’t know how to verify it. There are millions of them driving around. I’m sure someone more qualified than you would have already reported if they were tracking in real-time. The system is nearly a decade old.
Can you explain why these protections are not sufficient for privacy?
> 112 eCall is not a black box. It does not record constantly the position of the vehicle, it records only a few data to determine the position and direction of the vehicle just before the crash and these data are only transmitted to emergency call centers if there is a serious crash.
> eCall cannot be used to monitor motorist's moves. The SIM-card used to transmit the eCall data is dormant, i.e. it is only activated in case the vehicle has a serious accident (e.g. the airbag is activated).
That statement is factually inconsistent. Either 112 eCall incorporates a time travel device or it must constantly record the position and direction of the vehicle and other data. In theory, that data is then deleted, but you have no way to verify that it is - and it would only require a trivial, unnoticeable software update to modify this.
Thankfully, we're safe. Car software is notoriously high quality and rarely hacked. All governments are fully trustworthy, especially around espionage and privacy, and have a perfect track record of never lying to the public.
Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked; "hackers cannot take control of it", from ec.europa.eu. They built an unhackable device. I am not sure what you could be worried about. If the government tells you something cannot be hacked, then it cannot be hacked. Furthermore, none of the EU member states have been found using other infrastructure to violate privacy laws.
It's not. It just stores the last speed/wheel position/brake state data that it receives when the "collision imminent" condition activates. In some cars this can be literally the same signal that deploys the airbags.
> Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked
Pretty much. It's just a normal LTE radio, that is normally inactive. It technically is hackable, but I'm not aware of any hacks of baseband firmware of this severity.
And come on. Car manufacturers, which are notorious producers of insecure software, are legally mandated to make an inexpensive device which includes an LTE radio and a connection to the vehicle buses, and you think that is... unhackable? I can't tell if you're trolling me, but your average blackhat only needs 1 of (shitty car OEM software/LTE radio/vehicle bus connected device) to break into a system. This system is a trifecta of hackable crap. To call that, of all devices, "unhackable" is priceless.
The original standard version defined only one location datapoint, the more recent version defines two additional _optional_ points ("recentVehicleLocationN1", "recentVehicleLocationN2"). It also allows specifying the number of passengers.
The mandatory datapoints include the location and direction of the vehicle, but they can be acquired as needed.
> I can't tell if you're trolling me, but your average blackhat only needs 1 of (shitty car OEM software/LTE radio/vehicle bus connected device) to break into a system.
I'm not aware of black hats hacking into a modem that is passively tracking the mobile networks. It's theoretically possible, but I'm not aware of such feats.
Oh, and every year there's "only three days left to invest!"
Such positioning could be what the intended customer base react well to.
For example, mechanical window winders would need a whole extra disengagement or locking mechanism for child proofing.
I’d much rather they included a $200 system, since ~ 100% of their customers will want to be able to have speakers in the doors and a mic in the dash (at the very least).
I never had a manual window winder fail to work, but electric window buttons breaking or the motor getting stuck (e.g. in icy conditions) has happened at some point in every car I've owned.
The convenience factor hugely outweighs the rare failures for me, but I could see why someone buying a Wrangler for its intended purpose might actually prefer the manual option.
How old are you? Back in the 70s-80s these manual ones would break all the damned time. Of course US cars from that age we're commonly crap.
However I do live in the UK so they were European/UK cars - Vauxhall, Volvo, Citroen, Renault.
I have. It jammed. When I tried to release it the glass fell out (into the door).
Electric winders tend to experience motor failure leaving you with a stuck window. They don't stress the mechanism that much.
Manual winders, you would generally experience mechanical failure. If you were lucky, you broke the handle. If you were unlucky, you broke the gears and had the pleasure of watching your window fall into the door.
* Bed size is just five feet
* Towing capacity is just 1000 lbs
* Not AWD
None of these can be retrofitted after the sale.
Where I live, it'd struggle to be called a "truck" with these limitations.
Not everyone wants to spend 40-80k on a bloated luxury-truck-ized F150 when they only need to carry something oversized maybe once a year.
I like the "starts out cheap, then upgrade it later" premise of Slate, and I like that it's electric, but it'll only really be a toy with the limitations I specified.
But if you have even just those once-a-year "need a truck bed" needs the gap between "SUV with fold down seats" and "actual truck" is pretty substantial.
I think the set of truck buyers with either:
* just occasional needs for a bed, without a need to put sheet goods flat or such (if you have that just get a minivan these days ;) )
* a fashion-driven desire compared to a van or SUV vs a practical-driven one
is substantial compared to the set of "needs a professional-grade truck" buyers.
The set of professional-grade buyers hasn't changed much in thirty or forty years, but the former two sets have exploded.
Though yes, I could see it being less important if that's not an issue in your area.
I don’t think the Japanese automakers have squandered anything, yet.
A comparable truck gets 18mpg mixed. At $3/gallon, that’s $0.16 per mile. So, the price premium pays back after 100K miles. That’s comparable to milage driven during a long car loan.
I ignored oil changes, tax breaks on used cars, and picked the form factor where EVs are the least economical.
It’s still basically break-even.
We make a ~180 mile trip roughly once / month and could charge on site as we always stay ~2 nights, though probably slow 120V / 15A charge (aka Level 1). My current car would probably be pushing it, range-wise, but I definitely think for the vast majority of our usage, we could be using only EVs if we got one with a 300+ mile range (based on 100% battery usage.) From what I've read some EVs (like mine) struggle a bit below 15% and start to run in "limp" mode.
Its reputation is that of a brand for people who really like cars, who can appreciate the care put into proper engineering and a wonderful manual transmission; or people with an eye for a "conservative" kind of quality. It's basically the new Volvo, but sportier.
https://www.mazda.com/content/dam/mazda/corporate/mazda-com/...
Their expectation is that their sales will be stagnant at best, but probably decline for the foreseeable future.
Mazda maintained their relevance and independence by operating their own center of design, engineering, and manufacturing excellence in Hiroshima, and exporting the results to the rest of the world, since at least the 1960s. As I mentioned, that thread is now broken as far as EVs go, with the Changan JV making EVs for Mazda. China is now producing excellent EVs that surpass the capabilities of ICE cars at a fraction of the cost/price, thanks to continuous improvements in LFP battery technology. China also dominates solar, which (together with the batteries) solves the grid stress issue for large EV deployments in most regions of the world. Together these exports are likely to disrupt Japanese, US, and European ICE exports and energy markets throughout the world, no matter what tariffs the US chooses to enact.
Mazda and the rest of Japanese companies slept on it, led by Toyota's trust in the hydrogen-powered future that didn't materialize, even while Panasonic had the best batteries in the world. The time to invest in these platforms and technologies was 15 years ago - now they will have a far harder time financing this and finding technology development partners. Sure, they can survive - not thrive - on existing ICE exports for a while, but they will face a shrinking market and stronger headwinds - and are likely to lose their independence, which is what allowed them to design great cars. Don't believe me? Look into what's going on with Nissan (which squandered an even bigger lead - the world's first mass-produced EV).
This has been a fantastic decision, as a large number of EV manufacturers have gone bankrupt.
I will never want to listen to the radio. I would love to remove radio as an option. I would love to have no fallback as an option. But no, the car just f-n loves the radio and will not stop trying to force it on me.
Oh yeah, and the radio is buggy and could get stuck if I tune into the wrong station. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60333765.
This car definitely tries too hard to be smarter than it is. There's all sorts of exceptions that keep the doors from auto-locking when I walk away, and I would turn all of them off, but I can't. Walk away too fast? doesn't lock. Open the rear? won't auto lock. Car just doesn't feel like it? doesn't auto-lock.
And god forbid you hit the unlock button when the passenger has already unlocked it. Anxious beeps from the car for several solid seconds. That is not an error condition!
Performance and reliability have been great though. They just need to stop trying to be smart. They're not.
https://www.cx90forum.com/threads/fuse-box-diagram.172/
Something foul and malign is afoot at Mazda these days.
I even adore the scroll wheel and wish it could be in any car I own in future. Yeah it takes slightly longer to do certain actions in CarPlay, but I can do it so much more safely than I could in the Civic I had before. The infotainment boots basically instantly; as you mentioned CarPlay starts itself, and the patronising-but-mandated “don’t use this in motion” warning dismisses itself. In the Civic I would be half way down the road already by the time it booted, blindly prodding at the screen to try to dismiss that warning so I could pause the podcast that started playing itself because I plugged my phone in.
And, while my 2022 car predates the stupid auto-re-enabling ADAS requirement in Europe, the 2024+ models have single button deactivation. I dunno how, cause it’s supposed to require a minimum of two presses legally, but it sure makes me wanna stick with Mazda.
However that makes the upcoming 6E that much more disappointing. They’ve partnered with a Chinese manufacturer, I assume because they don’t have an EV platform of their own ready yet. Looks fantastic from the outside, but the inside is a sea of touch screens with barely a physical control in sight.
So I only use Google maps with Android Auto now, but cannot put the turn by turn display on. Also, who knows what telemetry Mazda is sending home on me without me knowing or wanting them to. Probably selling it to data brokers.
When looking at who is doing it right, I wouldn’t put Mazda on a pedestal. They simply are behind the competition.
As an aside a lot of people like to levy criticism on the infotainment screens which I think is very well deserved, but then people text and drive, watch YouTube videos, and do all sorts of crazy things too.
Instead of levying criticism on these distractions (let’s include billboard too) we should instead focus on just reducing car usage since we won’t stop people from being distracted.
The safest car is the one in your garage.
Instead of levying criticism on these distractions (let’s include billboard too) we should instead focus on just reducing car usage since we won’t stop people from being distracted.
This argument to me reads like one for abstinence from sex. The world is not so binary, we can both criticize distractions and build communities where car use is not a necessity. Not to mention in most jurisdictions some of these distractions are criminalized.
Criminalization of texting and driving and such doesn’t matter unless you enforce, and we don’t enforce. So it’s de facto legal. Who cares about infotainment screens at that point?
As for criminalizing texting, I’ve heard enough people getting caught and getting big fines that it works enough for me to dissuade me from doing it.
If you’re focused on less death, sure we can criticize infotainment screens, but the energy is much better spent in demanding enforcement and in whatever we need to do to reduce car usage. Otherwise you’re kind of wasting your time, unfortunately.
https://pictures.dealer.com/s/surprisefordvtg/0292/10a2adba8...
It's like a window into hell.
https://www.ford.com.au/content/ford/au/en_au/home/owners/te...
(Really. They did. No, you can’t adjust the steering wheel position enough to fix the problem.)
Also at least personally I never change the fan speed but just set the temperature I want.
No one likes ads, no one likes their data being collected. The sooner insurance and car companies understand that, the sooner they get out of the maelstrom of false revenue from ad- and spy-ware programs.
The only data I can find relates to Chinese vehicles which shows some concerns, but that's understandable given they are built by a foreign adversary.
https://www.autopacific.com/autopacific-insights/2024/5/22/y...
What percent of users understand how much data is being collected about them?
The thing is that car manufacturers have been fucking up software in cars since... forever. The second car play and android auto hit the scene, that's all anyone wanted.
There's more benefits than just what's on the surface, too. Even if the car software is perfect, it doesn't have access to the same data your phone does. It won't put your contacts in your navigation, for instance.
Look, can car makers make somewhat decent software? Probably, if they burn enough money. But is it even worth it? I don't think so. People already use their phone hours a day, just let them use that.
Changing lock, light, and anudio (bass/treble/sub/fade) options. Map integration with fuel capacity (they only recently do this for EVs). Checking service intervals, recalls, etc.
If CarPlay had APIs/toolkit to serve those functions, it could 100% replace the UI that the manufacturer delivers (and nobody likes).
Tracking, phoning home (with related privacy issues), etc:
* https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/flaw-in-kia-web-portal-...
* https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/five-...
There's zero chance a car manufacturer is going to nuke some of the most desired features of modern automobiles for some undefined cohort of privacy conscious consumers.
Most younger drivers would even buy Chinese vehicles despite their privacy concerns.
https://www.autopacific.com/autopacific-insights/2024/5/22/y...
It just should be said, that all these features could perfectly be implemented without violating privacy. You just have to use another system not from Apple and that other advertising company.
> support wireless CarPlay and android auto
Removing LTE doesn't cost me real-time traffic updates because (preferred maps app) is running on my phone which already has LTE. Streaming media? The media is being played from my phone or streamed via my phone, which already has LTE. I'm not sure what "remote controls" are in this context? Letting me set the A/C fan to high from Internet (almost certainly via a browser or app running on... wait for it... my phone)?
We've already paid for the LTE modems and app integration on the phone side of things, don't need to pay for it a second time on the car side or have to deal with the vehicle manufacturer's terrible implementations of navigation apps and media streaming services or yet another vendor collecting telemetry about me and reselling it to whoever wants to pay.
If you're gonna build that crap in at least go back to a standard-sized replacable module.
You are complying by installing it, the customers are the ones [easily] removing it [because you were a bro].
Those safety add-ons are there for a reason.
If a car is connected to the internet, it does not automatically mean that it is also collecting car data and sending it somewhere.
It's safer and convenient to have a connected car. I like it that way. When you can open your car app and check the location where it is parked, amount of gas or request ventilation/ac.
I am happy to share my address and phone number etc. but not to be tracked wherever I go or have everything I do on my computer or within my home monitored. These are different things.
what is the killer app of a connected car? businesses might want to watch their fleet but does anyone else care
It requires at least a basic cellular module for eCall in Europe since 2018, so car manufacturers use the already present hardware to provide more services. Maps and updates (live traffic view), internet hotspots for passengers (IIRC, Tesla does that one), entertainment that doesn't rely on a phone, firmware updates, feedback of driving data to insurances (yes, some insurances offer discounts in exchange for proving you "drive safely"), position data for leased/financed cars in case they need to be repo'd, synchronizing stuff like seat and mirror position across a fleet, remote pre-heating, "put packages in my trunk" access for parcel deliveries to thwart porch pirates, uploading data from real-world traffic situations to train AIs (again, Tesla does that one)...
There's quite the laundry list of nifty to nasty things that can be done with a connected car.
* giving me the current fuel and battery levels in the app
* giving me an ETA on when charging is finished
* locating my car
* telling me if the car has been sitting there for a few minutes with ignition off but doors unlocked, giving me the option to lock them remotely
* telling me about open windows, giving me the option to close them remotely
None of them is really crucial, but for a hybrid or EV, getting the ETA for when the charge is finished is pretty useful.
When is this actually useful? In the ~12 years I’ve been driving, I’ve never needed to know the fuel level of a car when I’m not in it. I guess maybe if I’m planning a road trip and need to know if I’m going to have to stop for gas before I leave? But I’ll figure that out when I get in to leave and I’m probably not leaving with <10 minutes of margin.
> locating my car
Again, never once have I not known where my car was. I think my phone keeps track of where I park too already? But I’ve never needed that feature. I guess if it’s stolen and the thieves don’t know how to disable this, it could potentially be useful for insurance/police.
> telling me about open windows, giving me the option to close them remotely
This could be useful. I’ve never left windows open by accident before, but I have left them open on purpose - if there were an automatic notification when this happens, I’d probably just eventually turn it off to reduce the irritation from false positives, and then not be notified if I ever left them open by accident.
> remote door un/locking
I had a Lincoln that had this feature, while I was working as a reverse engineer/pentester. Took me ~45 minutes to be able to send an unlock request to the car, unauthenticated, and have it open the doors, over the internet. Pretty sure that’s never been fixed (at least, it hadn’t been when I got rid of the car - model year 2016, which was identical to the 2013s, and I got rid of it in 2022). Needless to say, not a fan of that kind of “feature.”
I could see charging ETA being useful if multiple people are using the same car and for whatever reason can’t communicate that sort of thing with each other, and don’t have a feel for how long charging takes. (I’ve never owned an EV, but I imagine that you plug it in when you get home, and then it’s ready for you in the morning, so I don’t really know what the use case for knowing the ETA is in that case. Maybe if you’ve been driving around all day and need to make a long drive in the evening? I still assume you’d know how long it’ll take to charge when you plug it in though. And if you're at a fast charger, don’t they have a screen that gives you the ETA when you plug it in? I’ve only used one before, but it did that, and it was accurate to within 30 seconds, so I’m not too sure how useful it would be to have the ETA on your phone in that case either.)
* charging stations have different powers
* charging time depends non-linearly on the remaining change
* ... and it's also temperature dependent (though only a little, with my plug-in hybrid)
I cannot plug in at home, but there's a public charging station around the corner, 3 minutes walk.
So I arrive there, plugin in, and the car gives me an estimation when charge might be finished. The initial estimate is sometimes off by up to 30 minutes (usually less). Sometimes I also forget the estimate, because I'm too busy with other things.
Getting a notification when the charge has finished, and an updated ETA on demand, is a notable QoL improvement.
It feels a bit similar to bluetooth headphones: I never complained about the cable before I switched to bluetooth. But now, I'd find it annoying to go back to cables.
Eventually I expect cars, chargers, calendars, and the electric company will somehow integrate so that you can plug in and the system figures out when to charge your car. that is a complex project though with privacy concerns that are hard to address.
There are several reasons to have internet connectivity in a car. For example, you might want to start your car remotely (e.g. winter time and you want to pre-heat it) or you'd like your onboard navigation maps to update automatically, or you'd like the latest traffic reports (if available in your region), yadda yadda.
While there are a lot of people that love Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, there still remains a sizeable group of people that want to have a navigation solution without using their phone, or to be able to enjoy their car without having a smartphone at all.
Yes, Tesla has one of the best user interfaces in a car, and has set the bar high. But just because they have OTA updates it's now called a "Software Defined Vehicle"?
See Rivian's intro on their ECU design and Zonal architecture: https://youtu.be/6ZBko4TvfJY?t=137&si=-SKL_iFqZFnHE8nQ
This might sound like purely implementation detail, but having the (non-safety-critical) "business logic" of a car as software gives the manufacturer flexibility to late-bind behavior as new use cases / demands inevitably get discovered.
Something can simultaneously be a good idea, buzzword'd by marketing, and/or deviate from the original intentions.
Tier 1 suppliers have enough resources in both know-how and manpower that I have been wondering if they could do a platform car. Provide a basic frame that passes crash, provide a basic engine that passes emissions, provide basic safety, etcetera.
Then invite other parties to upgrade components. Package lots of air between components to simplify compatibility.
I suppose the only way to get this going in the real world is a big military contract, but I am wondering if it wouldn't be smart play for everyone involved. It would be deadly for a bunch of traditional automakers, but they can't do anything preventing it.
Come up with few general hardware modules, enough to replace the head unit, body controllers, ECU, climate control, and ideally driving automation, and software to run them. Everything minus safety modules like the airbag controllers, and then license them under Fair/non-discriminatory terms.
Then, a variety of automakers get access to core functionality and cheaper hardware to run it. That means that the cars themselves can have higher quality software, cheaper hardware (from cutting out companies like Bosch that charge exorbitantly for things like a windshield wiper controller), and thus deliver more value to customers.
Is this not just Android Automotive? A lot of Volvos use it, it’s a lower-level OS type thing that sits below Android Auto or CarPlay.
And past HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32447650
https://openinverter.org/ https://youtube.com/@evbmw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898280
I'd like a car with zero screens, no internet connectivity possible, and maybe one audio input and a radio.
Also I drive a manual, which here in the US seems to be almost unheard of.
As an aside, what's next? You can't buy a chef's knife without wifi?
It's uncommon but some enthusiasts still drive them. My last two vehicles have been manuals. Planning to keep driving them as long as I can. 8)
All of my last 5, including my current vehicle are manuals. Almost impossible to find and a dying breed.
This was something that really hit me when the Internet allowed game developers to ship a game that wasn't done. You got the game, and the first thing you did was download a "patch" that was at least as big as the CD the game came on (several hundred MB). I've got "released" Windows98 games on CD that are essentially unplayable because what was shipped on the CD was unplayable and without the update server on the network sending out those critical fixes, its never gonna work. For game archivists that means finding a fully patched install and then preserving that.
This is a shitty experience that serves manufacturers but not their customers. I don't expect it to get better any time soon but I wish it would.
Vertically integrated companies do this very differently. Tesla pioneered this. The Chinese copied this and at this point you also have companies like Rivian and a few of the legacy manufacturers that are doing the same. Effectively they in house all the software and e.g. Rivian runs the software on a handful of hardware subsystems instead of having hundreds of chips with their own firmware for things like the wind screen wipers, the software that controls the windows, the AC, the keyfob, AI driving features, and so on.
I mention Rivian here because they just did a deal with VW to start doing the same for them.
The issues here are not just technical but cultural. I used to work in Nokia when it was in the (slow) process of figuring out that they were a software company rather than a hardware company. Then Apple and Google came along and they were slow to adapt their internal processes and management. Apple makes firmware that goes on their phone. They provide OTA updates. There's only one supported version of that firmware: the current & latest one. It's the same for all phones they still support with updates. Nokia did the opposite. They forked their software for each product variant (dozens per year). And they did not do OTA upgrades. So most of their phones weren't updated at all (by users), and would typically ship with bugs that had already been fixed on other branches of the software. And it would ship on the schedule of the manufacturing process, regardless of the state of the software. With all the obvious consequences. Nokia got a well deserved reputation of shipping half baked software.
By the time MS bought them out, they had learned and improved a lot but Apple and Google were running circles around them by then and it did not matter anymore.
You see the same with car manufacturers currently. It's all about the buttons and the bling. They have a gazillion of upsells, features, special trims, and what not. And it all adds up to a whole lot of nothing if the software experience isn't great. That's why VW is paying billions to Rivian to fix that for them.
Their cars are too expensive, have too many chips and wires, and their software just isn't good enough. And they don't have ten years to figure this out for themselves. That's what Rivian is supposedly fixing for them.
The only formula I know that works is "hire good people and listen to them". From experience, the only way legacy companies can do this is acquire and/or seriously partner with companies that have established a track record in what you need (even if it is only a couple of years, as long as they are _delivering product_).
As software effectiveness/innovation speed/productivity continue to increasingly crush legacy industries, it is extraordinarily frustrating to see how hard it is to make (seemingly simple!) changes.
p.s.: nice to see you Jilles! :-)
Despite the problem having the hallmarks of a backend issue (many cars with the same software running into the same issue on the same week), corporate is still insisting that it's a hardware issue and trying to sell us on $5k hardware replacements. I love the car for its build quality, but almost kind of wish I'd gotten a Tesla given how bad VW is at software.
I could probably whip him up something nicer if only there was just a Nuc or something in there somewhere.
I would also guess (completely un-informedly) that because the simple (and probably correct) answer is very difficult, a lot of companies are trying to avoid it by doing things that are more complicated but also easier. And because they are more complicated, it is not immediately obvious why they won't work....but they won't. Which is resulting in the repeated failures.
These systems also have to work correctly (100% of the time) in a range of conditions and it needs to not drain the battery while the car isn't being used. They also need to start up quick on relatively low end hardware. The car creates a very hostile environment generally for electronics. There is lots of dirt, muck etc that will literally work its way in everywhere. There is also a bunch of regulations that have to work almost internationally.
Car companies are not software companies. If you are a software developer not in a software company, things are much more difficult as the organisation just isn't geared to deal with software development generally. Combine this with it being a massively complicated product (modern vehicles are complicated) you are setting yourself up for failure.
No. I don't want it. I want Not to have it.
I don't want a touchscreen. I don't want a computer car. And I definitely don't want an internet-connected car.
Apple had a secret test track in Arizona, with buildings made from shipping containers. You can see it on Google Maps under "Chrysler Oval Track".
My current car is a Kia; I love it. But the door locks are software controlled (you can tell from the lag). The issue is I like to lock my doors as soon as I'm in the car.
The software can't cope with this; about 500ms later it unlocks the doors again and won't let me lock until the software has realized that I can now lock the doors again. So there is a 3-4 second gap in which I want to lock the doors but I can't.
This is appalling for safety; I grew up in a dodgy area and all my then cars kept me safe by allowing me to lock as soon as I entered. Now I have to more cautious than ever.
The other issue is that it has collision detection and automatic braking; it works great 99% of the time. But one time it got confused with over head sun and road markings and decided to emergency stop on a school road. I was lucky there was no car behind me.
If two people lock it at the same time, it locks, then unlocks.
The smart lock stuff on it is even worse. I didn’t think it was possible to screw up car door locks so badly, even knowing Tesla’s implementation burns people to death sometimes.
You summed it up. I want the minimum required electronic in my cars and above all no software managing critical features like abs breaking that could be updated on the air, like the Tesla.
Humans aren't perfect by any means, software might be better than us by a few percent at avoiding crash but damn, when I crash i want it to be my own fault.
If tomorrow I run over a kid because my abs had a bug, go prove that in court. And yes it actually happened in France with the speed control, some manufacturer managed to fuck that up and people who had crashed (without killing themselves) have a hard time to dismiss the so called expert calling them basically retards incapable of pressing the break pedal, that they press the clutch pedal instead of the break one...
There are reports of people being stuck in their car for up to an hour, while on call with the police, trying everything, and you're telling me that they are not capable of pressing the break pedal during that entire hour ?
Didn't "confused with over head sun" once almost start a nuclear war?
I used to have a problem where a road made a bend right, but if you continued straight on (crossing the lane coming the other way) there was usually someone's car parked on the space in front of their house, beyond the road.
I was lucky my car only had the "beep at you loudly and flash the display red" collision detection rather than the "slam on the brakes" one because that road triggered a false positive something like half the time.
There's a reason why Apple, Nvidia, Tesla got where they got to.
This is why the Chinese OEMs, Tesla, and Rivian are able to move fast.
These companies have huge wallets, and can surely scoop up a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? It seems like a problem than enough money could solve quickly, but they've been doing horribly at this for decades now.
Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.
Each car has dozens to 100+ ecus, written in different languages, by different teams, different requirements, and different companies. Some are proprietary. Ford can’t just tell Bosch, hey your abs module needs to now integrate with our api, multiplied by 100+ companies. The legacy car makers need to revisit everything, and move most of it in-house.
Car companies realized early on they could outsource component development and production to 3rd parties and they could make them bid each other to further lower the prices.
So their platforms were optimized to be able to swap component vendors very easily (to achieve lowest costs).
Of course the vendors are not 100% interchangeable and building a platform to accommodate everyone has to make sacrifices.Aka target the least common denominator across all vendors.
So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?
And to what extent were the subsidies an advantage? They phased out after 200,000 units and Tesla has sold millions.
Since government wants to encourage transition to sustainable energy, and oil and gas have been subsidized for decades, not to mention the tens of billions in bailouts for legacy auto, putting things in perspective shows that legacy auto should get the brunt of any criticism here, and the relatively smaller subsidies to Tesla are offsetting the larger investment Tesla has made.
The beauty of it is that the money is actually paid to Tesla by the legacy auto makers who have not stepped up or have stepped up only at a scale of virtue signaling, if you look at the sales numbers.
I know, I know, shooting the messenger…
With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.
So they've just chosen death. Fantastic, great to hear.
I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please.
When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000
That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits.
EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now that this would only be one small change that saved an inconsequential amount of money. But each group is incentivized to produce minor changes like this that save small amounts and that those amounts do add to substantial savings and help complete the process of enshittification of the ownership and driving experience for those who choose to buy one of these vehicles.
"We found $X cost savings" is the easiest path the promotion. It's measurable, cleanly attributable, and immediate, while the downsides are not. Maybe perform is bad bc they skimped on memory, or maybe it's because the software team sucks. Maybe it means future updates are hamstrung, but who cares the bonus checks cleared years ago. Besides, you probably got promoted to a bigger / better role by now, and who can remember who decided what when?
Now you get a shitty feature for savings while the people who implemented it can go cry in a corner thinking about their good version.
Spent 7 years at the three pointed star within design and UX - one day, when i’m over all i had to witness and experience i’ll write a book about the downfall of the german automotive industry.
It’s all politics and due to constant battles and changing ownership throughout departments they won’t ever have a solid foundation. And i dare to assume that this goes for most of the automotive industry.
It’s sad to see that a once driving force of innovation is stumbling over its own arrogance and ignorance.
A major factor contributing to this are cost saving measures from the early 2000s where most of them stopped in-house research and development giving most of the work to contractors - a very expensive cost saving measure long term.
We’re down to them using “technology” as a seasoning for consumption like a fancy restaurant - very little long term thinking.
In German cities with automotive industry, you’ll find thousands of these satellite companies.
I hear that kind of statements all the time but if you take like real important car things germans are (still) pretty good: their cars handle really well, powertraian usually works perfectly smooth (or sporty), ergonomics is good to perfect, it will not rust for decades, list goes on ... The real things killing germans I think: cars are expensive and unreliable
For example
Since cars are primarily being bought by sculptural aesthetics of the exterior and above all their brand they continue being bought for those who feel the need of a status symbol.
At the core there is still a lack of a long term strategy and above all stability to build on - not saying it is an easy task.
In the end the customer has to suffer with abysmal usability, reliability and ever changing mental models. And don’t get me started about the touchscreens everywhere situation…
It isn’t just software though - VW moving development and above all production engineering and planning to china since they failed coming up with an efficient solution in Wolfsburg is basically saying it all. [1]
Dire times ahead and i hope for the best.
This is not sexy. This is important.
Needs different mindsets than the software folks grew up along in the past decades. Yes! Yes! There are much much more sexy topics to focus on for an agile software maker, that yields better looking results seemingly instantly. Compared to the boring finalization and coordination - oh, you devil bastard, coordination - heavy activities.
Don't take me seriously, speculating heavily.
I think in a lot of cases that would be Bosch, which is huge.
Worse this really grew into a culture of entitlement where only a ready to use product is acceptable. There is no R&D anymore, there are people looking to buy solutions that don't exist for car makers.
You ask: Why BMW doesn't just buy the ECU manufacturer?
Well... the company that was selling the ECU to BMW, is BIGGER than BMW. Even if BMW sold 100% of its assets and stock, it wouldn't have enough money to buy the ECU manufacturer.
The iPhone on wheels paradigm shift has been stated like a decade ago and as usually the incumbents just can’t cross it while at the same time the new companies are successfully exploiting it.
Not surprisingly it coincides with EV transition - both are enabled by cheap electronics and EV voids incumbents’ ICE tech moat.
Most of our customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money... They tend to either want either a set of features checked off (only for existence, not quality), or something along the lines of get as close to a rivian with thirty cents per unit more than we paid last year.
When you target a certain feature set it can make sense to use one big central processor, for lower end things it's more sensible to use limited smart sensors (from multiple vendors, for absolute cost minimums).
And it's generally not cost effective to move an old high trim platform down range due to changes in hardware and regulations.
So as you go up in features on some model "the BigTruk" you might be going through variations of one sw platform, or jumping between platforms.
Some have several platforms for high and low cost based on centralised vs distributed, so for example an s class will not have much software or hardware shared with an a class.
There's a lot of very expensive development tools (e.g. dSpace simulators) that rely on this model of automotive development.
And to support the differences high trim will have different sensors and differently distributed compute.
This means that the infotainment system will be running in different places on different cars.
On top of this comes some functionality to control windshield wipers, lighting, AC, seat heating, etc. Stuff which is probably not top-tier safety critical, but still important. I would expect that stuff to run on one, maybe two processors.
Then comes the infotainment system, running on its own processor.
Sensors are supplying data to all processors through some kind of modernized CAN bus and some sort of publisher/subscriber protocol. Maybe some safety critical sensors have dedicated wiring to the relevant processor.
A lot of variations on this seems possible with the same SW platform, tuned and parameterized properly. The real-time safety critical stuff would need care, but is doable.
Am I completely off the mark? Can you give some examples of where I am going wrong?
I guess I'm in the minority, then, but as a data point: I own a VW ID.4 and I'd pay significantly more to get software that isn't such a burning dumpster tire fire.
And no, the excuses provided in this thread don't cut it.
To be clear: it doesn't even annoy me anymore that the infotainment is slow and crappy, I've gotten used to it and I just never use it. But I when I want to close both windows and I press two buttons simultaneously, I would like both windows to go up, not one up and one down, as it sometimes happens.
The crappiness of the software in this car is mind-boggling and it cannot be excused: most of it is incompetent and sloppy programming.
I would pay more for a car where the software department is somewhat competent and knows what they're doing.
I have a Tesla Model Y and I was thinking of downsizing to an ID.4 and you just scared the shit out of me.
I'm not blaming you, I initially thought a VW ID.4 was a cool option. It just wasn't clear to the marketplace how bad the software was, and it's easy to assume "it's fine, I don't need fancy stuff" until you live with it and see how fundamentally bad the software is. How is the market to know? If it takes a couple years to figure it out, it makes sense for the hardware company managers to just make the hardware specs at the competitive price, and software is ... just whatever needed to get it out the door.
I worked for a few years at a sub-division of Samsung, and I've thought for a while about why "hardware" companies can be so bad at "software" ... in many cases, it's just that the leadership chain doesn't know what good software is and who is good at it. Managers don't really know what a good programmer is or does. Division heads don't know what managers are good at managing software teams and projects. And so on.
So at some point 2 years after the car is released, the CTO drives it and realizes that the software systems are fundamentally crap and can't be fixed, and it was not close or in-progress or anything, but he should have realized it 3+ years ago if he had good software sense, long before the car was released. And that's what happened with the VW ID.4
Suddenly everything was fast. No slow lags anymore. System is ready even before I start the engine. Navigation now zooms smoothly. Voice recognition is finally working 95% of the time and only tripping up on hard words.
I don't know how many different software versions are out there but apparently they are working on system speed without changing the hardware. Maybe I got an early access version and they are waiting for data before they push it to all vehicles.
A) If there is stored code for a specific universal machine in question and the storage is re-writeable, and
B) there is a control mechanism in place to integrity check the stored code before execution, and
C) the integrity check mechanism relies on a cryptographic secret, or any mechanism which prevents the owner from changing the code but permits the OEM to, then
D) the specific universal machine's key store MUST permit full wiping of all keys in a way where no keys are stored anywhere (no permanent manufacturer keys), and the key store MUST permit the owner to store his own root keys; additionally, in the interest of national security and the average citizen's digital sovereignty,
E) replacement software/firmware for universal machines should be encouraged rather than stifled, so additionally there must also be technical specifications detailing enough of the hardware's architecture and the overall design of the part or product (the logic in making design decisions to accomplish product functions), to permit a skilled owner to write his own firmware and achieve similar functionality as shipped.
Basically, think Louis Rossmann gets together with Richard Stallman, and they form a beautiful baby governmental regulatory body to come up with "Apple Laws" (sic: Lemon Laws) to answer and address the Apple Question.
Abandoned proprietary code on abandoned proprietary hardware is a national security concern much greater than the minute problems caused by the occasional tinkering script kiddie. It will mean the end of the easy money of putting everyone on subscription, and would encourage more evergreen platform/API design to reduce developer-driven code churn. If companies want to make cheap proprietary throw away product which will house malware in a decade when the company has long abandoned patching holes in it, and design it so no owner has a practical chance or hope of fixing the vulnerability, then companies can suffer a price-doubling tax that'll go to pay for their open source competitors to more easily compete!
Sorry, not sorry. Get expertise producing material things people need, if what I outlined above would mean the high paid software gravy train ends lol.
Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?
You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not.
It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.
Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well.
While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
Unless the top of the company comes in and starts chopping every head that gets in the way of the new paradigm then it just ends up in locked up meetings for years of people that don't want to change.
Electronics integration isn't the problem, the people currently there are.
The time to go and implement such a change probably pales in comparison to the amount of time spent in meetings getting people to agree to make the change.
https://www.hwe.design/product-development-process/developme...
For components that have many components or complex requirements, or are part of more complicated systems, this takes longer. Cars have a design cycle that's many years long - 5-6 years would be a decent ballpark. That's due to the complexity of the product, complexity of the supply chains and tooling, requirements, and scale.
It's because these companies are more about vendor management and regulatory compliance than building things. It's a totally different mindset.
I'm not so familiar with Asia, but I get the impression that the entirety of Indian and most of Chinese drivers feel the need to lean on the horn with gay abandon (fnarr).
In Britain the horn is generally reserved for "fuck that was close: I think you are a bit of a tosser" or "you are driving a German car and seem to have have no indicators".
Were car horns disabled (broken deliberately) in Chongqing?
China internally is much more of a free market now, so I’m not sure how they could just disable horns anymore, although you still can’t get away with driving an outside register vehicle inside a city for very long without getting a crackdown by the police (meaning, they can enforce inspection requirements fairly easily).
I’m not sure if it was really Chongqing or some other obscure city like Dalian, I’m going by hearsay 20+ years ago. More recently, Shanghai banned honking in most circumstances in 2007 (inside its outer ring), but it’s enforced with just fines.
Clear rules, and consistent enforcement works.
Noticed something similar with littering, right now they have to employ an army of old folks to pick up cigarette butts. But I suspect once people come to expect clean surroundings that enforcement of littering fines can become a thing and the culture around respecting public spaces will slowly change. We even caught a young kid full on lecturing their grandparent for spitting on the street.
I don’t think horns were used much in Beijing even on my first trip in 1999, although I do remember the Japanese guy driving us from the airport in a Jeep using it (and also seeing lots of city buses out at night without headlights on, you don’t see that anymore).
I just got back from Beijing a couple of weeks ago and honestly…the traffic is still very horrible but fairly orderly. Just too many cars and not enough roads (but it’s always been like that).
Have a friend from Shanghai here in Germany that had a really hard time getting a drivers license due to her old driving habits. Aggressively cutting in front of people and horning isn't looked upon too highly here.
They also banned lane changing over solid lines with the same camera system IIRC
India is getting a lot stricter about driving rules, and I hven't been there for a few years. I would expect the above to change as people realize that the horn doesn't really work for that purpose anyway. But change is always slow.
Based on a quick googling, this seems to no more be the case, and there is a 'priority to the right" rule.
I also don't think this is part of any specific culture, mine or someone else's, it's just something I saw in one neighbourhood.
Neither system describes how Indian traffic works, which is much more of an iterated cooperative fluid dynamics simulation, with the main rule being ‘don’t drive into people who are in front of you’.
And they drive on the left, so priority to the right makes no sense.
I mean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_to_the_right
That is, unless there are other signs overriding it (like yield or stop signs), you must yield to someone coming from the right in an intersection.
> And they drive on the left, so priority to the right makes no sense.
Not sure that matters. The important thing is to have a consistent rule that everyone can follow. Whether the rule is to yield to the right or left doesn't per se matter, nor does it depend on which side of the road you drive on.
Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.
The result of course is that there's a non stop cacophony, in places like Hanoi it REALLY gets to you after a while.
Here in EU if someone honks at you it's considered rude and will make me really react with wtf is your problem. Out in Asia it's completely normal.
(crossing the street is also kind of surreal as it's more like going through a school of fish; the trick is to walk at a steady pace to maximize your position predictability)
Six months I was there. Six months of honking honking honking.
You can only use it, if its to prevent an accident from happening. that's it.
The horn has also been moved to the center on newer models.
A certain type of HN commenter has been shitting on Tesla for nearly a decade now despite their continued success and dominance. There’s no one close in most categories, but especially on software. This is reflected in the market.
I also prefer no stalks.
Frankly, there are a lot of quirky design choices on a Tesla that make them unpleasant for me to drive:
- not being able to coast/disable regenerative braking
- the current implementation of the yoke and capacitive buttons outside the CT
- placing FSD/cruise on the shifter
I don't think these are "get used to it" things, I think they're actually worse UX for most people. I also think that Tesla implemented every single one as cost-cutting measures on a supposedly "luxury" car that's now falling further and further behind the competition.
The Tesla vents are great, the ui is good or can use voice. Other companies that attempt what Tesla does do it poorly with bad software.
Which cars are you driving where they break often?
My experience is that as the car gets older it is common for the vents to lose the capability to stay pointed where I place them. As in: you point them where you want and they flip back all the way to one side as soon as you let go.
(Hot climate here, with several months of "a/c set to max during the whole trip" per year)
More modern cars of decent build do not have this issue.
Edit: Now that I think of it, it's possibly still a huge cost savings in that you can have interchangeable parts across all models, since the vents are hidden to the user.
I worked for a $ ~billions revenue software storage vendor who had the exact same issue (excessive logging wearing out under-spec'd flash drives).
Datadog was costing several thousand euros per month despite near-absent customer traffic. But the name made finally sense because all the data in there was absolute dog shit from reboots.
So yeah too much logging can be bad.
I definitely think that teams should think about what to log. Otherwise go with a live image kind of system like Smalltalk of LISP. The whole event sourcing paradigm and trying to just log everything and look at it later strike me as a poor reconstruction of that concept.
There is a tragic aspect to the "Worse is Better" essay that I see play out everywhere: there is a way to do something correctly but just throwing something together wins the race to market. Winner takes all and we're stuck with ossified bad decisions from the past. The idea that we can fix it later is just a lie. You can't do the foundation later, you'll be stuck with a structurally unsound edifice and forever holding it together under a completely unnecessary cognitive load.
And I also agree about worse is better. To me the most tragic part is that "worse" has become almost as costly as doing "The Right Thing", mostly due to the extreme flexibility and rush to the market from vendors and libraries. Our foundations weren't as sketchy when the concept was invented.
The guy basically answered "Oh, same. I just ask for people to do microservices because that's how the CTO wants".
These kind of problems only happen years after the software roll out so no one cares when you are under time pressure.
It also takes much more time and requires a different set of talents. Often just using a bigger chip is better than investing the R&D.
The best analogy I can make is trying to make your own custom rendering engine and then code the UI in it or just use a browser and writing JS. Even if you do make it, your own custom rendering engine will probably cut a lot of features like fancy animations.
People just use android and javascript front-end.
It's not crappy hardware by miles, crappy hardware as a category doesn't even exist these days.
It's hardware that can run everything necessary hundreds of times over, but shitty bloatland sloppy javascript it + android bloat it can not.
My own car is too old for Android Auto, but I sometimes drive a car that's from 2017 or so, and Android Auto works just fine on it, it's a pleasure to use (with the caveat that the phone has to be plugged in the USB port, wireless came later). So to me it seems like it always worked well.
It's puzzling to see this push for general computing on devices that need to far outlast the typical release cycle of GC devices. There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car.
If your consumer hardware needs to last for decades, then the core functionality and automation should be provided by sturdy embedded computers that are self-contained and do not require any kind of network access or regular updates, while the general computing functions functions should be provided by the user's own device or a replaceable/upgradable computer with a standardized interface.
Android Auto is not Android on the car, it's a protocol that allows an Android phone to use the car's system as a display, with limited UI integration.
This is not what the GP is describing though, he's talking about the experience of a built in infotainment system running Android that can (for the time being) sync with his device.
Now I have a lovely vision of the Android Auto device getting Garbage Collected when nothing depends on it.
Real life GC would be a fun project to see a geek movie of.
Naturally, there must be some scale threshold where this is true, so I don't doubt your experience. And my workplace doesn't make anything as elaborate as a car, or with such stringent reliability specs. But my experience is that hardware is always finished before software.
Apparently, 300k+ people in 2025 Q1, and that is with a refresh in the most popular model happening in March (presumably people who would have bought held off until the new one came out and will buy in Q2 or beyond).
For comparison, this is 2024 Q1:
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...
Should all VW drivers have a "I hate Hitler" sticker on their car too?
Because in case you aren't aware: VW was started by the German Labour Front (part of the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler himself oversaw early development of the first models.
Why the need to apologize for the CEO of the company that you buy products from? Should we also have an "I hate Foxconn" sticker on every Apple device?
German car companies absolutely were boycotted after WW2 in much of Europe (and rightly so) and boycotting Tesla for Musk's antics is consistent with that.
If the board of that company additionally wants to do everything they can to shovel $50 billion to that known "problematic" CEO - well, that's not something non-fascists are going to like.
Doing multiple hitler salutes in public on stage should have consequences - and when a company is tied that much to your personal image and is viewed as your, and only your, "masterpiece", that company is obviously going to become synonymous to whatever horrible thing you do.
Tesla has always been about trust in musk and always had a bit of a Führerkult. And now they're noticing why that might be a mistake.
Case in point: My company (in the PV-space in germany) recently decided to modernize their fleet and would have bought a couple hundred teslas if musk wasn't tesla's face and main profiteer of any purchase. But in the current situation, that would be insanity and toxic to our public image, so we went with something more "politically quiet".
Tesla has essentially become a political statement now, I'd say.
Which is because he is in the media a lot.
I can understand the impact on your brand as things are, but it would be interesting to see how well other manufacturers would stand up to scrutiny.
> musk wasn't tesla's face and main profiteer of any purchase.
The face bit of it makes sense.
As for "main profiteer", he is the single largest shareholder, but its about 13% shareholding - 87% of the profits belong to other people.
And since the compensation is equity, comparing it to profit, which is cash, makes no sense. One can discuss if the market price of the equity is too far removed from current profit, but surely even Elon doesn’t have any influence over what millions of investors around the world choose to pay for Tesla shares.
Should majority owners of a business not be able to vote on compensation?
I didn’t realize people still believed this?
He placed his hand over his heart and then waving out to the crowd followed by saying “my heart goes out to you,” words which mimic the motion.
It’s been on video since the day it became a story.
It's not just that I live in a city with small brass plaques on the pavement, in memory of those who were made to disappear last time[0].
It's not just that protestors projecting the image of the guy himself in the middle of that salute, on the walls of his own factory in Brandenburg, was enough to warrant an official investigation because such symbolism is unlawful in Germany[1].
He tried to support to the AfD political party in Germany, who were already suspected of being an extremist party (and have since been officially determined as such), and where several party members had already faced legal problems for using banned Nazi slogans[2] while their former friends at the EU level dropped them for trying to rehabilitate the image of the actual SS[3].
This is who they were before Musk chose to support them. And you trust his word on the innocent interpretation?
It's not like Musk has otherwise got a reputation for being particularly trustworthy — Musk got away with calling someone a pedo by claiming it was a joke; he's been punished for claiming that an offer to buy Tesla for 420/share, which can only be interpreted as a joke, was serious, and that he's really upset to be accused of saying anything untrue; he's mislead people about how close his cars are to full self driving, leading to out-of-court settlements[4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-musk-tesla-nazi-salute/a-71403...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/german...
[3] https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/european-parl...
[4] https://electrek.co/2023/11/07/tesla-owner-wins-10k-settleme...
While I think Musk seems to have duplicated Jobs' Reality Distortion Field*, the second CEO-ing of Jobs didn't strike me as quite as severely attaching Apple to Jobs as all of Musk's businesses are now with Musk. For example, quite a lot of the industrial design of that era is (and was) strongly associated with Jony Ive, not Steve Jobs.
I think at best, out of all of Musk's business empire, the closest you get to a Jony Ive-esq "it's not Jobs" is that Gwynne Shotwell is well regarded and seen as being highly competent in her own right; the second closest is that Linda Yaccarino gets named a decent amount in the news, but even then she's very much in Musk's shadow. The public perception of Neuralink and The Boring Company is just "Musk announced his company, [Neuralink|TBC] did ${thing}".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field — and apparently I'm nearly a decade late in making this connection
Thankfully, I said to myself, none of our non-Tesla cars have problematic histories.
(Mussolini, Hitler...)
Now of course tesla/musk are destroying themselves through various idiotic actions. Sales are dropping through the roof. But the technical quality of the software ecosystem (car, web, app) is still better than all the incumbents. Think about Rivian getting a billion dollars from VW for their much better ECU and and software integration, for example.
I feel like Rivian is almost as good as tesla. Tesla still has all that, even as the company is in awful shape sales wise. Lucid seems to be better than the legacy auto, but I haven't looked into it as closely.
Maybe it's time for an 'OpenCar' project, where a "standard car" model is designed for (all cars have ECUs, light controls, HVAC, etc), and there's also a kind of natural demarcation that could exist like between drivers (engine performance characteristics, etc) and operating system (the overall "standard car" model). We don't write custom OSes for each PC make and model, why the flying f*** are car manufacturers all d***ing around doing their own things independently?
I think cheap China cars will finally kill the bloated US auto sector, and it will be a great time for the government to bail them out at a cost: they must design and manufacture parts to a national "open standard" in addition to any proprietary designs they choose to make. If they come up with a novel technology redesign for a part in the standards vehicle, the design must be open even if a patent for exclusive marketing of the improved part, as long as the part is not mandated. Automakers who don't participate don't get the competitive incentives. There should be a figurative x86/amd64 car, an ARM truck, etc. Think: volkswagens! There needs to be evergreen design in the standards cars: new parts made 30 years later should generally still fit, so it should have much looser regulations which would otherwise kill it off in a few years (like EPA regulations murdered the small truck).
It must be made much harder to put customers on the rentier treadmill. Planned obsolescence and proprietary design are two important tools to the rentier, along with copyright and DMCA. Look at China: better to strengthen your people and production even if it means chasing price gouging software houses off, because China demonstrated you can just steal the software in the future and improve upon it. What matters is the soil, minerals, metals, food, and production. People need materials to survive, they don't need frilly whirlie-gig flashy wazoo SaaS applications which cost monthly. Zynga's original business model should not be viable in an ideal world, but this is the world of the NPC and the cryptoshamanic advertising industry.
A family member had a early-gen Up!, and the OEM display (build by Navigon) that sat on top of the dashboard was removable, but used a proprietary connection, not USB. I believe it snapped on with magnets, which I remember thinking was quite nice.
The detachability was mostly for anti-theft reasons I presume, but quite quickly an aftermarket started to form to replace the OEM screen with other options, including phone mounts. I don't think VW envisioned that, but I thought that a detachable mount for aftermarket satnav, phone mounts or other accessories was quite smart.
I did wonder why they didn't just make it a phone mount as standard so you can basically BYOD, which could lower the price of the car further and probably be a better experience anyway.
> Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.
Thanks to your comment I looked into it again, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see the newer generation Up! actually does have a OEM phone mount now, how cool! From what I just read it uses an app to integrate with some of the car's features.
More car manufacturers should do this for their budget cars. Have a few physical buttons for controlling built-in functions (namely HVAC), and let the user's phone provide the entertainment, navigation and other driving aids. Maybe even ditch the radio interface, and just have an amplifier and speakers build in.
It's a shame that phone OSes are moving away from on-device 'driving mode' in favor of Android Auto and Apple Carplay. I get it though, larger screen makes for easier controls and thus safer to interact with while driving, but still...
When you have dozens of communication lines required between different parts of the system it becomes just as complicated as your average micro-service cloud. Really, a car is a distributed system with dozens of "services". An analogy is that each microcontroller-microcontroller communication use their own custom binary-encoding API that runs on multiple different, incompatible versions of HTTP.
We actually spent considerable amount of time just developing our own custom protocol for communication that could run on all sorts of different physical interfaces (CAN, ethernet, modbus, etc) as well as a series of proxies between devices (so component A can talk to component C through a proxy in component B). And if we had to use a custom protocol from an external manufacturer we had to wrap it into our own custom protocol.
That protocol was actually used for our cloud data reporting as well, so eventually all our data communication would use a single unified protocol from micro-controller to IoT Linux to cloud data-ingestion pipeline to database.
i'm sure that every time this happens, it individually makes sense to do it at the time.
This is a microcosm of how large systems get developed in small pieces, by different people, over a long(-ish) period of time. It's the same in the software world too i think, but presumably has a lot more consolidation than cars (as software for cars might be less common, and thus employees moving between companies is unlikely to make any sort of cross-pollination like there would be for FAANG-like companies).
Ultimately it's a price control strategy to pit these suppliers against each other to lower costs. But it means that designing these electronic sub-systems isn't just a question of the design itself, but also of managing all of these supplier relationships as well, they all have different contracts, you would have to coordinate all of them at once to make sure things are interoperable, etc.
> We actually spent considerable amount of time just developing our own custom protocol
Not only is this unintentionally hilarious, it’s a real life example of an xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/927/) that will never cease to be true.
> eventually all our data communication would use a single unified protocol from micro-controller to IoT Linux to cloud data-ingestion pipeline to database.
This, however, is remarkably impressive, that you were able to build a single protocol that fit this end to end use case.
On the other hand it was nice being able to just import a library into your code and JUST SEND A FREAKING MESSAGE without having to deal with thousands of lines of code that were last changed 3 years ago and nobody knows how it works. The scrutiny on the code quality of the common protocol was much higher and therefor much more pleasant to use and troubleshoot.
All the encoders and decoders of messages used the same code in all the parts of the stack (technically 2 implementations, one in Go and one in C)
TI has some powerful automotive SoCs like the AM69A/TDA4AH (https://www.ti.com/ds_dgm/images/fbd_sprsp79b.svg) that target the industry.. 8 Cortex-A72s, a full GPU, multiple Cortex R5Fs that can lockstep, and a bunch of powerful C7000 DSPs. The SDK is probably not awesome as embedded BSPs tend to be but the SoC should be workable. That should be plenty of compute.
So what is really going on, and what happened?
At least that is how I build my self-made system, which is quite awesome compared to solutions you generally see in cars. Not for the average consumer, but classic car makers can do much better with a bit of courage.
I completely agree that vertical integration and building your own software stack from the ground up is the correct approach, but that's not the root cause of the problem. A better explanation here is that when all brands have awful infotainment systems then there is no consumer choice that forces competition.
Hardware procurement is cut-throat, sometimes they have mandates to reduce component costs and the procurement people WILL reach them. Often procurement > product in the power dynamics so no matter how bad the product gets those people still do it because the software gets the blame for bad product, not procurement who forced a bad chip to be used.
The infotainment is usually the #1 chip to be cut down because it is often the single most expensive electronics part in the system that can be "easily" swapped for a different part.
It would make zero sense if I drive to a Walmart and demand they sell to me with monotonically lowering prices as function of date since registration of my reward card, but in cars they do.
For years now, Samsung has used a 'virtual proximity sensor' in everything but their premium stuff. Sensors like that are a few cents. Degrading the entire experience on the phone for a few cents cost savings. Say you do that for 25 components, saving 4 cents each. You've now saved $1 on a BoM of $100-$200, whilst making the whole experience of your product feel a lot worse.
The Model S came out in 2012 so they’ve had well over a decade to catch up.
They also want to treat it as a new revenue stream rather than as a value add, which ultimately hurts them.
We end users don’t want to pay a subscription for our car. Especially for things we already get for free on our phone.
I think I've heard of something called an ICANN(?) bus that is used to communicate stuff in cars and is fairly standardised, maybe?
There are already companies doing 3rd party electronics as mentioned above, such as Visteon and Continental, and Garmin is trying to get into that business too.
Related to CAN, the bus is standard, but the thing is, CAN is just a bus, not a protocol. There are many ways you can have two ECUs (vehicle's modules) talking in incompatible ways.
Pioneer has been selling standard-sized Android Auto head units for over a decade at this point.
- Compliance and,
- Regulation.
In Australia, for example; we have very strict requirements for manufacturers - and it seems mostly out of regulatory incompetence that vendors like Tesla are able to deploy and bypass in the way they do.
I've been told, by stakeholders in industry, that the systems that facilitate the software of vehicles to align with such requirements historically were strictly controlled.
(The same applied to the hardware)
Whilst it's also over simplifying it;
- I am not excited at the prospect that `developer-a` can `git commit` functional changes to my vehicle.
I'm not sure you should be, either!
Someone should tell an automobile manufacturer. It’d save them ~ $1B.
No wonder these clowns still can't put together a car radio that works reliably, let alone an automotive interconnect system; they're still using the term "multimedia." Welcome to CD-ROMs, circa 1994.
It think it’s a standard for “events happen on cam bus”, “there is a not-hdmi display in the dashboard”, and “there are analog amplified audio out jacks for the speakers”.
From the consumer end, it looks remarkably sane. Like “there’s a dev kit for the computer on github” levels of sane.
The entire thing is $150, which is nothing compared to the rest of the warranty.
If regulatory compliance for a car stereo actually costs $1B in the US, then that seems like a bigger issue than “unfair” competition from China, and I’d like one of their $10K EVs, please.
Everything makes it beep. Beeps for “you will die now” are similar to “you put me in gear”.
There’s one exception: For many reasons, it turns off one-pedal driving. When it does that and is unexpectedly accelerating into cross traffic, it does not beep (until the collision alarm sounds, presumably, ask me if it kills me…)
Anyway, it runs Android Automotive, but supports Android Auto and CarPlay as well. My SO uses the former exclusively and it's on as soon as she gets in the car, can't imagine it's any different for CarPlay.
If you run the Automotive shell, you can have a media widget at the bottom which can be set to radio, shown here[2], I listen to DAB that way.
It also has a row of physical buttons for the important stuff, like climate control, defrost and such. Media and volume controls are on the steering wheel.
[1]: https://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-news/first-official-pictur...
[2]: https://cdn.automobile-propre.com/uploads/2021/09/megane-ren...
Won’t be able to control auto locking and stuff like that though because it either didn’t exist or wasn’t controlled by the factory radio, because it was just a radio.
Fingers crossed that they can keep it up with an EV transition. In the MX-30 they did an HVAC touchscreen, but perhaps the years long gap between that and their next EV will be an opportunity to reflect on how stupid that was. (Ignoring Chinese joint ventures that just use someone else’s platform)
When I have trouble with voice input I just use my phone to enter the directions instead of doing it in CarPlay. Typing by scrolling through the alphabet with the wheel is not good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQlFIl18x9g
Obviously I don't expect you to watch all of this but to have the lights working you need to program a computer to do so. This guy had problems just sourcing the right "module", then it has to be programmed. The car is basically an ornament until they fix it. This vehicle is about 20 years old and seems to be in reasonable condition for its age and would otherwise be perfectly fine to drive on the road. Now he is lucky to be friends with a guy that has access to the BMW software and has decent knowledge of how the software works.
Contrast that to my 1994 Land Rover Defender. There isn't a computer in it at all. The most complicated electronics is probably the wiper circuit and (which is partly mechanical). To fix electrical issues you use a multi-meter and adding/removing fuses. My toolbox is spanners, screwdrivers, socket set and a multi-meter. I managed to fix my vehicle in a car park at 11pm, with no prior experience of repairing this vehicle.
If you want things to be able to be repaired by normal people they have to be simpler and typically that means everything has to be modular with a well define spec or easily reproducible for a person in his shed with easily available tools. The trade off is that it won't be refined.
On average, the best people will tend to better jobs. Salaries are half of places like Google.
Of course their software is in trouble.
- No Internet connection - No touchscreens - No LCD dashboard; I like dials. - 100% user-repairable; there should be no need to go to a dealer if one can easily fix a problem themselves or one wants to go to an independent mechanic (often cheaper!) - Buttons and (analog, not digital) dials for the media center - Media center with ONLY Bluetooth, CD player, and radio media center - Analog locks (not software based) - A Physical, metal key (not a chip)—I like to be able to go to my local hardware or key shop and make backups, thank you very much. - I don't need navigation; I have a phone for that.
And I don't need an app either:
- Wanna check the fuel/battery level? A little thing called a fuel gauge on the dashboard will work just fine. - Wanna check the tire pressure? Use a pressure gauge, feel the tire directly, or look at the tire, or base it on feeling while driving, i.e. the same little things we've done for decades just fine (not to mention the app or dashboard may not take into account used or third-party tires, as each tire brand/type/size is filled up to its own pressure rating). - Wanna lock/unlock doors remotely? Detached key fob. - Need diagnostics? OBDII still works excellently.
Incredibly reliable, very easy to work on, cheap high-quality parts, everything’s analog, you get a full suite of gauges (except oil pressure, but there is at least a light for low oil pressure and low oil level). 94-95 is OBD1, but GM’s OBD1 implementation is almost as detailed as OBD2 (just without per-cylinder misfire detection and secondary post-cat O2 sensors). Keys are $4 at the hardware store (if you disable the pass-key system, which was an anti-theft system that relied on a resistor in the shaft of the key - if you leave that, more like $25). Key fobs are $15 and can be programmed in 30 seconds. Oil changes cost $60, transmission fluid changes cost $150, diff fluid changes $150 ish (cut all those numbers roughly in half if you diy). Tires are $90-110 per for good ones, less if you have someone who can get them for you at cost. And they’re incredibly comfortable.
Only real downside is fuel economy, ~17mpg city, ~25mpg highway. With some tuning knowledge you can get that up to 30mpg highway on premium fuel. And if you don’t like the image of driving an old car, that can be a downside too.
To run a profitable businesses with shitty software, you need a big fat pipe of money from a captive market. Most automakers don't have that kind of market. They cannot afford to waste time writing shitty software that won't increase their bottom line.
Building a highly effective software team is one of the hardest things to do in tech. We actually know how to do it - review the DevOps studies from the past 10 years - yet organizations don't do it, because it requires very specific leadership goals, buy-in, and culture. Most organizations are led by "personalities" that "go with their gut" rather than data-driven decisions, and most people, let's face it, just aren't very good at their jobs. Finding a company with good leaders, good managers, and good workers, is like finding a leprechaun.
Automakers should have learned this decades ago, that only extreme attention to detail and high quality results in better outcomes (and thus bottom line). It's fucking hard work to make a good car. It's also fucking hard work to make good software. Did they really think "just add more software" would be easier than making more cars?!
They don't need to make all this software. Automakers are happy to buy some parts commodity, and have some made bespoke. Software doesn't all have to be bespoke. Take 100 different x86 computers and the same OS will run fine on all of them. They don't all need to invent their own novel way of networking and controlling embedded devices. Look to the software that works well everywhere for inspiration. It's all standards-based, loosely-defined, layered, simple, with replaceable parts. Kinda like a car.
And yet most of the companies don't seem to be willing to spend the one-time cost of getting the UX right.
The article seems to overlook the fact that if you can receive a benevolent update over the air, you can also receive a malevolent one over the air. Over-the-air is not a good update model for cars. It would be better if you had to install the update manually.
It did not succeed, despite some very smart people on the team.
This stuff isn’t easy at all.
I wonder if anyone here can think of an example (or six) of other more worrying questions about this. Before cradling your head in your hands and asking where you can get a decent new car that's just a goddamn car.
Look at the market landscape: literally nobody knows that Toyota produces the #1 system for automated driver safety aids (ADAS) and it isn't close - their current generation of vision/radar fusion sensors have the only car on the market that passes 2029 federal regulations for AEB (62mph to dead stop if an obstacle is detected being a metric that some other manufacturers called not feasible) on a 2023 Corolla.
Compare that to IIHS data for other brands/makes, even "safe" ones - many of them perform abysmally. The systems are awful. It took me a genuinely decent amount of digging to uncover that most cars, even lauded ones, are equipped with "compliance software" that meets bare minimum requirements, i.e. Honda, Hyundai, etc.
And yet every review and even poster on the internet calls Toyota woefully technically inept because Kia makes fancy screens. Alas.
So unfortunately regardless of Toyota's possible prowess in the field it's unlikely to receive many plaudits for focusing its efforts there.
Now with tightening federal regulations and lawsuits for faulty ADAS manufacturers are tightening the belt. Investment must be substantial for the 2029+ regs from all manufacturers. Toyota is just ahead of the game currently as of their latest offering and shows you their value as a company in being so.
To be honest, though, I'd be interested in exploring your premise. The statistics regarding ADAS from insurers shows a straightforward benefit in accident reduction.
For every software change on each module, they have to go to a supplier to ask because of IP rights.
That is why Ford is/was trying to build a new generation of modules with in-house software which they never wrote before.
Also pertinent: "Why Ford decided to merge its next-gen architecture with its current platform" https://archive.ph/CR2Pv
https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/leq366/comment/gm...
you'll spend a few more months sitting in online seminars while some talking head explains why it takes 6 hours to configure a million goddamn things so their garbage tool can shit out an entire Italian resaurant's worth of spaghetti code just to blink an LED at 1Hz. Except it's not 1Hz, it's 10Hz, or 0.1Hz, or some other bullshit that you didn't want, because you muttered the wrong incantation to the configuration utility somewhere around step 2 out of 800, so guess what, you get to back and do the entire fucking thing again.If anyone ever wants to hear I got the Porsche CEO to step down for his terrible tech strategy. There is no hope
The clear leaders here are the companies that weren’t already locked into the old-world approach to automotive software. Tesla, Rivian, Lucid and almost all of the Chinese automakers have built ground-up systems that work without legacy bloat."
Did the market demand this? Does safety? Fuel efficiency?
I'm holding onto my 2014 vehicle precisely because of this over the air update, constant tracking bullshit.
If you can't deliver a reliable car without needing to patch it weekly, I don't want it.
I recently purchased a new bike which has electronic shifting and while it performs better than and and requires less tuning, I honestly miss the pure simplicity and connectedness of a cable actuated derailleur.
Like... can we pleeeease have this already!??
We really don't and neither do the manufacturers. Unless you want frequent crashes and user-caused engine problems. Programming an Engine Control Unit (ECU) is not trivial.
> with no surprise NSA backdoor management engines
These backdoors are generally required by law (e.g. Lawful Interception for Cellular Technologies) and are highly standardized. It is very unlikely that Tesla/Apple make backdoors on purpose.
Every car I've driven I disabled all drive assist features (except for ABS and ESP). They just simply don't work well. Edge cases are not handled well - there is a little snow on the sensor? Beeps continuously, because you're hitting the wall going 100km/h on the highway...
I hope more cars/trucks like the Slate truck will come. We want cheap, simple and safe cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_emergency_braking_sy...
Infotainment systems are a race to the bottom on BOM+SW price point. ADAS OEM's understand that there is a human cost, liability, and reputational cost for failure.
The real risk with these monoliths is when companies start to remove the distributed/redundant nature of safety critical systems, in order to reduce hardware costs.
There are multiple very good reasons for a distributed system in a car. However, irrespective of how clever your architecture is, there is only one good reason for centralized systems in a car and that is cost. It benefits no one but shareholders and C-suite.
OTA updates are sold as a key benefit but again it's marketing, they only reduce costs for the manufacturers and effectively remove a lot of the penalties of recalls. I would argue that difficult/costly recalls put pressure on manufacturers for 'first time right' design, OTA favours happy-go-lucky software.
People are careless and inattentive beast of animals in our modern societies. Things are done for them, expected this way, they do not need to pay attention that much, which has lot of merits and advantages for the advancement of humanity. Dumb solutions doing as told and need to be handled expertly can be dangerous for modern people. Developing automation right (emphasis is here, big emphasis!!) is very necessary.
But unfinished and sloppy developers are killing careful people. Not show in the statistics, saving more bad drivers than killing good ones overridden by shit software cars.
Need to do it right with no collateral casualties.
I believe the tone of the conversations are into this direction anyway: please, pretty please, do it right! Not the current sloppy way! This is a dangerous game not mobile messaging platform, needs different mindsets than average software development approaches.
Examples: there are pedestrians nearby and the car is in reverse so it wildly swings the acceleration curve around, cycling between “slam on brakes” to “1-2mph” to “why am I on the other side of the street and standing on the break pedal?”
Even without pedestrians it constantly changes the acceleration curve and this cannot be disabled in a way that reliably survives turning the car off and back on.
Once, a motorcycle was lane splitting, so the adaptive cruise control tried to race it and accelerated at the car in front of me. I had to slam on the brakes.
This is by design: There’s a chapter in the manual explaining the dozen different reasons it’ll fail to regen brake at a stoplight (or, from what I can tell, rear end someone on the freeway) because of low visibility. (Including being on a hill, not going straight, pedestrians, vehicles in other lanes, and motorcycles lane splitting.)
Changing from drive to reverse to drive disables one pedal mode. I’m sure that’s caused at least one collision (when you take your foot off the pedals it automatically accelerates, especially in parking lots).
I’ve had it override steering too. Sometimes it tries to force me out of the lane. Sometimes it wants me to stay in the lane so it overrides emergency maneuvers when other cars try to merge into me.
The beeping is constant, and alert fatigue has set in. There’s even an undocumented alert icon that looks like “car is about to explode”. We don’t know what it means.
Even if they fix the safety issues, we plan to sell it for that reason.
Note that all of this idiocy is possible because they wired together the transmission, throttle, brake and vision systems more deeply than “we need emergency override”.
Anyway, mark my words: The accident rates on this model will be high.
I’d settle for a bluetooth (call and music) capable fm radio though.
Not because of the shit infotainment systems - although the idiots could save money by just doing carplay and android auto, they'll never do something better.
But because I want physical only failsafes for stuff like brakes and cutting off the engine.
Also, use the savings in software to bring physical buttons back.
Besides the life threatening "software" features, don't forget that they could also adjust engine power in software. As in, include 75 hp in the selling price and sell you highway speeds for $999 for a week or $299 per month with a 2 year commitment...
We are only as sovereign as we are willing to fight, and if voting worked do you think they'd let you? lol
But it seems like too much trouble, if I could even do it.
And if you start talking about razzle dazzle infotainment smart phone experiences, well that’s where you get the $1b price tag from.
My startup is actually aiming to disrupt the low end of this with a generic VCU that lets you design any vehicle you want and then tweak a few arguments to set how it should be controlled. The goal is to let you build a Slate-like car or truck (infotainment excluded / BYO) without writing software.
Now these same dinosaurs want to build and ship "software defined vehicles"? What a joke.
As a dev the last thing I want is a software-defined car. Look what we did to TVs.
Say what? Give me a clunky manual interface with buttons and knobs any time over an electronic interface for which I have to look away from the road.
They cite tesla as an example of a “good” approach, and don’t understand that (in addition to Elon) a large percentage of the market won’t consider a car where the computer decides which way the vents point, and if you are allowed to open the doors after an accident.
It does mention that people hate touch screens, and probably will not like these new cars. Other than cost savings, and “the infotainment computer is slow” there zero discussion of how these new systems improve the car or the user experience. “Slow infotainment” should be fixable by throwing a better cpu/ram in.
Google thinks they have a good support policy on phones that are approaching a decade in age. My truck is literally older than Google. And the mechanics down the street can easily get it back up and running from any trouble I typically see.
Narrator: No, they really did not.
FrankWilhoit•1d ago
tehjoker•1d ago
To be fair, im still not sold that this is an advancement except maybe in simplifying the number of components. I'd prefer the car to work without "updates" and DLC. Why does my car need a firewall??
cosmicgadget•23h ago
[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(engine)
DonHopkins•22h ago
AlotOfReading•23h ago
For what it's worth, I work in this industry and the general rule of thumb is that every increase in validation from QM (standard quality) up to the various levels of safety critical code has up to 10x the cost per line of code of the previous level.
umanwizard•23h ago
Exactly that was done for decades.
miohtama•23h ago
bronson•23h ago
Heck, manufacturers were issuing service bulletins to fix the fuel maps in their cars in the 1980s.
AlotOfReading•23h ago
rjsw•23h ago
Now that all vehicles have entertainment systems connected to the internet, I guess it is tempting to use that to reprogram ECUs, I haven't been working in this area recently though.
The first use case of connecting entertainment systems to a vehicle bus that I can remember was to read some engine settings and turn up the volume on the radio at higher speeds.
gjsman-1000•23h ago
Is anyone actually begging for this though? And why do you need a full bus? This feels like a luxury car problem that could be solved over I2C or something.
I’m reading this whole SDV thing, and outside of using less ECUs, it seems like an overengineered solution to what was hardly a problem. If we can update ECUs already with OBD-II, step 1 is just making a virtualized OBD-II port that the infotainment system can talk to. Everything else can then stay unchanged until later.
rjsw•23h ago
vel0city•23h ago
AlotOfReading•23h ago
A "virtualized OBD-II" is really just a UDS server if I understand what you're trying to convey. UDS is a dumpster fire of a protocol that should be expunged from existence, but my personal feelings aside can be run anywhere you want. That exists. I'm not aware of many systems that directly connect the infotainment processors directly to critical CAN buses. Usually there's an intermediary component to isolate them.
encom•23h ago
Yes, but code that doesn't get written does not have bugs. And I don't want to control the rear window defroster, wipers, climate control, fog lights or whatever, on a touch screen menu buried 7 levels deep while going 130 km/h. It's bad enough that coffee makers, light bulbs and tooth brushes now have updatable firmware.
mrheosuper•14h ago
v9v•23h ago
Why? If the rest of the car can function within design specifications for years, why can't the firmware?
I'm fine with updates to add compatibility with new protocols and such, but to me a bug implies there's a standing problem with the current system that's not due to some sort of wear/changing standard/component damage etc. While one can point to examples of cars with defective mechanical designs, I don't think anyone considers it impossible to create designs without such defects (where defects are defined wrt. specifications), why is this the view in software engineering?
AlotOfReading•22h ago
But, do you have an example of a software project anywhere that's bug-free? I'd include the space shuttle code, but even that famously high quality development process produced a (low) number of bugs.
jmb99•13h ago
The reason for this is a physical limitation: the cars weren’t shipped with wideband O2 sensors, so there’s no way to measure the AFR when wide-open (since it’s targeting a significantly richer mixture, and narrowband O2 sensors can only signal whether a the combustion is stoichiometric, or rich or lean relative to stoichiometric, with no further info). The implantation is probably not a bug but rather a compromise; in an ideal world, the “most recent” BLM will hopefully be from an “almost wide open” part of the map, and the general rich/lean characteristics will be close enough. And, the fuel table in the factory tune is quite safely rich when wide-open, so even with a leaking injector causing the idle BLMs to be way off, the fuel being pulled when wide open will still be completely safe.
Aside from that, 128k of bug-free code.
tehjoker•23h ago
nyarlathotep_•16h ago
What was wrong with ECU and ABS etc software prior to the OTA era that we're now apparently entering?
I've had plenty of cars--too many--and outside of a few warranty repairs involving re-flashing ECU/ABS(maybe), this was a very rare occurrence.
(Not counting deliberate tunes or re-flashes for modification purposes)
AlotOfReading•15h ago
One, it's expensive. If your update takes half an hour to apply, under the old model someone's being paid half an hour to apply it. Either the manufacturer cuts the billable hours to the dealer and the dealer loses, or the manufacturer is paying that half hour out of increased prices to the consumer. With an OTA system there's usually no cost to anyone besides network traffic. This amounts to billions of dollars in savings for manufacturers.
Second, owners hate 1) paying for updates and 2) getting notifications about it in the mail. It generates bad press and bad experiences for the manufacturer.
Three, it makes the production line more efficient.
Four, the old systems sucked to maintain and for techs to use. They were also insecure and retrofitting security is impossible in a standards compliant way. The internet people have done a much better job with their standards.
Five, most owners are not like you and I. It's a feature for them that their car gets improvements and fixes automatically.
Six, you can be pretty certain what the rollout distribution is. Regulators don't like it when owners are driving around with years old recalls active because they forgot to schedule a dealer appointment. Manufacturers don't like keeping the inventory around.
Seven, "networked services" can piggyback on the same infrastructure and provide additional revenue streams. Certain corporate types think of this as one of the main benefits. Remember how manufacturers used to sell annual maps updates that no one bought? Some consumers also enjoy these sorts of networked services, which frankly I find a bit baffling.
mrheosuper•14h ago
jmb99•14h ago
Hmm, I disagree. Bug-free systems are expensive and hard, and get more expensive and harder as complexity increases, but you can absolutely produce a car that never needs updates. The vast majority of computer-controlled cars from the 80s to the early 2010s never needed updates, and the ones that did were performed at dealers (and were usually for non-critical things, because the critical things were simple).
GM had a good run in from the mid-90s to the mid-00s producing bug-free cars, even with some complexity. I don’t know of any software issues on any cars with LT1 or 3800 engines, nor with any of the tech in the Northstar Cadillacs. Displacement-on-demand could be considered a buggy implementation, but it was working as designed, and never got patched out, so I don’t think it counts.
That’s of course ignoring the decades of cars that had no computers at all. No software bugs being patched out with OTA updates in a carburetter (you have other problems obviously though, namely terrible fuel economy and emissions, and generally lower reliability).
If you make it a hard requirement for a car to be bug-free (maybe outlaw OTA updates and force physical recalls on any software problem?) I can guarantee manufacturers can make a bug-free car. It’ll just be way less complex and have way fewer flashy features, and will either cost more or have lower margins. It’s been done in the past, it can be done again.
There is a sweet spot for the level of computerization in cars. We had it somewhere around the year 2000, then waaaaay overshot, and haven’t corrected back.
tonetegeatinst•23h ago
maldev•23h ago
Alot of embedded stuff is outsourced and doesn't want to waste the computing power for stuff like stack canaries. I recall the following from making a tool for a dlink? router?
//Reads a file name foo ReadFilePath() { // Get file name // TICKET 21321: Fixed crash by increasing buffer size char FilePath[100]; ReadFileName(&FilePath); }
It sticks out to me, since the crash was clearly from a buffer overflow, and they had this documented in the source code that increasing the buffer size fixes it. What they didn't realize was that the bug would still happen and you could get a buffer overflow from this and do whatever you wanted. This is the level of programmer you're dealing with who's writing embedded software in an overseas sweatshop. And the talent isn't even there domestically since they're severely underpaid compared to someone writing simple javascript.
FrankWilhoit•22h ago
HideousKojima•19h ago
The pipelines to create more such people are sorely lacking though
jmb99•14h ago
But if you take a couple C/assembly/systems electives, look for internships at hardware companies, build a couple of toy projects on the side, and graduate with even a modicum of embedded experience, there will be companies that will hire you, pretty much guaranteed. You won’t be making 250k out of the gate, but you should still be making a more-than-livable salary (and frequently in a lower cost of living area than, say, the Bay), and if you pick companies correctly, you can be working with and learning from some truly genius engineers.
The pipeline’s there, it’s just not attractive (read: $$$$$$$) enough to pull in most people in the industry.
tcmart14•23h ago
But yea, a single class probably isn't sufficient and also I image a lot of embedded companies have a preference to hire someone already familiar with the chip they are targeting and the toolchain for the stack. I also see a lot of asking for experience with RTOS, which in my class, we didn't use an RTOS.
nickff•23h ago
ghaff•23h ago
FrankWilhoit•22h ago
I did some initial requirements work on a system to monitor continuous-web papermaking machinery; the line had to be stopped, physically and completely, within 100ms if anything went wrong, because an uncontained web of paper can literally cut people in half. They wanted, in order to be able to hire, to use one of the embedded flavors of a well-known consumer-grade OS, and I had to prove to them that there was no way to make any of them safe, at any cost. And they knew their hardware, because they had built it themselves.
The absolute last resort is a watchdog timer that hits the reset button if N milliseconds go by without the software telling it it's okay. This is what you have to implement if you are dealing with buggy and undocumented hardware -- as, all too often, you are. Sometimes you can get some doco for $ and an NDA, but then in order to get the real doco it is much more $$$ and a much tighter NDA, and the existence of that option is not even divulged until after things have already gone very far south.
If it were only a matter of reading the top-level doco for this or that chip, there would be no issue.
sillystu04•22h ago
If I were selling hardware I’d want it to be as open and well documented as possible. So that more people buy it and so that I get credit for all the great stuff people make with my products.
bigfatkitten•20h ago
jmb99•14h ago
1) The more you open up your design and its behaviour, the more your competitors can learn about your product and how to possibly improve their own. Even stuff as basic as what specific features/capabilities a specific SKU at a specific price point has can be useful information.
2) The behaviour may be sufficiently undefined as to make documenting it impractical (or a bad look). Specs may also be padded (“up to 14 bits of SNR” may mean you’re getting 8 most of the time unless you’ve got a golden sample, and you’re not getting the distribution without paying big bucks and signing a big NDA). This ties in with 1) - if your competitors know your exact yields, they might be able to advertise being better/more reliable more truthfully, or even cheap out on their manufacturing a bit to drop their own yields down to match or just slightly beat yours.
3) The behaviour might be unknown. There’s obviously a crazy amount of validation testing that goes into high-end chips, but even the best test plan can miss things. This is especially true when you’re talking about high-speed stuff and anything involving power delivery/voltage fluctuations, or async/pipeline executions, or a million other things that can go wrong. Again ties into 1) - if your competitor knows that your chip might deadlock the radio with an obscure pattern of inputs and control signals, that could give them insight into how you’ve laid out your silicon and might give them optimization ideas.
4) If all the available info is given out freely, then potential customers can easily compare manufacturers and pick the best one. The manufacturers don’t want this, unless they’re the best, for obvious reasons. And, because everything’s locked down so tightly, no one knows if they’re the best until the chips are on the market and the volume contracts are already signed. And those contracts are hard to break, since the specs agreed upon are pretty vague due to 1-3.
5) The manufacturer knows their chips suck, but needs them moved anyways. This is rarely the case from most non-discount manufacturers, but it can happen. In this case, you don’t want to give away anything you don’t have to, because most info you give out is going to drive customers away to a better option. Good example in the consumer space is Intel refusing to publish acceptable voltage specs for their 12-14th gen Core chips, which resulted in motherboard manufacturers overvolting and killing high-end CPUs to try to meet the frequency specs Intel was advertising. If Intel was truthful in their voltage and frequency specs, there’d be a minuscule percentage of chips that could actually hit the advertised frequency at safe voltages, and 99% would have worse performance than expected, which would almost definitely result in lower sales.
6) The behaviour may be highly dependent on external factors. Basic example, a chip with external DRAM might have its execution pipeline stalled more or less frequently based of DRAM spec, or a wobbly voltage regulator might be known to cause lockups when certain executions are happening. Are you going to tell your customer those problems, or just say “we recommend high-speed DRAM and high-quality VRMs?” Especially if the other guy just says “we recommend high-speed DRAM and high-quality VRMs?”
The world would likely be a better place without such logic, but the incentive is there. Until someone comes and breaks the paradigm, I don’t see things changing.
blueflow•23h ago
jauntywundrkind•20h ago
This is an industry that is about as far from the light of science & enlightenment as it is possible to get, ensnared as deeply in the entangling anti-human anti-science Intellectual Property qualgmire-hell as can be got. Oh sure plenty of science goes it! It's fantastically interesting & technical! But aside from some Application Notes write-ups trying desperately to help move the practice along, move it out of jank, knowledge goes in, but it doesn't ever come out! There's such a lack of peershios with which to practice science, to report your findings to, to replicate works on.
The software world talks about its patterns and practices. The biggest industries on the planet are building software like wild AND are mad into open source. But... computer engineering is the shadowland, where no talk nor victories that happen there are allowed to be shared, where nothing escapes confinement. What a fucking plagued awful land of people unable to ever do the right thing, unable to bring their work out of the dark & into real civilization.
nyarlathotep_•16h ago
What does writing ABS module software look like? I'd actually love to know--it's not an area where you can "vibe code" your way to a 'working' product.
gmueckl•11h ago
The process is so far removed from typical web and business slop that it's an entirely different world of its own.
odiroot•22h ago
dmoy•22h ago
kevin_thibedeau•22h ago
I'm waiting for a recall fix for the underpowered Sync 2.5 system to correct a backup camera problem. I'm not looking forward to worsening of all the current bugs with USB audio file playback that cause the UI to hang or not show a fully rendered display.
bluedino•22h ago
tonyhart7•22h ago
can someone tell me if there are any course that taught this??
jeffrallen•22h ago
tonyhart7•18h ago
bitwize•21h ago
jmb99•14h ago
Maybe things just really suck for embedded in the states? But since my last year of university I’ve been inundated with recruiters for embedded positions, and I’ve never had a problem finding work. ~75th percentile in salary alone for software engineers in my area, ~55th-60th for Canada. I make more than every JS developer I know who graduated with me, except for the ones who moved to Seattle, Vancouver, or the Bay.
sarchertech•19h ago
jmb99•14h ago
Now sure, if you’re looking for 500k+ jobs, embedded isn’t the area to be in, unfortunately. But I prefer low-stress, fun-environment embedded jobs, and don’t mind trading off salary for that. Different strokes.
Zanfa•11h ago
At this point, when I wanted to get back into hardware, it made more financial sense to outfit my home office with all the measuring instruments, debuggers, tools and other equipment necessary for embedded work and do it as a hobby. If I had the space, I could even get full-size CNC machines and still come out ahead cash wise. It’s insane.
It’s no wonder they can’t find experienced embedded devs, when it makes no financial sense to stick with it over a decade.
rangestransform•31m ago