As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software talent, but because they have no ability to actually build the electronics alongside the software, which is ultimately what constrains embedded software.
Without the right hardware, the constraints are just insurmountable, you can not do X feature because board A doesn't have the API to your MCU, or it runs some dogshit speed communication system that means you have 500ms lag. The feature is just unworkable, and if the PMs push it anyways you get what happens for the legacy car makers, terrible underpowered infotainment systems with no central design philosophy, stuck in an awkward, bad, middle between a full software stack and all buttons for everything. Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
I worked in similar systems and you are 100% right. 80% of the time was spent on communication protocols between the different boards and microcontrollers. QAing and solving issues from short-sighted dozens of unique custom protocols that worked in non-standard ways (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented).
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.
For american cars at least, I read that one of the reasons this process exists is because car companies want to work around union rules for manufacturing by outsourcing components of the cars to subcontractors that they can make deals with.
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.
>price control strategy to pit these suppliers against each other to lower costs
Apparently that rabbit hole goes super deep in which the large auto manufacturers in the US throw their weight around and force suppliers into selling parts at cost or with razor thin profit margins. And on top of that, they force the suppliers to eat the loss when it comes to cyclical business demand (e.g. storage costs for over-producing during low demand and increased labor costs during times to under producing from high demand)
You'd think the overhead of managing the supplier relationships would be more expensive than well-managed vertical integration. I'm guessing it's a failure on the part of admin to count their own costs.
> (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented).
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).
This makes it sound like the problem is that they either lack a person with architectural responsibility for the cars' electronics as a whole or that person lacks the skills necessary to do their job.
Bear in mind that all the electronics on a particular car are not specific to that car: there is a lot of reuse across product lines. And there are multiple vendors, each of whom is probably also selling the same, or similar modules to other manufacturers.
No, it’s the org and incentives structure - maybe the only people who have all parts that need to make change under their command are the board, and until now, the software was an unimportant part for them.
This aspect of the industry has seriously regressed. We started out trying to standardize and as vehicles have become more dependent on onboard networks manufacturers have gone completely proprietary and have put all information behind lawyers. The consumer is the real loser.
> every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented
> 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.
It is really hard, especially given you have to optimize for the lowest common denominator. For us it was a 512kb RAM microcontroller, we had to go to procurement to expand it to 2MB RAM and they were not happy about that.
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)
Think of the nightmare 5 years down the road when someone else has to then incorporate this protocol under their own new protocol, with the older ones nested inside.
Just to add one more thing to your point, if embedded devs work really hard and make the code work faster/better all reward you get is an _even_ more underpowered chip for the next version.
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.
I hate the penny-wise pound-foolish attitude both in embedded and Android phone development.
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.
Your account sounds accurate, but how fitting then that their cost cutting focus is losing them customers and potentially their entire company. VW is losing the EV war. Most manufacturers have already lost. Tesla and BYD are going to eat everyone's lunch. They either need to revolutionise their approach, or they're toast. I suspect they'll attempt to milk their existing supply chains into bankruptcy.
Car OEMs are modern day colonial plantation owners, they know cost structures of suppliers and schedule their price cuts. They already have an annual cost saving quota. Prices don't just go down but go down just-in-time.
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.
I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing...
That’s always been the case with Tesla. I still have no idea how the yoke with no progressive steering and a tiny button for a horn ever passed any sanity check. Not to mention the NHTSA.
Oh, I wish they would install tiny horn buttons on all the vehicles in Vietnam! In that country, the horn is a method of communication, much to the ire of literally everyone trying to exist.
Excessive horning (made up word) is not just a Vietnamese thing. Italy is probably Europe's worst offender, with Greece a close contender.
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".
In india if you hit someone after sounding your horn you are not at fault as you gave warning and they didn't move. (It is far more complex than that but as always the real truth is too complex for a comment box - if you are trying to drive safe it is close enough, but this isn't a license to murder), As a result all drives will honk their own if there is any possibility someone might cross in front of them.
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.
Was something like 20 years since I was in India, but IIRC at least back then they didn't have a "priority to the right" traffic rule, but rather some kind of "the one who first honks has priority". Traveling in a taxi felt suicidal, drivers just honked when approaching an intersection and continued blithely.
Based on a quick googling, this seems to no more be the case, and there is a 'priority to the right" rule.
I saw something similar when visiting Latin America a few years ago, in a neighbourhood friends lived in. Some people would just go full speed in residential streets and hold the horn while crossing intersections because I guess that's what's gonna keep their car intact?
By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?
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.
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.
I do agree consistency is probably the most important thing, but deciding which side should go first can have differences based on if you're driving on the left or the right.
Imagine a 4-way stop of 1 lane each way roads. Cars drive on the right in this example. One car rolls up traveling from west to east and another car from south to north.
If we give priority to the right, meaning the south->north traffic, they end up out of the way of the other car sooner than the car on the west to east traffic. They only need to cross halfway before they're unblocking the other traffic. If we give priority to the left, meaning the west-east traffic, the west-east car needs to cross the entire road before they start to unblock.
I ride a bike for a few months in India. The honk system worked quite well. As a small vehicle, you learn your place on the road. Largest first, even if you honk. Honking at every turn in small town works ok, but it is loud. so loud.
Ah wow, this explains so much about the idiot who didn't know how to use a 4-way stop and nearly drove into me the other day. I thought he's giving me a hard time, blaming me, when I had the right of way. Maybe he was just doing the "warning because he might hit" thing?
In Asia it's mainly used to signal your presence, like when you're overtaking someone. Just a little tap of the horn. Just the fact that you hear it say in the right corner behind you will make you not swerve in that direction. It's almost subconscious and really does improve safety imho. You can't possibly visually scan for all vehicles around you.
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.
It's been a while since I've been to Vietnam but most of the traffic is composed of motorcycle and not cars, so honking is indeed a signal of presence that's needed compared to just having the noise of a single car that's behind you.
(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)
When I got my driving license too many years ago in Italy, they taught me that a brief honk when taking over in interurban roads is actually mandatory (but nobody did it). I don't know if that rule stayed the same as they harmonized more and more the road rules to the European ones.
Horns were disabled in Chongqing at least a couple of decades ago. I’m not sure what it’s like now though, but the government in China can and will deal with excessive horning using means we wouldn’t consider in the west.
They straight up banned horning in Shanghai when I was there in 2017 using some kind of camera system IIRC, it was quite jarring when I continued onto Nanjing and the usual cacophony resumed.
They also banned lane changing over solid lines with the same camera system IIRC
Ya, China has no problem using camera/recognition tech to its fullest. I wonder if other societies will eventually be outcompeted (cheaper law & order costs means Chinese cities will be more efficient) or if there is some huge cost (privacy violations that lead to economic consequences) to this that will make it less competitive.
Looks like London is on track to deploy similar technology. They did a trial in Croydon recently that was considered a huge success. From what I understand they actually ended up with pretty decent buy in from the locals as it had a noticeably positive effect on the community.
We'll probably eventually see it in more western cities as time progresses. Unsure what to make of it tbh.
20 years ago each city/province was basically its own closed market. So if you were driving a car in CQ, it was probably bought and even made in CQ. They simply required that the horns be disabled.
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.
Was actually quite surprised by how "civilized" the driving was in our recent China trip. Don't think I heard a horn once in probably 20h or so as a passenger, did find the drivers up in Heliongjiang a bit bold with their lane weaving but in Beijing they drove great!
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.
Dongbei drivers are famous for their interesting driving (but I’m going by hearsay and that one famous song about it).
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).
Yeh the congestion on Beijing's ring roads is pretty awful. Orderly but awful, also less EVs than ideal.
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.
When I was there (ages ago), the driver of the bus I was on overtook on a blind corner on a road cantilevered off a cliff. They did cross themselves before doing it.
A low amount of low stress people can be found late at night, on highways at negligible traffic hours, on the narrow and meandering country roads that everybody learns to avoid, in half-empty parking lots, and many other obvious uncommon situations.
Naples is the first place I got honked at for not cutting the person off. I was at a stop sign, making a left turn onto a main road that had a steady stream of traffic. Apparently, I was supposed to wait a few seconds and then just creep out, cutting cars off on the way, which is what I believe the driver on the main road meant when he beeped at me and gesticulated wildly while I was sitting still at the stop sign.
That city was the first place where I saw a guy traffic splitting with a car. It was an ancient topolino, but my jaw dropped as he was snaking through traffic like on a moped.
Lebanon. Especially Beirut. The honking. Every taxi driver that passed me if I was walking down the street. Honking. Honking. So much noise. All the time.
Six months I was there. Six months of honking honking honking.
I have experience of both Vietnam and India amongst other countries. The latter takes any country, including Vietnam, you can throw at it and wipes the floor with them when it comes to mindless honking.
The bane of every cargo cult cloud op. I worked with a company that had maybe 20 devs total, > 30 "microservices" in kubernetes and one of the most complex bits of the deployment was handling Greylog and Elasticsearch. Still they couldn't manage high availability, despite logging all the things. Go figure.
I once worked for a unicorn that got near-zero traffic during the pandemic, but nobody could understand why some services were struggling to stay up.
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.
Oh most definitely. Maybe my sarcasm was a bit too subtle.
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.
It has definitely gotten much worse. The only thing keeping me sane is hacking solo projects in languages with great tooling. I don't think I can even stomach interviews anymore, let alone the whole application process farce.
I remember doing an interview with systems design using microservices and mentioning at the end "Well I guess that's it but if this was my personal project I would just have a single server and no native cloud bs".
The guy basically answered "Oh, same. I just ask for people to do microservices because that's how the CTO wants".
We sold physical hardware with bundled software, so we could actually create the problem via in-market software update that didn't exist at time of sale! Fun times.
HPE also had this issue with their ILO 4. New firmware fixed that issue but if your flash chip was already worn out you're out of luck and the only solution is to replace the entire motherboard.
How is writing excessive logs to a destined-to-fail flash chip in a car's electronics system not a poor design choice? Pretend the person wrote "poorly-designed electronics implementations/sytems" or similar, because that's obviously the intended meaning.
If the flash was better, the product wouldn't fail so quickly. It's really a combination of poorly designed electronics, and a software bug wasn't there, the fault wouldn't have popped up so early.
it isn't a software fault, it's a whole defective system that was designed poorly end-to-end: the software does something inappropriate, which the hardware cannot bear, probably because of a high level mandate to write too many logs and to be too cheap.
I understand the concept, but the question I have is why?
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.
I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’
This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy.
Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff.
And you’re left with bunch of MBAs trying to wing it in what is available which is - no talent, bunch of admineers, and a long list of supplier bills.
They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings!
I can go on and on about this, but one of us even tried to be Tesla trying to build our own zonal architecture - and are currently struggling due to costs, tarrifs and turnover.
Also you can’t overnight change this mindset - building vs assembling. But there has to be some way and I’m too about to walk out the door due to ~10yrs of frustrations.
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.
Yeah, and then those contractors (like Continental) has sub-contractors (like Akka) and they have sub-sub-contractors (some random Indian software company) working on the side mirror winding logic.
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
The main topic is software and it is still treated like a part you can just outsource and plug in.
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]
Given that the driving characteristics of most of the cars on the road don't match a BMW, what're the real "real important car things"? The revealed preference seems to be that the things you listed aren't actually that important. Long term cost is. Maintenance cost is. Not having to bring your car to the dealership for service is. Having the car have a long lifetime is. Handling well is nice; sporty drivetrain is nice; but that sort of stuff is clearly just a luxury, and the bottom dropped out of the luxury market recently (see: LVMH restructuring). If you're going to buy a sporty luxury car, why not get a Porsche or something with more cachet? Obviously there are reasons, but BMW's in an awkward position.
A good design from engineering standpoint. You feel it just instantly when you use the product. Interior is nice and will accommodate just about every possible driver comfortably with every control reachable. Suspension just works frkn great no matter how it was tuned (sporty or comfortable) and no matter how simple the design is. Same for drivetrain, you will acelerate/decelerate precisely how much you'd expect. And it's not a luxury it's a norm, even cheapest german or french cars have all this things sorted out. I'm speaking for the EU market though)
Well, yes. The legacy car companies are ossified. They want to keep churning out minute variations on the same cars, and regard software as a thin layer for the entertainment system. They don't want to adapt to EVs, which force a redesign of the car as a whole. They're going to get run over by Chinese companies unless they can beg for tariffs to prop up their un-innovation.
Isn't the trouble that agile is not compatible with things that has to be thoroughly made, 'finalized before release', like in every mission critical production? Casuality and the dyamic free spirit primised has much much less space here.
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.
> They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings!
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.
Rinse and repeat across hundreds of components and your team "pays for itself"
"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?
And with the help of software your get: this algorithm works well to recognize signs using 2 cameras. We can alter it a little to make it work with 1 camera (huge savings) and losing like 10% accuracy. With a cheaper camera we lose again some accuracy but even more savings.
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.
I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.
I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."
In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.
Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.
That is one component in one model. Car makers have several models with maybe hundreds (or thousands?) of electrical components. Plus "cost-saving" has always been a surefire way of ensuring bonus.
Yes sometimes it’s a dollar or two and it really adds up quick. Sometimes 10’s of dollars. That door speaker can be few dollars cheap - you may get 2% more THD in a frequency band… the conversations can be really reduced down to ‘meh subjectively not noticeable’ but will save us a million.
Add few of these things and now you have a shitty radio system but 5 mil in bank.
Speakers are a bit of a funny one, because, with the important condition that the amp needs to not be crap, they’re pretty straightforward to upgrade for the end user.
There have been attempts at it. Unfortunately, they consistently botch the execution so badly that most of the executives in the business have PTSD from the experience. And these were very expensive failures that become lore inside the companies. When they do acquisitions of small companies entering this market those end up getting smothered by the culture of the automotive companies.
Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.
The answer is that current car platforms were designed with flexibility as first goal.
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.
To be fair, this seemed to be the right strategy since they were able to be profitable in a very crowded market. Yes, the new companies try to verticalize everything from components to software, but none of them seem profitable (marginally Tesla passes the bar, but not so sure if you took away all the subsidies and carbon offsets).
I can tell you this works if your product doesn’t need frequent upgrades/updates and isn’t cohesive.
In legacy auto world, you ask for one line of code change and the supplier slaps 100k bill.
This is generally why things look old, outdated, carried over and buggy.
I totally agree with what you say. I am just not sure if the car market is willing to pay a premium to have this nicer fully integrated experience. Maybe there is space for a couple of premium makers.
My preference would be do less! Shift all the nav and entertainment to phone integration; stop trying to make half assed shit versions of those. How many billions were spent on that?
Tesla took the hit for the transportation industry, working their asses off and pioneering the costly ramp up to mass production of EVs, so the subsidies are the government compensating them for having not taken the easy path that the legacy auto makers are taking with their continued production of polluting gas cars and their half-hearted introduction of compliance cars.
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.
In Q1 2025, Tesla made $595 million on selling environmental credits/carbon offsets to other car makers. Net income for the whole company was $409 million.
How many issues due large companies run into thinking they can just throw money at it? Just look at google and stadia, or amazon and their failed game studio. They have immense money and knowledge and ended up with nothing.
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.
At the same time, we've had car companies putting out cars for 20 years with 10s of different modules built by different companies and things have been working just fine. Suddenly it's a problem because apparently everyone needs a giant screen on the dashboard?
Because the auto companies outsource everything, lay the risk onto the outsourced companies and expect that some significant percentage of them will go bankrupt every year.
With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.
I worked at BMW. I knew there was a project in there, using a certain ECU that was being quite problematic (as in, project being slightly late because ECU was a bit buggy and sometimes crashed when it was supposed to have almost 100% of uptime for legal reasons).
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.
When I started my career I had a very keen interest in the embedded space, but when it pays half of what CRUD webapps pay I quickly changed to software only. I still tinker with embedded on the side and maybe at some point I can justify the cut in pay to go back to something I'd prefer to work on.
They don't have a culture that values it, at any level. Historically hardware was important and software was a nice-to-have addon cost center. That's the mentality that the people at the top are still in, and it trickles down.
They did the opposite for decades in the hope to save some bucks, they outsourced everything so only business people remained.
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.
This also works the opposite way. If the software roadmap does not inform the hardware requirements, then minimization of the bill of materials will lead to the selection of crappy hardware chips.
If you’re making very low end HW maybe this is true. Because HW is something that you put into the real world there are other constraints such as power, cooling, space, security of supply, ability to ramp, cost, reliability, etc. The calculus for HW selection is much more involved than simply SW. Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. This is a very rare skill in 2025. Most SW engineers I’ve encountered cannot explain stack vs heap. Furthermore even fewer understand how to use malloc correctly.
> Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW.
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.
I feel like Subaru Eyesight violates this, which is why I’m so surprised with it. It’s a stereo camera system that just works so darn well. I’ve got to imagine the hardware that runs it is not insignificant.
This is weird because the microprocessor industry owes a lot of early success to automotive companies. Motorola 6800, Intel 8061 (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vaul...) etc. Quoting wikipedia: "the name "Motorola" by linking "motor" (from motor car) with "ola" (from Victrola), which was also a popular ending for many companies at the time, e.g. Moviola, Crayola"
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.
I’m in a loaner 2025 Volvo right now and I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised with the Android Auto setup. I thought I’d never again use anything other than phone projection, but nope — I can install Google Maps and Spotify and sign into both, and then my profiles and everything are right there including search history, and it’s actually more seamless and integrated than switching between CarPlay and the native/outer car UI.
Give it five years and it will be guaranteed garbage. Spotify will refuse to run on an unsupported older Android without the latest DRM API, while Google Maps will crash your system randomly, requiring you to disconnect the car battery to jumpstart it again. Volvo will offer you an upgrade of their proprietary device at the low price of $1899.
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.
I've been using Apple CarPlay on a car that was manufactured in 2016. There are some occasional issues with the infotainment system, but CarPlay works as well as it did nearly 10 years ago. It is much more likely that CarPlay will continue to function just as well whereas proprietary systems made by car manufacturers are going to start showing their age.
> There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car.
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.
The version in Volvo and Polestar's is actually Android Automotive, which is it's own Android distribution with it's own version of Maps/Spotify etc. Funnily it even has Android Auto functionality too.
Although it didn't use to have Android Auto, which was awful. Because as you alluded to, Android apps are not automatically available on AAOS. As it happens the music app I use is not available on AAOS, so until Volvo added Android Auto support to their cars I could not get a good experience with my music.
Yes, Android Auto has some of the standardized interface features I was talking about, allowing the general computing needs to be fulfilled by a device brought by the user.
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.
Why did you think you'd "never again" use anything like Android Auto?
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.
Overall I’m a fan of the projection model, and I definitely see the benefit in longevity as well as the ability for older vehicles to get a retrofit head unit that adds in the projection interface.
My reflection was only that I was surprised at how well the built in apps worked when I tried them… but I definitely take it on board that it’s unlikely to still work this well 5, 10, or 15 years from now, so it’s important that the car still has projection available as a fallback.
Having your accounts, preferences, and history follow you into the car without juggling cables or switching UIs is exactly the kind of seamless experience SDVs should be delivering
This is only half the story, working for a major vendor, we sell both hardware and software, the whole way up to a full customisable well integrated platform. The manufacturers are deliberately choosing less capable systems, or taking thing piecemeal.
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.
> customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money
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.
Well, consider, you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't.
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
This is, incidentally, why it's so important to have a free market in software separate from hardware, despite what Apple may think. You can't have a free market competing on every possible feature; some features are going to be dominant. So people will choose cars based on size, aesthetics, price and brand .. but not on the quality of the software, which is very hard for them to evaluate even on a test drive.
> you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't
At the time, I did not pay much attention to the software, because I never expected it could be so bad. Now I know better, and my next choice will consider software as one of the main factors (I don't be buying a swasticar anytime soon, though).
If VW and all other product manufacturers of products containing universal machines as components were forced to charge customers a 100% sales tax on all such end-of-chain products, UNLESS all (and I do mean all, down to the controller on the SSD or the battery controller or whatever) universal machines in the product complied with the following:
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.
There are other competitors for that segment, even the Q4e on the same platform has better UI. People still buy the ID4 because it's not enough of a deciding factor.
Hyundai/Kia make very good EVs. I am extremely happy with my new Kona. I would not say the software is amazing, but it is responsive, nice to use and has pretty much everything you need.
I have a VAG ICE vehicle and had a problem with the navigation system not working. When I brought it in to get it fixed, they apparently put a completely new version of the software on the hardware.
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.
I can't recall any car that didn't have any 'teething problems'. Some cars I've owned had multiple recalls. Of course it doesn't look good, but often it's to fix the probability of a problem occurring: it's not that the doors instantly swing open when touched by a drop of water.
Not at all, a high end car will use an entirely different architecture to a mid/low end...
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.
What you mean by different architecture here? I've never seen a situation where manufacturers choose fundamentally different architectures between price points on the same platform. I feel like I'm misunderstanding what you mean though.
Someone like Ford for example will have several software platforms, some for low cost vehicles, some high, some that are adaptable between trim levels.
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.
I think it's fair to say that the software in a modern car contains lot more functionality than an average smartphone. Drivers just aren't aware of how much is happening in their car each second.
To someone that knows nothing about car SW architecture, that is surprising to me, I would have expected a number of control loops for things like fuel injection, ABS brake control, drive-by-wire, EV battery charge and discharge, etc. each running on their own processor due real-time safety considerations. These I would expect to be different implementations and parameterizations of the same control theory maths.
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 am also not deeply into this stuff. But there is more going on in a car than what you list.
One probably surprising thing is that an LCD dashboard is usually driven by multiple rendering stacks. One is for the complex graphics and eye candy. The other one is responsible for brake and engine warning lights etc. and is considered safety critical. The second one is very basic and often partitioned off by a hypervisor.
A lot of these controllers are running more than just control loops. They are also actively monitoring their system for failures. The number of possible failure conditions and responses is quite large. I had instances where e.g. the engine warning light came on because the ECU detected that the brake light switch was faulty. In another instance, I had powered steering turn itself off during a drive because it had developed a fault. These kinds of behaviors are the results of dedicated algorithms that are watching just about every component of safety critical systems that can possibly be monitored.
All of these software systems are provided by different vendors who develop the aplication software based on either their own stack or operating systems and middleware provided by other upstream suppliers. It don't think it's uncommon for a car to contain multiple copies of 3 or 4 different RTOS stacks. Nobody at the car manufacturers is enforcing uniformity in the software stacks that the suppliers deliver. The manufacturers tend to want finished, self-contained hardware units that they can plug in, configure and turn on.
Because a low and high cost phone do essentially the same thing, whereas a high trim car will do things like steering assistance in a way the low trim does not do at all.
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.
Yes, different platforms have different architectures. Within a platform, the system level architecture will be relatively fixed. OEMs will part subsystems out to different tier 1s for different vehicles on that platform, but that's (ideally) just plugging different boxes together on the OEM side.
There's a lot of very expensive development tools (e.g. dSpace simulators) that rely on this model of automotive development.
It was encouraging to hear an exec from Ford recently say essentially this in an interview. The legacy manufacturers seem to realize that Tesla is eating their lunch because of their lack of vertical integration. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve but will be interesting to see what effort achieves.
Tesla was eating their lunch in terms of software, integration, capabilities, apps. Then rivian came along and a few other companies doing a much better job than the awful legacy companies.
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.
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.
I had one of the most popular published projects on mp3car.com back in the heyday. It actually got me into a few strange meetings with companies that were actually building this stuff, like Clarion. I had literally designed, built, and installed a superior product to what they shipped as a one-off for fun in 3 months, but to them I was just a token enthusiast.
The vocabulary that these people started throwing out was absolute nonsense. It was pretty evident that "vehicle informatics" was fucked the second someone said those words out loud. And here we are more than 20 years later and still no closer to getting it right. Despite being seemingly well regarded, even Tesla's in car systems are just awful. And it's more impossible than ever to fix, modify, or replace on your own.
Sounds like a potential business opportunity! I don't know much about cars, how much is standardized in car electronics? Would it be possible to build a infotainment module that you could sell to several car manufacturers with only minimal modifications?
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.
That's what many OEMs have been doing for decades and this is exactly what many SDV have been trying to get rid of, since integrating many different products from many different manufacturers are slow, let alone iterating and designing new features.
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.
Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know.
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.
As an embedded developer I usually point to the fact that there is generalist hard and software available for the primitive problem an infotainment systems needs to solve. At least for that side I don't see how generalist pc hardware wouldn't suffice and fit probably 95% of use cases.
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.
How much extra work have automakers made for themselves by pridefully(?) refusing to use Android Automotive to handle some of the very things that auto makers are worse at?
For those unaware: the Volkswagen Up! is a small, low-budget car produced by VW group, it's also sold as the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii. AFAIK it was only sold in Europe and Latin-America.
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...
>>> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
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.
FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …
I mean the EEs / MEs can certainly turn out a board and housing in under 6 months, certainly on a yearly cycle. Though for the current automakers, they don't have a team for this so it would take them probably 3 iterations to get good enough to actually scale it to a mass market car, and that is if their team has good talent and strong leadership.
You're right that legacy OEMs can't pivot overnight and start fabbing their own boards, but unless they move toward tighter integration of hardware and software (or lock down long-term partnerships that function like internal teams), they’re going to stay in this awkward middle ground.
>Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
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.
This seems like it is also a „purchase department got the cheapest crap instead of something reasonable“ problem. You don’t need to actually make your own electronics if the specs are decent and the features match your needs.
> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
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?
When you design electronics you have to produce millions of, it takes a couple of dev 'spins' and usually a couple of prod 'spins' to get to the mass market board. Usually the PMs, EEs, MEs and SWEs get together and spec out a schematic, then the EEs will create the first draft of the board. There is usually extra connectors and test points on this board to ease testing and development. Once they verify it powers on, I as an embedded software engineer, start producing the software to get it running, or 'brought up'. While that is happening EE testing is going on for all sorts of things like EMI, power, communication speeds, etc. Besides the software I actually write, the chipset vendor's drivers need to be added and tested as well, there are always little things that take longer than they should. I've lost a lot of schedule to very subtle issues with chips.
As we progress along, the schematic or layout gets updated and new versions are produced. Maybe the traces need to change to reduce EMI, maybe a chipset isn't workign well or we find a cheaper equivalent and swap it out. Then once everything looks good we move to a production version, all the test points are removed, and we start putting in orders for the parts we need in volume. If you want a million of something you usually have to order in advance. Then you start bringing the factory online, helping with factory test software...and well the point is the cycle time for all this is like 6 months for a tight ship. More like a year if the kind of thing your making is novel to the team since you need a longer dev time.
I’m not sure if you’ve worked around hardware but a year is not very long in these environments, and that 5 year plan is less like a sensible, let alone obvious step to take and more like a crazy leap of faith.
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.
Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place.
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.
Because they are not electronics companies, and further more they are terrible integration companies.
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.
Precisely, such a change represents substantial risk in an incredibly risk-averse industry. People at orgs in such industries are in constant CYA mode, looking to point responsibility (and therefore blame) to anyone else.
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.
It is possible to put out a fire by dumping cash on it, but there's a minimum amount that you need to dump at once for it to work. They cannot stomach the amount required, so they just feed it in one handful at a time, which of course just causes the fire to grow.
When I was working at $samsung_competitor, my NDA'd next gen android phone prototypes (a huge motherboard with a screen) were sent some years earlier. Like Samsung is on S25 now, and we would get boards for S27... It takes a long time for these things to evolve.
I feel like I'm on crazy pills sometimes when talking with people who deal mostly with software. I think SW engineers sometimes think that engineering generally looks like what they do, when in reality SW is a deep outlier wrt process...
The word “engineering” in SWE is just plain wrong. Present day software development has nothing to do with engineering outside of some very niche markets (aviation, mission-critical systems, embedded controllers). The term vibe coding came up really handy because it describes how 99% of software is developed much better than “software engineering“, with or without LLMs. That’s why it’s always fun to read such discussions of hardware vs software people.
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.
The VW and Rivian tie up for electronics will help answer if a traditional automaker can catch up if the electronics integration bit is taken off the table.
Remove the LTE chip and all functionality related to ads, support wireless CarPlay and android auto, and use physical buttons. You’ll win every award in the industry.
Mazda has done a great job at this so far, very minimal screen which automatically just shows CarPlay, and buttons for all the normal car stuff, which also isn’t overdone. The only flaw is the scroll wheel to interact with the screen, which is just slightly too clunky in apps with too many options
My 2017 Mazda cx5 refuses to not play the radio. There is no "off" for the audio, you have to choose a source. I use my phone, via bluetooth. But sometimes, for unknown reasons, the car does not connect with the phone. It then falls back to the last source chosen before BT, which is radio.
Okay, so I created a flash drive with an mp3 of 30 seconds of silence, played that, then went back to bluetooth. This failback strategy worked one time, then it also failed to recognize the flash drive, and failed back to radio, again.
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.
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.
Long pressing the source button turns off audio and keeps it from turning on automatically on the next start. This at least lets you explicitly decide when you want music.
Re: radio always turning on, my LDV eDeliver 9 is the same but worse - sometimes the radio comes on immediately, and sometimes it takes about 20 seconds. You can’t preemptively mute it in the latter case. There’s lots of other weird quirks with the radio (e.g. going into reverse switches to a low-volume radio if you were previously playing music or a podcast in CarPlay). It’s as-if almost any change in the audio switches the radio on.
Other than that, it’s a great van!
While not dramatically better, just a few posts down[0] someone paid for the "Welcome to Mazda" service manuals/program for $30 and shared the fuse box schematics
I have tried that (not on a Mazda). The radio is still there playing whatever and if there is a valid station the now playing song has to be shown on the other useful screen. On I got the system to default to radio off, but that means I can't control my heated seats w=ithout turning the system on - there are several seconds of noise between getting the system on and it responding tol the volumn knob.
I think making manufacturers pay you back the whole car in a recall, or half the car and you keep it, for this kind of crappy design, would be a good thing (especially since I am sure the firmware is code signed lolol). Oh no more Matsuda or GM because they went bankrupt from fines and restitution? Cry me a river, sucks to suck cutting corners lol.
Mazda also managed to squander a huge brand and structural advantage by falling into lockstep behind other Japanese automakers in underinvesting in EV manufacturing infrastructure. Now they have to rely on their JV partner Changan to lead the way in producing EVs, giving up the core structural strengths that Mazda previously had in designing and building their own components - including software and controls, which in the Changan-led models have no continuity at all with Mazda's domestic models. They just superficially copy the Mazda exterior design language while wholly dependent on Chinese supply chains (and some Android Auto for the software, it seems) for manufacturing the actual EV.
While that might affect their market share in HN neighborhoods I assure you Mazda is making money hand over fist selling their boring non-hybrid SUVs to normal people. People love them and they sell.
I know Mazda makes good boring SUVs, I own one. I like Mazda's design philosophy, that's why I want them to succeed. In terms of vehicles sold, Mazda's sales peaked in 2017, the year before I bought my most recent one. As best I can tell, operating profit peaked in 2016.
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).
Mazda’s operating margin is higher than Walmart’s (along with many others). I think hyper scalable sectors like high tech and finance distort our OM expectations.
Operating margin is irrelevant, only profit margin matters for this context. Walmart hangs out in the 2.5% to 3.5% range, not materially different than Mazda. Either way, any business with a low single digit profit margin is not making money hand over fist. It might be different if Mazda had such a huge and loyal market share that their low profit margins are offset by low volatility of expected future sales (such as with Walmart/Costco), but that isn't the case at all with Mazda.
Their expectation is that their sales will be stagnant at best, but probably decline for the foreseeable future.
It's not about unusual, just that a low profit margin in a volatile industry is (with a downward trend in sales for almost 10 years), by definition, not making money hand over fist. That is why their market cap graph looks like this:
A lot of people still don’t want or can’t really afford EVs given their limitations. I’d say it’s the majority where I live. I directly know only one person who has a full EV (not a hybrid).
I don’t think the Japanese automakers have squandered anything, yet.
We paid maybe a $10K premium for a used EV truck. It gets 2mi/kWh. Most parts of the country are paying ~ $0.125 per kWh, so that’s &0.06 of a dollar in electricity per mile.
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.
For commuter with charging access at office or home EV makes sense. For me making 300+ mile round trips with no charging infra (pull in at the gas station in the foothills) and low overall mileage EV is trickier.
There's a stop, it's just in the middle of nowhere. 20 minute charge would be annoying but survivable assuming they had them in say Lone Pine. And yeah, 20 something mpg and 16 gallon tank multiplies out to a large range.
Including supply and generation, we pay $0.148 / kWh, and yeah, I average $0.06 charging my EV at home on a slow, inefficient 120V / 15A. (Some day I'll upgrade, maybe.) I've never charged anywhere else (except for free at the used car dealer where I bought it.)
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.
China is currently making affordable EVs, though they might not meet (American) expectations of things like range. There’s no reason why traditional automakers couldnt be doing the same had they not focused on larger ice vehicles, hydrogen, or the luxury market.
Hopefully they figure it out because I love my Mazda 3 hatchback and would buy an EV version of it in a heartbeat. Not only is it very fun to drive (I have a manual transmission) but the interior design is excellent.
Mazda's target market is quite different from the EV buyers one, at least here in Europe.
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.
I bought a Mazda3 a few months ago and I love it. It is exactly what I want as a driver.
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.
When I was doing my car shopping two years ago, I was initially considering another Mazda, specifically looking at the Mazda 3 AWD Hatchback. Their high tech features were significantly behind the other Japanese auto manufacturers. Some features like the ability for the car to automatically stay in a lane were not present.
When looking at who is doing it right, I wouldn’t put Mazda on a pedestal. They simply are behind the competition.
Generally agree but they are laying the path to enshitification. You see you can get turn by turn directions on the HUD, but only through their app where they want you to pay $10/mo for the privilege. Same for inputting addresses into their crappy nav system.
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.
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.
I mean we can also change laws again in europe (in favour of that) - but we could also keep it as a separate module. So the LTE chip only gets used for an emergency call and nothing else. No remote control.
Unlikely to happen, but possible (not 100% safe, but good enough).
If you don't turn on the LTE chip, it can take a while to get registered or a network in order to perform an emergency call. If the LTE module is turned on (the same applies for mobile phones) the network operator will know your coarse location because of the LTE specification itself. Furthermore, all communication equipment is legally required to support Lawful Interception; and LTE is no exception to this.
Was my sentence that unclear? I constructed it as a OR. Either change the laws (my favourite solution as I don't like enforced modification of my car) - or use a technical solution to just meet the law.
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).
>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.
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.
Sorry, that's incorrect. I have actually read the law and its relevant standards. The standard requires at least two pre-accident locations to increase accuracy and other fields with pre-crash data are encouraged.
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 MSD (minimum set of data) is defined in: "CEN 15722 ESafety - ECall - Minimum Data Set".
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.
Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location.
The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants. The common OEM implementation these days is that the physical device that does eCall does several things, including eCall, over the same cellular radio. There's nothing stopping the OEM from connecting to a random website and eval()ing the result.
You seem confident in the security of this unhackable system so I will point out some of its other security weaknesses. Several eCall device implementations include Bluetooth modules (both "unused" as part of hardware and implementations that use Bluetooth.) Bluetooth is as secure as a wet cardboard box, so you could take BlueBorne or one of the six million other Bluetooth exploits that work on a non-discoverable device just sitting on the shelf, get in that way and boom, you can transmit whatever you want over the cellular radios. Vehicle infotainment systems are pretty insecure on average and are frequently hacked, so you could take over the infotainment system, get into the CAN bus that way and then send bad data to the eCall system, which is in the business of processing and responding to CAN data.
But those are just a few of the million ways; you could write up attacks all day long and you wouldn't scratch the surface. The facts are: this is a system with cellular radio(s), a CAN bus connection, sensors that constantly listen and interpret data; this is a large attack surface, built by OEMs that write notoriously insecure software. It is, by any reasonable judgment of those facts, a pretty hackable system. And yet, the European Commission goes around telling people that it "cannot" be hacked.
Anyway, this will be my third comment in a row here telling people that their comment is plain incorrect, so I'm going to have to leave the discussion here. I hope that my words provide some food for thought - for the next time that a system that could track you becomes legally mandatory.
> Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location.
I have the standard open, and I don't see it.
> The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants.
Sure. So just choose an automaker that doesn't provide data subscription services and/or don't pay for them. The eCall requirement in itself doesn't require tracking.
Your privacy should not rely on the government's "trust me bro" and it's like we forgot about China owning SS7 last year lol. No, it is plainly obvious to me that the mandate for eCall and the lack of an owner off switch for it is for nannying and surveillance FULL STOP. No option to opt out must be treated the same as the violations to privacy they are attempting to pre-construct the conditions for.
Well, for starters, the SIM card in the eCall system is only needed to receive a callback from the 112 service if the call drops, which the system automatically picks up. You can actually dial 112 without a SIM card in your phone, as a GSM device without one can still connect to nearby radio towers in a "limited-service set," better known as "emergency calls only."
I know some carriers have strange quirks in their SIM provisioning systems. For instance, it may take more than a few minutes or require a specific type of coverage (like UMTS) for an otherwise "dormant" SIM card to activate from limited service on short notice.
And naturally of course you don't carry a cellphone with you while you drive...you know, that device with accelerometers, GPS and an LTE chip that you leave powered on all the time on your person?
You are also free not to use a mode of transportation. You can, for example, buy an old car, register it on a historical number plate, and you’re good. There is no retrofit requirement. If you want a new car, suck it up.
I'm always amused at people who deem future and freedom of choice incompatible and effectively stating that the end game of all progress is absolute slavery and obedience.
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
Ah yes, brilliant reasoning. "You carry one device that can be tracked as long as you're carrying it so what's the problem with having tracking baked into your vehicle?"
I can actually remove my number plate. One tool, five minutes, car still drives.
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.
I’m certain you aren’t that important for anyone to care.
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.
> I’m certain you aren’t that important for anyone to care.
Storage is cheap. We know the NSA hoovers up everything it can and puts in a database. This is facile reasoning.
> So you can get help.
How many accidents resulted in fatalities because 911 couldn't find the victim? What's the percentage on that you think? Is there _no other way_ to get help other than this system?
> I’m sure someone more qualified than you would have already reported if
You're just full of confidence. Pray tell where it comes from. What makes you believe this is true?
> You're just full of confidence. Pray tell where it comes from. What makes you believe this is true?
I trust in people who look for this stuff as a daily job, or because „they’re here to get you”. Because you know a sim card in the open is really easy to verify. And there are thousands of them driving around but also easily approachable sitting targets in every possible setting.
But you double down. I find this discussion pointless.
> How many accidents resulted in fatalities because 911 couldn't find the victim?
You’re missing the point of the eCall system. Think out of the box. What if there is no witness? What if everyone in the car cannot get help
Everyone who could reach out for help, received it. Can you tell the same about those who weren’t able to contact first responders in time? Maybe they’re still missing! It’s called survivorship bias.
Almost like sometimes people get seriously injured in car accidents and can't get to their phone, assuming it's where it was left prior to the accident.
Let people decide if their fear of death warrants all kinds of surveillance on them and not shove that down their throats as in "we know that many of you would opt-out of being tracked so we made it mandatory", alright?
There's nothing at all sensible about legally mandating that all cars must have a device which can be used for surveillance. Still less so for something which is at best a marginal gain in safety.
That’s interesting - what vehicles require you to do that? I know the usual suspect is the Tesla, which I have, but I never have to navigate through menus to change the temperature while driving.
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.
> 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.
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.
We can - but we don’t need to clutch our pearls about infotainment screens as if they are some sort of special moral insult relative to what’s very common in today’s driving communities.
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?
We are talking millions of cars driving at a speed that can kill people both inside or outside the car. Anything you can do to reduce those distractions is a net positive for society. Less death.
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 live in America it’s just not enforced. Even cops do it. I don’t do it because I just don’t need to but you can watch people doing it for yourself if you pay attention.
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.
As a Linux fan and owner of a Sync 1.0 vehicle I feel your pain. I want to replace it with something aftermarket, but the cost of a dash kit is pretty steep if you want one of decent quality. I reboot it weekly, which takes minutes, so it doesn't freeze during the week. I'm guessing there's memory leak that takes a while to accumulate.
I've got a Ranger with SYNC 4. HVAC has its own set of buttons and dials below the display, but you can use the touchscreen widgets too if you want to.
Just bought a 2022 Mustang to avoid the 2024-2025 series for SYNC 4 and the removal of physical buttons. Car is nice but can’t get past the whole digital set up.
We rented a BMW which had all climate settings on a touch screen. That touch screen crashed once and we couldn't turn the air con off without trying to reboot the car which isn't exactly trivial since there isn't any obvious off button.
Subaru require you navigating to second screen for climate modes. Simple temp adjustment has buttons, but the screen interactions for basic usage feels dangerous as a driver.
I’m being pedantic but the OP did specifically say they need to “navigate through screens to adjust the temperature” which I think is different than setting climate modes. Not that I’m defending that you might have to do that specifically, but I was responding to the OP’s specific wording.
The industry keeps chasing "connected experiences" and ad monetization while ignoring what most drivers actually want: responsiveness, simplicity, and reliability
I don't even think they've built a single prototype. I'd be happy to be corrected but last time I checked, none of the "prototype" shells they showed off had a powertrain.
This is the same way that hn proclaims every single arxiv paper as revolutionary. I really wonder sometimes who is this gullible on the internet (kids? bots? I
influencers?)
I think the market for base Mavericks is pretty small. At that point it's really not providing much value over an SUV with rear seats that fold down. I agree not everyone wants to spend 40-80k, but that doesn't mean they want to spend $20k for a small no-frills EV in the shape of a truck with not many other similarities.
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.
AWD is only standard on the fanciest Maverick trim and not an option picked by the couple of folks I know with them. But that + the bed length doesn't seem to be stopping them from loving their trucks. Tacos also start at 5' IIRC.
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.
For a pickup truck, if you're buying it so it's "there when you need it," it removes a lot of value if it's gotta stay in the garage during the winter.
Though yes, I could see it being less important if that's not an issue in your area.
It's not a truck. It's for people who need more than a car, but less than a truck. A Cuck? (oh, wait...) A Truar? Either way, those specs are plenty for the average person that just wants to haul some stuff, or pull a small trailer, and not burn too much energy while doing it (or not doing it).
I seem to remember Jeep saying manual window winders were actually more expensive once you factor in the costs of having them as an option given how cheap electric ones are when they dropped them for the new Wrangler. Might still be cheaper if you only manufacture with them and don’t offer electric but the price difference can’t be that high.
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.
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.
All depends on how they market it. Wind down windows to me today is an aesthetic statement - “we are selling a cheap, no frills vehicle - look see! Even wind down windows”
Such positioning could be what the intended customer base react well to.
My biggest concern is lack of a stereo. Did they include speaker cutouts and wires, or are you looking at a $1000 labor bill, minimum?
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 mean, they did something, for sure, but they sure as hell didn't do "this" ;P. What they are doing is more in the line of not providing even hardware, much less software, which is an entirely different paradigm... like, they don't even provide speakers?!...
Don't know about the rest of the world, but the EU requires e-call (automatic emergency call after an accident) for all new cars now so you can't sell cars without an LTE chip.
... but you can be a bro and make sure that hardware is close to the surface somewhere for easy access, its presence isn't required to start and operate the car (either firmware check or the immobilizer performing metrics), and its removal does not cause an obvious and annoying alert during operation (IE removal should not make the car appear to be in a 'degraded' state per its indicators).
You are complying by installing it, the customers are the ones [easily] removing it [because you were a bro].
It is mandatory to have and it is in checklist during annual vehicle check. Without it it is not street legal. And the car should show an error in case the module is removed/failed.
Really, it's only surveillance, thinly veiled as safety. The reality is that my car is no safer with an LTE modem. Zilch. Zero. It's purely surveillance, if you don't fall for the marketing.
In fact, I'm going to find mine and faraday that shit this weekend.
Let me guess: you are afraid of the surveillance, use only cash for payment, pager for connectivity and have no permanent address?
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.
That is a blatant reductio ad absurdum. People should have the right to reasonable privacy without being homeless and off grid.
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.
The Nissan Leaf is (was?) what you describe, apart from the LTE chip. The LTE doesn't seem to do much without NissanConnect (which was actually written by Bosch).
That's just for cables, I think you still need MFI (and all the paperwork and approvals and cost and the chip itself) that go with it if you want to implement a CarPlay receiver.
Does anyone prefer wired CarPlay over Wireless CarPlay?
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.
> Does anyone prefer wired CarPlay over Wireless CarPlay?
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.
Yeah all I want is something that holds the phone and gives it a USB-C port that charges it, lets me play media through it, and lets buttons on the wheel control the phone (volume, next/previous, and programmable go forward/back x seconds buttons).
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.
It's the latency that kills me. Let alone the stupid "you're an idiot if you let this screen distract and kill you" message that pops up, it seems to take a good 10+ seconds to sync with the phone and "come alive".
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.
But some do, don't they? It seems to me that Hyundai will initiate the phone connection right when you open the driver's door. Then, as you sit down and start the car, the infotainment has already booted up and the phone connection comes online almost immediately.
Also, during short stops, the screens go black but the connection is kept up, so when you re-start, there is no delay.
The Slate truck won’t have CarPlay because it won’t have infotainment at all. If you want Carplay buy one of the dozens of offerings from companies like Alpine and have it installed at one of the thousands of stereo shops across the country. You’ll get exactly what you want from experts in what you want.
Physical controls are worth it for me. Having a press to talk button, track advance and volume controls on my steering wheel is a pretty nice quality of life feature. I could do without a screen if the car has that.
My car even has a relatively small console screen but still prefer it over my (non-plus size) iPhone. I could live with just my iPhone on USB but consider the center screen a plus. (The vehicle is pretty good about climate control etc. on buttons.)
My old ford tourneo custom has a well placed phone holder. I use this and a MagSafe charger plugged into usb port on dash. Works great, I can use my phone, or anybody else can use the van and their phone, it’s really easy. Just looked and newer models have great big touch screen instead :(
I mean I have that already, a Volkswagen E-Up that has a cradle for a phone with a USB port behind it for charging. They even have an app that connects to your car directly(through Bluetooth! No fancy subscription based nonsense) and shows you all charging/energy consumption figures.
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.
You get a new holder. The one that came with our e-Up was too small for my S24 Ultra, so I just got an adapter on eBay for like £3 and installed a new holder(with wireless charging!). Where there's a market need someone will provide a solution.
I'm not sure why you have the downvotes. Even it's mostly just about GPS, the built-in screen is better than iPhone on a somewhat dodgy clip attached to a vent someplace. Unless the car were otherwise compelling--and it's a pretty competitive market--not sure I'd buy a car without CarPlay.
The more premium Opel Astra K models had a phone holder built-in (optional accessory, but you get the point) that would also charge the phone. Practically no one bought it so they removed it in later models.
Removing LTE would remove key features that drivers want, including real time traffic updates, remote controls and streaming media? What's your objection to LTE?
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.
That's a concern for privacy focused individuals, who are a very small fraction of the consumer market, despite being common here on HN. If the last few decades have shown anything, it's that most consumers don't rank privacy highly as a desired feature for products in anything but the most abstract ways.
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.
Some privacy concious customers know that data collected by China is less relevant than data your own legislation could get access to, but that is a different point.
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.
I just want to be able to disable things even if they're default on. Or if not a software toggle, perhaps pull out the SIM card so the connectivity goes away.
I don't think it's a huge assumption. It was in the past, but not anymore.
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.
The only problem with CarPlay (and presumably AA) is lack of integration with the car…
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).
Right, and Apple Car Play does it out the gate. So much so that I can say "Navigate to Doctor X" and it does it. And it did it without convoluted requirements on the vehicle side. And it will continue to do it, because Apple's navigation isn't going to rot like the car manufacturers will.
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.
The moment you pick a non-techie off the street and help them see the amount of data collection occurring, you have another person who proves the assumption. It's not a huge assumption.
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.
I have never once seen someone use the manufacturer provided traffic data, navigation, or "streaming media" over their phone when given the choice. Let's be real; it's just an excuse to try to subject customers to another subscription fee.
Why does anyone need any of those except maybe remote start. The rest are handled though CarPlay. Nobody wants built in navigation that the phone already does
Looking back at the last 10 years how my fellow developers write code, the last thing I want is software defined vehicles. No one is rewarded for writing good code or for handling all the edge cases. People are rewarded for getting things done. The problem is, that this approach works e.g. for non-critical web applications, but not for cars, which are dangerous, heavy object traveling at high speeds.
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.
I would argue that the software quality of ADAS systems is very different from Infotainment.
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.
I believe you, that these systems work. However, I watched too many videos about cars on which it doesn’t. Many of them were expensive cars. Phantom breaking is really scary to me. I’d rather have full control of the car, than letting some system randomly emergency brake the car for no reason.
ABS and ESP one can anticipate. ESP usually can even be turned off.
Statistics work on generic population but mush away a lot.
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.
I have a new EV9 and the software on it regularly causes near miss accidents. I’m waiting to see accident statistics after it’s been on the market for a while. They’ll be dismal.
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.
The future we want: The Ford Econoline rebooted with diesel-electric hybrid and full EV powertrain options, kei truck style flatbed with foldable sidewalls and tailgate, built on an actual frame so custom bed options are now possible, fully analog controls, no connectivity or center console display of any kind.
I want the center console, but not hooked to the rest of the car. Instead, it’d have a standard screen, and a jog wheel that’s compatible with third party computers.
I’d settle for a bluetooth (call and music) capable fm radio though.
Serious question: Have you ever driven a vehicle that didn't have a center console display? Not having an ipad in the middle of the dash vying for your attention is pretty sweet.
It is only as inevitable as consumers' alreadism-driven apathy. The moment they recognize that Car As A Service is something out of the sane world and having a means of transportation that can simply expire or be blocked remotely for a far-fetched TOS violation is against their interests, all inevitablism goes up in flames.
The worst one is automatic brights. Some cars don't even have a button to disable it, and it's only like 75% reliable at detecting an oncoming car as to not blind the other driver.
Interestingly, for me this worked very well. On my BMW M235i it was flawless. It had normal beams, and one could turn on the auto beams. One button to switch it on/off. I really liked it, as it was easy to activate, did its job, and when in doubt, I could deactivate it easily (button).
On my VW Golf GTD (mk7) it works also pretty good, only the activation/deactivation is strange. It uses the same switch, which is used to switch on the beams. Depending on the current state, it activates the beams, auto beam or turns it off. After more than a year of ownership, I still don’t know how to use it. Sometimes when I need to turn it off, it doesn’t turn off, but does something I don’t want it to do.
So I have serious thoughts about driving “software defined vehicles” in the future. I mean, and the article has confirmed this sufficiently, the core competence of the established car manufacturers is not software. I don't trust the newcomers like Tesla or the Chinese manufacturers for the time being. In my opinion, the same standards should apply to software in motor vehicles as in the aviation industry. And there can't be things like permanent internet connectivity, on-the-fly updates or anything else that is suitable for consumer entertainment devices. So I'm seriously considering whether my next car should be an “analog” one - but it's going to be difficult, a Lada [1] (not so exotic in Germany, where I live) is only available second-hand because of the Russia sanctions. I'm happy to accept alternative suggestions!
My car randomly braked today because it thought a car on a side road was pulling out. Not just sound the alarm but actually apply the brakes. Fortunately I didn't have a tailgater behind me.
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.
This happened to be on a highway when driving my friends car with all these assisted driving "features" while in cruise control. I was going up a small hill and for whatever reason there was a car stopped right at the top that I couldn't see. So the car slammed the breaks while I was in the middle of swerving out of the way. Which caused me to swerve more than I had intended. After I regained control it removed the breaks and attempted to return to the 80mph I was at previously which caused more problems because I wasn't ready for that.
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.
This happened to me a couple of years ago where the car I was driving decided that one of those water-filled tanks ahead of a barrier on a road under construction was in front of the car just because the road was curving hard to the right. It was very scary. It almost caused an accident by itself. I don't remember how the brake assist cleared, but the fact that there's nothing one can do to make the computer not break is very scary.
That happens decently often. This is the reality for all systems aside from braking system in trucks perhaps, which are more sophisticated.
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.
This subthread is about ISO standards. The implementation quality of the new safety systems varies wildly.
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.
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.
The role of US regulators in the automotive industry is pretty different from what you seem to be expecting. They see their main goal is to set minimum, testable benchmarks for safety and give manufacturers freedom to achieve that in any reasonably justifiable way. The consequence of this is that almost nothing is required beyond meeting FMVSS and passing the tests it prescribes. ABS stopping distance is one of those tests, but a quick glance at the CR tests doesn't look like an FMVSS failure. The stopping distance simply wasn't up to industry norms.
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.
Ah interesting, I wonder if Tesla is an exception and if their systems do in fact follow ISO 26262. Standards are not necessarily legal requirements, and not necessarily checked by external people.
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.
I don't understand the reasoning you are making here. Cars have had advanced safety features like emergency breaking for a long time now (e.g. Toyota Crown Majesta 2003). Furthermore, there are many safety features that are controlled by software (e.g. airbags and seatbelts) that exist in all cars manufactured today.
Some of them were caused by nothing other than faulty software. Which is the point. The more links in the chain the higher the overall failure rate. Which has implications on MTBF but also on overall failed deployments.
> You literally trust your life with medical devices full of software
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.
I’m not sure I understand everything you said but I went with Dacia Duster, it’s the affordable brand, but I like that I can have a new car that has the controls and everything like a car from a decade ago… (lol) physical buttons, relatively good quality as they get to rely on Renault’s everything, I don’t need to go to settings to open the glove box, they don’t try to “out-innovate” everybody with ads, subscription heating, goofy scroll-knobs, or non rectangle screens. You can put CarPlay and Android Auto in it if you want.
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…
They also have a poor safety rating from NCAP (at least they did 2 years ago), because they don't fit their cares with electronic aids such as emergency automatic braking, which is just another reason to buy one.
Projecting that "software had to be fully validated and finalized before the product entered production" was the stale old days and "make the car better over time" (i.e. out being driven) is the bright future by the automotive industry is far beyond worry.
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)
I'd trust BYD more than Tesla but I don't want to have to trust anyone. I drove a 20 year old Honda still to this day, but literally every new car has software in it and it won't be an option in the future. It's just too profitable to gather the data that they generate. It's a privacy nightmare. I'm still appalled that Tesla got caught pulling footage of people having sex in their own vehicles, but the legal world has no intention of doing anything about it.
Also, as many of the well known manufacturers have been going for 40 to 60 years, and some of them for over 100 years (Rolls Royce, Ford, Mercedes, etc...) then 25 years is a newcomer :-)
That Niva is so nice! Just very very fuel inefficient, but man can it do off road in the hills of Albania. Take the one with the low gear and the diff-lock (and heated seats!). It's a joy to ride that thing (although not on the freeway). I also considered it, but even before sanctions is was very expensive due to taxes (here in western Europe). But it's so much fun.
Aviation standards are the way they are because if you have an engine problem you can’t pull over to the side of the road. But yes, something approximating these for road conditions is a good idea imo.
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.
Having an engine problem on a back road is one thing, having a software-system-integration-what-the-hell problem on a Autobahn at 180 km/h +/- is a different story. And yes, I do not want my family in the car at that moment.
It was Boeing that intentionally hid the importance of a system much more relevant than flight characteristics of a plane. That is an intentional violation of the spirit of the safety checks.
But that's the point! A professional pilot misunderstood/was unaware of a new safety feature, despite their professional experience and continuous training.
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.
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.
> a flight control feature the pilots didn't know about
phrasing that made me take issue. To me, it implies that if just the pilots had known about MCAS in detail, the crashes wouldn't have happened, implicitly placing the blame on them. While the reason for both the faulty system and the lack of knowledge can be attributed to Boeing trying to save money, which I think is a more fair target for blame.
I visited Detroit last year and went to the GM headquarters. It’s open to the public with no appointment. You can wander around the Escherian maze with no guidance. A physical manifestation of every business decision GM has made in the last four decades.
I think they can be separated though there's certainly overlap. But standards are going to be coming largely from pilots. Regulations are coming entirely from bureaucrats.
BMW i3 is great for city/town if you’re OK with electric. Not 4x4, but minimal “assist”, just traction control. Internet remote stuff is optional but nice.
In the fully autonomous future the car I want to own and drive will still be my 6MT 911! :-)
Not to AUS or, as far as I’m aware, SFO. They also screwed the pooch in Austin by making Waymo available only through Uber, with no way to ensure you actually get a Waymo rather than a broken car driven by someone with a serious BO problem.
Just buy a car from the people, who dedicate their career/lives to making cars and have done so for decades. You aren't smarter then them. Your "serious thoughts" and "opinion" about what standards should apply are not yours to worry about.
Thank you, I'm fed enough with living in the world governed by the people who dedicate their carrer/lives to make it a peaceful, prosperous and free place (as in freedom) and have done so for centuries
I want a 7-10” central display that spends 99% of its time showing CarPlay but also has a radio if I need it, the backup camera when I’m in reverse, and lets me change a couple of settings for convenience features like auto locking etc. Everything else can be dials, knobs, and buttons. My Mazda3 is perfect for this and I’m quite sad that I’m almost certainly not going to be able to find anything like it by the time I come to replace it.
Most cars from the mid 90s until the mid 00s (sometimes later) have this: you replace the double-DIN factory head unit with an aftermarket CarPlay-compatible head unit. $200-$1000 (depending on how much you want to cheap out), easy DIY install or pay another couple hundred bucks to a stereo shop to install it for you. You now have a 7-10” central display that boots to CarPlay but can do radio/bluetooth/aux/satellite, and turns on a reverse camera when you shift into reverse. Climate control and everything else is still physical switches, because car manufacturers were still making cars properly.
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.
Halfway through reading this comment I was thinking “Yup that’s why I like my Mazda3.”
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)
I would love to have both. The scroll wheel is convenient when I’m driving, but the touchscreen would make entering a new address much easier, as it’s very annoying to do now by scrolling, and voice dictation doesn’t work well in my language.
I do agree with that, and the newer Mazdas let the screen act as a touch screen when stationary for just that reason.
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.
I have a 2024 Kia EV6, and this is pretty much what it does: Central screen displays CarPlay, backup camera, and infrequently-used settings controls, dials and knobs for most things, one secondary touchbar (row of buttons, but it’s really a touchscreen so the buttons can change) for climate controls. Pretty much perfect, although only wired CarPlay. (The 2025 models apparently have wireless.)
Climate controls, including in-seat heating, as well as radio/media is exactly the stuff that needs actual hardware knobs that are always in exactly the same place and that I can use by knowing where in 3D space they are by muscle memory and feel without looking.
We have an EV9, and the user interface is so pathologically bad that we’re planning to get rid of it.
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…)
Shoutout to the thing I got for my mom's Merc where it's a literal 10 second installation to have carplay in a 2011 vehicle. Swap the built-in navi box with a $75 Aliexpress plug - bam, CarPlay/AA all wirelessly on the main screen and controllable by the standard navigation knob.
Car companies have to worry about regulatory compliance, certification, approvals, as well as warranties; aftermarket manufacturers do not have such concerns (at least to the same degree).
It’s a box that forwards a carplay / android auto UI to an LCD, and snoops the cam bus for button press events.
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.
If a stereo is defective, it might require a recall for replacement, which is very expensive. Additionally, anything which connects to the vehicle network has the potential to cause safety issues which can be even more expensive.
Thanks. Seems to be some kind of Audi-specific branding.
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.
My Renault Megane e-Tech is basically this[1]. Well it's a 12.3" screen but if you're in the UK you can get the one with the smaller screen. Not sure why you'd want that though.
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.
- 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.
I was shopping for a new car and could not fathom why would you buy one that is heavy on electronics and especially software. Software does not age well unless it is designed in a controlled environment like aviation, which is not what happens with car systems. Besides the risks of being locked out of bugfixes in the future the software features are marginal to the overall experience and utility of the car. I would argue that cars made today are hardly any better than the ones made a decade ago. The problem is that making similar cars is not that profitable unless you spice it up and sell that feature for a premiuim.
Pretty much that exact list is why both of my cars are 94 Buick Roadmasters (admittedly, no factory Bluetooth, but yes on everything else).
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.
Same. This is why I am rooting for Slate (https://www.slate.auto/) to succeed. I hope everyone in this ridiculous software war loses and in the end they realize that there is a huge market for just basic no-frills car.
While I definitely hope Slate is a huge success and I really love its premise, it's a shame that, judging from their homepage images, the dashboard is an LCD screen, no dials.
I don’t want anything without CarPlay anymore but I agree with your general sentiment. Google maps while driving and the ability to respond to messages by voice is great.
What you're describing is a 1990's car, except for the bluetooth part. I would buy one like this too, assuming it's half the price that is. I've never used the mapping software on any of my vehicles, google maps on my phone is way better.
I do like me a good 90s car. Honestly, though, my above-listed criteria would be my ideal car. But, a good number of cars up through the 00s would be enjoyable for me, if not exactly perfect. For example, the 2007 Dodge Charger is pretty good. :)
I would really rather that cars didn't run software, or at the least the minimal software to get the job done where there is no other option.
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.
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.
Does it work better when you use the key fob from inside the car? I would expect that because they surely tested a "unlocked accidentally and locked again right away" kind of scenario.
At least on ours, it tries to maintain the invariant that all doors lock at once (for aesthetics?), so you cannot lock anything if any door is open. It also likes to auto-unlock, but not auto-lock when you’re outside the car.
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.
About a year ago the Ford CEO (who is also Chris Farley's cousin) explained why legacy car manufacturers could not make good software: each of their cars have 150+ modules, each of them from several suppliers, each of them writing their own software.
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
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.
Surely that's not why the interface is a laggy 10fps piece of shit and the touch latency is over 200ms. If my iPhone 3GS from 2009 can display the UI in 60fps without lagging like crazy then so can a $100k BMW that's straight from the factory. It doesn't need hundreds of extra modules.
I have driven several different, rather new, cars over the last two years. The most hassle-free experience was the second cheapest of the bunch, a 2024 Opel Corsa GS (a Stellantis brand). I actually was sad when I had to give it back.
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.
I think the article was focussing on the advantages it would bring to the manufacturer. Fewer control units, less wiring, hence a faster build time. Putting everything in one place is easier from a manufacturing point of view.
> Consumers have had it with clunky, slow automotive technology, and the modern car is so computerized that a seamless electronic interface is an absolute necessity.
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.
I wouldn't even mind replacing the analog meters with a computer screen if it worked well. Instead it's a laggy slideshow where the tachometer is just basically an arrow randomly appearing in different places a couple times per second.
You're part of a small minority of people that want to had old and outdated _infotainment_ systems. The only exception to this is that people want to have climate control knobs and buttons for some features (e.g. heated seats, driving-mode, etc). However, this is not what the article is discussing.
The article is discussing moving safety critical functions like door handles and drivetrain into a centralized computer. This has been a disaster so far, and consumers hate it.
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.
Embedded-systems programming is not taught, and no one is willing to pay for training. The result is that development is outsourced to entities that claim, falsely, to have the knowledge. Eventually the consequences of the fact that they do not have the knowledge surface in an undeniable manner, and the only way to cover is to make a great show of a fresh start. (This affects all industries, not just automotive, but right now that is where the spotlight shines.)
Automotive has the problem of overwrought frameworks and no-code tooling that make it hard to fix problems and make improvements. Once the original devs are burned out or laid off the codebase rots and gets handed off to maintenance devs who barely know how anything works.
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.
Companies are not willing to pay what the people who know embedded deserve. $150,000, $200,000 and up for a JavaScript webshit "engineer", $100,000 max if you work in embedded, unless you have a super specialist knowledge maintaining software on NASA's remaining PDP-11s or whatever that they can't afford to lose.
Fortunately that is incorrect. I mentioned in another comment, but I’m well over $100k USD equivalent in salary alone as an embedded engineer, working in a relatively low cost of living area in Canada, graduated 3 years ago. Working for a “regular” company.
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.
My CS degree concentration is embedded systems. I love embedded programming, but it would probably cost me $200k a year to do it versus the backend distributed systems stuff I do now.
Admittedly I don’t know your salary or market, but it is possible to make decent money in embedded. Connections & market timing are both vital though, in my experience, as well as being actually good at your job. I’m in Canada so numbers are way different, but salary-wise I’m in the ~75th percentile software engineers in my area, my title is embedded engineer, and I’m fairly junior (3 years out of university, ~6 years full-time experience). I’m working with some other embedded people who are in the 95th percentile for software engineers in the country. The main problem is there are very few high-paying embedded jobs; conversely though, there seem to be even fewer highly-skilled embedded engineers looking for work. I recently interviewed at a company paying 50th-85th (based on experience) percentile trying to hire pretty much any competent embedded engineer, and their problem isn’t insufficient salary, it’s just a lack of applicants or any skill level. From what I’ve heard, the same seems to be true pretty much everywhere.
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.
Problems like this always come down to salary. I love embedded (hardware in general, really) and would absolutely love to do it, but during my entire career, the salaries for embedded have been so much lower than you get for slinging JS/web shit. And now with 15 years in, the gap is even worse.
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.
it is possible to get an embedded-adjacent job that pays well over 500k (my friend was bit banging FPGAs), it'll just be at an HFT instead of a car company
It’s definitely possible. There are probably a few embedded engineers making over $1M. But those are all outliers. It’s a whole lot easier to make $500k in web dev.
I took an embedded course in university where we programmed the AVR AtMega 328p on the Arduino UNO not using the Arduino libraries and compiler. Make files and setting up an environment.
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.
Programming embedded devices is not the same thing as "embedded-systems programming". The latter means, first and foremost, that the software is not allowed to crash, ever, for any reason, else it is people's lives.
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.
Why do the hardware companies make things so difficult?
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.
There are a few reasons, using the hardware manufacturers’ logic.
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.
RTOS-based development varies significantly from RTOS to RTOS, so I’m not sure how much it’d help to learn to use one. On the other hand, most fundamental OS knowledge is fully transferable to RTOS, so that would be helpful for embedded developers to understand.
Yes, there’s a ton of specificity. Could probably say that about kernel dev too. But there is a ton of things people do that’s a lot more generalized. Of course I’ve used very little of specific things I got tested on in my day to day over the years.
Yes! But it's also obvious that the industry doesn't have a prayer to ever reform. Stuck between proprietary and NDA's chips everywhere, using proprietary and NDA's toolchains and development kits, to product proprietary DRM'ed products.
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.
I can find 1000s of posts or blogs or whatever on every React nuance, Rust thing, LLM trend, or whatever, but nothing even describing what "real" embedded programming looks like in any fashion (I'm not counting blinking an Arduino LED here).
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.
Can't speak for cars specifically, but other software built to comparable standards requires a super rigorous process including detailed specs, risk analysis and mitigation, detailed design, comprehensive automated and manual testing against the soec including test coverage, tons of documentation on everything and finally a third party certification on everything.
The process is so far removed from typical web and business slop that it's an entirely different world of its own.
I'm not sure this is exactly the problem. It sounds like turning the car into a platform with changeable parts has caused both organizational and technical problems.
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??
It needs two! One to keep engine fires out of the passenger compartment[1] and one to keep unauthorized users or code out of your infotainment and control systems.
It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible. Since they're going to ship updates anyway, a lot of focus is on minimizing the cost and hence OTA.
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.
> That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.
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?
The rest of the car doesn't function within specifications for years. That's what recalls are fixing. These days, a lot of software recalls are being issued to work around physical design "bugs". The Tesla cybertruck frunk pinching issues are a well-publicized example.
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.
Not open source but mostly reverse engineered, and automotive: the PCM code for GM’s LT1 engines. The only thing that could be considered a bug is the behaviour of wide-open throttle fuelling, which was completely acceptable from the factory but made aftermarket tuning a bit tricky. Specifically, the fuel calculation routine would use the most recent BLM (short- and mid-term air-fuel ratio correction factory as measured by the O2 sensors) when calculating fuel delivery when wide-open, rather than locking it to a constant; the “most recent BLM” may be for a completely different area of the tune (like mid-RPM low throttle), where things like vacuum leaks or even just intake runner inefficiencies have a much greater affect on AFRs than when wide-open. This can result in either too much or too little fuel being injected, and under- or over-shooting the target AFR.
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.
It was not. Recalls have included software updates (sometimes via component replacement) since ECUs became common in the 1980s. Reverse engineering the binaries and flashing updated parameters is actually how ECU tuning used to be done.
But those cars are no longer competitive. There is only a marginal buyer group who wants to drive these "bricks", which would also unlikely pass the requirements set for new cars.
> It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible. Since they're going to ship updates anyway, a lot of focus is on minimizing the cost and hence OTA.
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)
They are not complex, so less breaking point to begin with.
Also some bugs are considered not critical enough to do recall, they can be fixed when the owner return their car for maintainence. But now even those small bugs will be fixed by OTA update
Purely from a manufacturer's perspective (not personal opinion):
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.
> It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.
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.
Updating the software in the computers that control the car has traditionally been combined with providing diagnostic support for it through the dealerships, not done OTA. Having an OBDII connector has been mandated in vehicles for a long time, you plug something into it that lets you either listen to CAN bus traffic or reprogram an individual Electronic Control Unit (ECU).
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.
> 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.
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.
One problem is that the ECUs are fairly dumb, they each have a limit on how fast you can send CAN frames to them without overflowing receive buffers. The protocol to reprogram them starts by asking the target ECU how much of a delay is needed between each frame then needs to keep to quite tight timing constraints when sending the new flash image, I have written a Linux network protocol module to do this.
I2C is also a bus, just one that's less reliable and involves more custom work to use.
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.
I absolutely enjoy speed compensated volume. It's nice to have about the same apparent volume inside the cabin as road noise increases while not being very loud when going slow speeds or stopped.
>That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.
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.
This is all the more frustrating as I'm in the security side if IT, and have been trying to teach myself C and assembly for embedded development and understanding how malware and vulnerability exist in this ecosystem and how I can help address these issues.
You can find router firmware sourcecode online and find pretty egregious vulnerabilities if you're really trying to learn.
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.
The people who actually can do it are not underpaid. These days they are brought in to do cleanup. They can name their price and pick their assignments.
Only if you’re looking for top dollar when you graduate. Which unfortunately a lot of people are. It makes sense, most people pick this field for the salary and not out of passion (like the vast majority of professions).
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.
> Tesla was able to fix this with a software update over the air, something no one else could do for a braking system. That was impressive, but the example presented a worrying question: Did engineers not do stopping-distance testing before they shipped the car to customers?
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.
> giving me the current fuel and battery levels in the app
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.)
In some areas you pay different rates to charge your EV at different times of the day. If that is the case for you then you will want to pay attention to and control charging. Normally you will want to do a get your car charging at the cheap rate, but sometimes you are willing to pay triple costs because you need to leave soon and there isn't enough remaining range. (your car matters - my PHEV only gets 30 miles from a full charge, so I'm always low when I get home, while many EVs get several hundred miles and so really only run low when on a road trip)
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.
Re charging times, there are several aspects here:
* 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.
The Lincoln thing reminds me, there was an article posted on HN about how a researcher found a vuln allowing him to track and unlock any LTE-equipped Subaru.
to be honest, we are now at the stage where everything that CAN get an internet connection, WILL get one eventually. Be it your god damn dryer or fridge or lawnmower...
Just bought a fridge. It was very difficult to find one with normal doors, a freeze door (not drawer), no stupid water or ice-making gizmos, and no wifi. There was literally one single choice in the dimensions I needed, unless I spent 6x as much on a European import.
You don't have to connect your fridge to wifi. Sometimes you can ignore a feature. Adding wifi to a modern fridge is really cheap (a micro controller is better than a mechanical thermostat or so I'm told - often wifi is included in a micro controller even if you don't use it)
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.
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.
Let me ask it a different way. when the cell carriers turn off the xG towers and those features fail to work will you spend your own money to get the replacement controller or just do without
As someone who has been working in security for past 10 years and systems / network admin for another 10 before that, I don't even know what a firewall is supposed to be any more.
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.
The threat is not exactly zero. In some cases, thieves can get physical access to the bus from outside the car, and then inject messages to unlock it, start the engine, and drive away: https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
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.
There are plenty of cars on the road today where theft is as easy as splicing two wires together. And yet grand theft auto isn’t very common at all even with all of these cars capable of being stolen in 10 seconds are being parked unsupervised on just about every block. Seems there are other filters in the overall system of society that are effective in keeping these unsecured cars from getting stolen today.
> 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
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.
It begs to ask why a headlight ought to have a data connection and not just power connection like most other cars of say 20 years ago. But even then when does the arms race end? Someone given enough time can cake apart a car to access any piece of it. A slim jim gets you to the hood release and the ecu of a say 2000 honda civic in 20 seconds. Was this a real world issue however in the 2000s, people hacking into drive by wire early obdii era cars like the s2000 to assassinate them with misdirected inputs or whatever the threat vector might be? Not really. Old fashioned ways to screw with people are simpler and cheaper.
I think anybody using this term has a shallow understanding of network security and just bundles it all mentally into a “thing” that stops all the bad stuff from happening.
I know that "military grade" has some relevant distinction in automotive. For example, normal car parts are designed to withstand "up to 80°C" and military grade means "up to 120°C". That has an impact on material choices and cooling.
Such a thing exists though usually not called “military-grade” per se. It is more similar to a data diode [0] than a classic firewall but has significant differences from either.
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 guess it's the same as a 'bulletproof firewall'. Just a colloquial saying indicating both high importance and required quality expected for operation in strong adverserial environments.
a firewall that prevents someone getting direct access to CAN bus and ECU, and sending messages like: "Key present", "Engine start", just by connecting to the wires of the headlight lamp (by prying a fender next to headlight)
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.
After using it for 3+ years, I'd really miss automatic cruise control.
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).
I can confirm that Volkswagen is borderline incompetent when it comes to software - a few months back, my 2020 Audi A4 (and those of tens to hundreds of others) all started having the same issue, where the infotainment will randomly reboot every 5-30 minutes (taking out nav, the backup camera, and the parking sensors with it, and requiring a PIN to get back into the system).
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.
These companies fail because vertical integration, and even a monorepo, is needed to make these efforts successful. This is completely at odds with the existing OEM/Tier 1 business model and engineering process grown up around it. Also, neither OEM nor Tier 1 have software cultures up to the challenge.
This is why the Chinese OEMs, Tesla, and Rivian are able to move fast.
General Motors was in the lead then they just quit. It was stunning to see all of their incredible self driving Cruise cars vanish and then overnight see them all replaced by Waymos. It was like watching the downfall of Xerox PARC.
There's another huge constraint that the article and a lot of responses do not seem to mention:
- 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.
> When the Model 3 first came out, it took far too long to stop in Consumer Reports testing, thanks to bad anti-lock braking system (ABS) calibration. Tesla was able to fix this with a software update over the air, something no one else could do for a braking system. That was impressive, but the example presented a worrying question: Did engineers not do stopping-distance testing before they shipped the car to customers?
Apple has famously poor software ("better than Microsoft" is not an impressive bar to clear). Apple (and Tesla, for that matter) "got where they got to" because they're luxury fashion brands, and luxury fashion brands don't compete on actual quality, they compete on perceived quality, which means that the most important skills they need to understand are marketing and presentation.
I've long wondered why no car manufacturer has gone for an open source model. Certain things should absolutely be locked down (for example, the airbags and other critical safety features) but there is absolutely no reason the HVAC and Infotainment system need to be closed source. Open it up and let hackers go crazy, then just "borrow" the best options out there for next year's model and everyone wins!
Apparently there are folks working on converting ICE vehicles to EV, using open source and reverse engineering to integrate discarded proprietary EV components (battery, motor, inverter etc).
There could be a sort of "ARM" or "Android" but for cars.
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.
I have been wondering the same, but slightly differently.
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.
Because there are regulations for the infotainment system as well. For example, you can't watch videos or read SMS/messages. Not to mention that the infotainment system likely has access to the CAN bus, through which you _could_ impact other safety systems.
Automotive-grade Linux is actually a pretty big thing but cars being put on the roads still need to pass through approvals. It's not "hackers" doing anything they feel like.
Just talk to Canoncal, or IBM, make a NixOS config, or just do something. How hard can it be? My father’s 5 yo Volkswagen van has an 80’s looking UI, the touchscreen is already failing. Going from the normal UI to CarPlay is just jarring, any 2024 Linux distro looks, feels and acts more modern. What are they doing over there??
I could probably whip him up something nicer if only there was just a Nuc or something in there somewhere.
It isn't just the UI. You need to (re-)read the article. They have a bunch of interconnected systems that need to talk to each other, the existing methods are fit for purpose.
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.
While I don't dismiss your general point, I will say that anyone who says "how hard can it be" really needs to consider they are falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In my experience, that phrase is (typically) a red flag for the latter.
I'll let you know why I finally get my own van, add DC powered Nuc-like with a touchscreen and just run Gnome on it. Or, to make it more fair, I'll put LineageOS on it. Very touch friendly.
This strikes me very much as one of the things where the answer is probably very simple but also very difficult.
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.
IMHO, Tesla stubbornly refusing to launch an App store will be seen as is its biggest failure when one of their many competitors finally takes on this challenge. They have millions of iPads bolted onto electric wheels, and for some reason refuse to monetize it.
Software isn’t super hard I suppose, but you still need a dozen “rockstar devs” and $1mil in licensed software to push out a car, so yeah probably it’s a minimum $5-10m exercise for basic software that can just drive around.
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.
We use a production VCU hardware with custom software. It currently supports most of the VCU functions you would find in a production vehicle, including in-built CCS2 and NACS charging on the single controller (wires directly to socket).
We’ve put customised versions of our product in a few commercial vehicles, mainly retrofits. Our backstory is that we’ve been consulting in custom E2E vehicle controls for a long time and now we’re productising for better scalability of our expert team (capturing expertise in product so we can eventually take a step back).
Currently doing an angel/seed round: looking to raise US$ 250K. Very close to profitability due to low burn rate and having a lot of existing IP, so not planning to do any subsequent round like Series A. We think it could grow into a $50m company with low headcount in the style of Airbnb. Based in Australia.
We really need the right to modify our vehicle software, with zero 'safety' or 'environment' camel noses to shoe-horn in the total lockdowns we see prevalent today. 'FOSS' hardware should be exempted from a whole bunch of regulations to make it enticing and accessible to technicians, home builders, and boutique bespoke builders. What we don't want is Tesla's/Apple's model, we want the GNU/Linux on Talos II model with no surprise NSA backdoor management engines.
> We really need the right to modify our vehicle software
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.
as a car guy and software engineer I just want to say car's need way less software, way more separation of concerns, more standardisation and more open platforms, but most of the money is made on service, so the manufactures are incentivized to make closed systems.
Not necessarily less software, but more open software. There's been a lot of legal action around "right to repair" recently - I think there was a major decision regarding John Deere tractors a few years ago. But honestly, when it comes to cars, I haven't seen any significant decisions. I hope I'm wrong. Not 100% sure.
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.
> Thus, the double-edged sword of SDVs. They are more upgradeable and flexible than their predecessors, but that advantage allows companies to deliver under-baked software with a “fix it later” approach.
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 is funny that developers are always looking at the processes of car making to improve their own extremely broken ways and now it is car-makers that "should" be trying to be more like the agile software devs.
As a dev the last thing I want is a software-defined car. Look what we did to TVs.
This stuff is exhausting, I’ve never been happier to drive a 93 manual than hearing about infotainment systems.
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.
This thread is becoming huge and so searching through the comments is not easy. Nonetheless it’s my impression that little or no attention was directed to the regulatory compliance needed for vehicles to be marketed under the rules of UN (known as UN/ECE Regulations and approval scheme) and similar approaches worldwide. Which means that roughly speaking that the security and safety of the car being sold today rest assured until I don’t change (upgrade) the software governing its functionalities. It’s totally unclear how it might be possible at least in Europe to upgrade major parts of vehicles software without breaking its approval. Comments on this?
I would love a car platform that ran open source software, I think a lot of people would buy hardware they knew all the software was controlled by the owner. The way electronics plays into cars at this point is quite excessive, even seats and windows are running software.
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.
I understand, but that's partially caused by compliance software being problematic.
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.
Drivers consider it adversarial because it not only "takes away control" but also because it messes up their feedback loop.
I'll give two examples.
From a recent Toyota rental (~2024 RAV4): The lane departure system (which seems to have 2 stages?) gently corrects your steering if you get anywhere NEAR a line in the road. It's not a clearly-artificial buzzing in the wheel or a tug at your hands, it feels extremely subtle, like driving over a seam in the road. Every time I drove that damn thing I found myself second-guessing the surface and wondering if there was something I hadn't noticed in the road.
From a few years ago, some other rental: Automated brake force increase thing. If you abruptly lift off the throttle and quickly move to the brake pedal, it felt something like doubling the brake force. Why? Because apparently studies have found in many collisions, the driver didn't come close to using all of the braking force, because they don't know how to drive. Okay, so it makes you safer, but no can no longer know how much braking force you're going to get from moment to moment?
Do these systems not create a dependency loop where the very senses the driver is _supposed_ to rely upon to safely and smoothly operate a vehicle are blunted (seemingly) arbitrarily by some computer system?
It can both be true that this makes cars safer, while at the same time making drivers hate the systems. I don't disable ABS on my car because it does something I cannot do (high frequency brake control of each individual wheel), but I sure disable ADAS whenever I get a chance!
I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver".
The fallacy is that simply because a low-probability event hasn't happened to you, doesn't mean that you wouldn't benefit from assistance if it did. It seems to be a combination of optimism bias/competence bias/dunning-kruger. Systems that can mitigate "human error" are extremely critical and desirable, even by highly skilled/talented/trained machine operators like airline pilots.
Anyhow, it feels like your specific critiques apply to proactive systems, which actually don't really fall under the umbrella of what I'm outlining per se.
Proactive systems are either very intentionally engaged (i.e. lane centering or adaptive cruise) or highly theoretical and not widely implemented, for example, proactive driver assist in TSS3, if enabled (which it isn't fresh out of the factory for reasons you likely outline here), makes subtle corrections to the driver's experience, e.g. engaging brakes when cars ahead slow down or on curves. I have strong hopes for technology like this as being a good bridge between the challenges of full driver assistance and current technology, which, at the cutting edge, is undoubtedly impressive. They may very well not be there yet, which is suggested by Toyota's reluctance to make this the default experience on their equipped vehicles.
Conversely, reactive systems like AEB are widely tested by regulators and, for example, the IIHS, and should only ever genuinely engage in emergency situations. Certain systems do this better than others, which is software/sensor based. Some do exceptionally. Some do not.
Quick note:
(~2024 RAV4): Uses TSS2.5, not TSS3. There appears to be a large difference here in competence. I haven't driven with either system extensively.
> I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver".
Sure; and I'm sure you likewise recognize that there's a difference between "This could never help me", "I don't need this", and "I don't want this". People don't live their lives by making game theory optimal choices at every turn. There's also a difference between a safety regime offered as a cost-extra feature on a car, a regulatory requirement on a car, and a regulatory requirement on an airliner.
Only car companies? Isn't it rather that everybody and their hamster is pivoting to become a surveillance company, if you just manage to cram software into whatever it is you're doing? Get extra score for making it "AI"!
That's it, it's time to start a FOSS car project which is operated by poor lawsuit-proof individuals, because we will need to "steal" existing ECU firmware and incorporate it illegally into this FOSS car project. The idea here is to component-wise replace all the major computers on a bunch of well known car makes and models, creating a standardized car model (software platform), so we can kill trackers, black box recorders, take back control over power and efficiency from the ecofascists, etc.
We are only as sovereign as we are willing to fight, and if voting worked do you think they'd let you? lol
To throw a curve into this discussion, I'm not entirely clear that software companies have any clue how to enter this space. Cars are supported for far far longer than your average software system is expected to run, nowadays.
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.
Writing software, and doing it well, is expensive and time-consuming. It's like manufacturing anything else from scratch. It requires an investment in resources and expertise, proper planning and execution. Much like building a car, you can build software inefficiently. But if it comes out like shit, that directly affects your bottom line.
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.
I would like a list of those companies making "software defined" vehicles so I can avoid them.
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...
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."
IMHO, a computer car and even internet-connected car is fine. However, I want a computer car that I actually own. If it's my car that I paid for, I should have full access to the software that runs it. If not, then I don't own the car, I'm just renting it.
Alas, I understand why, just not enough people want it. Unlike the engine mod market, where aftermarket ECUs are a thing. Unfortunately, it sometimes involves the wiring harness, which is very expensive to mess with.
It's not just about the software but about the hardware architecture of the car. Legacy manufacturers are coming from a situation where they are integrating hardware and software from a lot of different suppliers. This makes upgrading the car a very tedious process and slows down the process of getting suppliers to fix issues and provide new firmware in a timely fashion. It's worse for them because they often want to do ICE and EV variants of the same car. Which means sticking with the same supply chains and associated issues.
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.
Legacy corporations have a very hard time incorporating fundamental technology shifts (moving from ICE engine/drivetrain dominant designs to software dominance).
They walk into the future looking backward, unable to identify/vet the team skills needed going forward, leading to silly hacks like: 1) hire from "big s/w companies", 2) pay high salaries to poorly vetted people, 3) adopt all the new fashionable buzzwords like "software defined vehicle", 4) force new teams every inch of the way to justify design choices to mediocre legacy management.
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.
From the article: "Evidence of that dichotomy is not hard to find. As automakers have introduced vehicles with more advanced computing and electrical architectures, they have also struggled to deliver bug-free software on time."
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.
Cars now have computers, cellular internet connections, cameras, microphones, privacy policies... I can barely find the words to describe just how frightening the status quo is.
Indeed. Reading the comments here makes me a bit more grateful for my early 2010s vehicle. I added a Bluetooth module so I can play music wirelessly. My phone magnetically connects to an air vent and starts charging. I open Maps and tell it where I want to go. Done. :)
no excuses... it was their primary business since ever and software wave is coming from 60s when human went to space, so software as car engines are relevant long time ago, they couldn't tolerant this mess with providers, ECUs and technologies, that long, for their core business.
One of these things is not like the others. Tesla, for good or ill, needed to write a full stack for their EV. Not only did they need to do it, but they did in fact do it and ship it and develop it over several years. Recruiting a Tesla software guy is probably the best choice between these three. And he'll cost you less.
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.
> One of these things is not like the others. Tesla, for good or ill, needed to write a full stack for their EV.
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.
Android automotive doesn't come with software for battery management and functions like climate control, headlights, error notifications, and other driving functions. But it does provide the best toolchain, widget set and user interface framework for those functions. It also comes with support for multiple screens, multimedia, multiple languages, speech recognition, app stores, cameras, wifi hotspotting, OTA updates, modes for vehicles in motion, Bluetooth, pointing devices so you don't have to be all touch all the time, etc.
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.
Old car is massive amounts of mechanotechnical engineering, with some software for keeping the beast under control and provide some basic entertainement.
New car is basically a computer on a simple chassis with an equally simple drive train. Software and battery tech is everything.
I'd argue that chassis tech is more sophisticated in the BEV case due to more weight. Adaptive dampers, air springs, rear-axle steering, etc. might not be necessary on a comparably sized ICE vehicle.
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".
it's a lot cheaper to pay one exec a couple million than to staff a medium-sized software engineering org: even 500 people at an average fully burdened cost of $250k is $125m/y.
One major issue has been that paying a developer market rates is practically unthinkable to traditional automakers. If you were to apply to a mid/senior job in Michigan, you might get offered $125k. The typical workaround has been to establish "software offices" on the west coast with separate pay scales and separate corporate structures that largely function as internal "external" vendors. The C suite are able to pretend they're not overpaying, and the teams getting work done are able to attract people closer to market rate.
Well, it’s not just about pay scales. The developers just don’t want to live in Detroit (or even Ann Arbor) for the most part. And coastal East isn’t really that much cheaper for the most part.
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.
I wasn't disagreeing with you; I idly did the mental math, was surprised at how high it was, then thought through how I'd probably finger-in-the-air that it would take a couple thousand eng years to build a whole car OS. You're building safety critical software, so you're going to start with a very serious test effort, etc. So finger in the air a good chunk of a billion dollars a year for many years.
Terrible mobile website for what its worth. Two sentences per in paragraph ad and I couldn’t fully read the article because it bogged my se2 down to a crawl. How I wish I could jailbreak this phone and install a real adblocker but alas not on magic version number.
> Access InsideEVs and over 450 other websites as e.g. motorsport-total.com and formel1.de without banner ads, personalized tracking and video ads for only 3,99 € per month.
Yes, Titan was cancelled in 2024 after eight years of development. There's a good breakdown on The Information about why, it mostly boils down to software challenges (especially ADAS), leadership turnover and a fair amount of internal skepticism that it was even a worthwhile project.
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".
All I want my car to do is drive from a -> b. Connecting AirPlay is nice, but not necessary. All other touchscreen stuff is dangerous, crappy, and outdated the minute it's rolled over the showroom floor. Just stop, please.
>Now, they need to make compelling apps, slick new features and all-new electrical architectures that neither the companies nor their suppliers are used to using. They need to build Tesla-level upgradeability with far less willingness to ship unfinished goods, all while tucking it behind a military-grade firewall to ensure your car can’t be remotely hacked.
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.
If you want to know the many ways this is going to suck, then think about everything you've ever heard someone bitching about in the modern video game ecosystem, then multiply it by "but instead of people not being able to play a video game, someone might die".
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.
There is a 0.0% chance I am going to buy a car that requires a network connection.
All of this is complete nonsense and a huge waste of resources.
Especially for electric cars. These things are so simple that it is not funny. The level of sophistication required is barely much more then what went into a 1990s era Sony Walkman.
Legacy car companies haven't realized that good UX is no longer optional. If the system people use to interact with your car is unpleasant or unusable garbage, it ruins the whole car. Just like it doesn't matter how good your kitchen is if the waiter is rude and spits on the food in front of the customer.
And yet most of the companies don't seem to be willing to spend the one-time cost of getting the UX right.
I have a BMW with iDrive 7 and none of this feels familiar - am I in the lucky minority which happens to have chanced upon a good manufacturer which did a good job on integration - or am I so clueless that I don't recognize I am lookin at a dumpster fire?
Software defined vehicle? Never heard of this term. More marketing buzzword BS.
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"?
From first principles I think the concept can make sense. From car-specific function-specific ECUs, to platform-shared (but still function-specific) ECUs, then to Zonal architecture and domain controllers. The goals: consolidate and generalize HW across the lineup moving model-specific bits to FW/SW/Config (amortizes the development cost and simplifies certification), and also simplify wiring (saves you precious copper wires which are costly, messy, and heavy) because you can pretty much just plug every miscellaneous sensor or actuator to its nearest "anchor point" without worrying (too much) about arbitrary ECU limitations.
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.
Pretty cool seeing how all those little gripes with car tech stack up, kinda makes me question if adding more software actually makes things better or just adds more mess. you ever feel like simpler is actually safer when it comes to stuff like this?
As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software talent, but because they have no ability to actually build the electronics alongside the software, which is ultimately what constrains embedded software. Without the right hardware, the constraints are just insurmountable, you can not do X feature because board A doesn't have the API to your MCU, or it runs some dogshit speed communication system that means you have 500ms lag. The feature is just unworkable, and if the PMs push it anyways you get what happens for the legacy car makers, terrible underpowered infotainment systems with no central design philosophy, stuck in an awkward, bad, middle between a full software stack and all buttons for everything. Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
I worked in similar systems and you are 100% right. 80% of the time was spent on communication protocols between the different boards and microcontrollers. QAing and solving issues from short-sighted dozens of unique custom protocols that worked in non-standard ways (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented).
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.
For american cars at least, I read that one of the reasons this process exists is because car companies want to work around union rules for manufacturing by outsourcing components of the cars to subcontractors that they can make deals with.
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.
That smells plausible, but from my seat as am armchair car enthusiast, it seems that foreign automakers outsource components just as often.
and have the same problem with software ? yes and yes
>price control strategy to pit these suppliers against each other to lower costs
Apparently that rabbit hole goes super deep in which the large auto manufacturers in the US throw their weight around and force suppliers into selling parts at cost or with razor thin profit margins. And on top of that, they force the suppliers to eat the loss when it comes to cyclical business demand (e.g. storage costs for over-producing during low demand and increased labor costs during times to under producing from high demand)
Conway's law strikes again!
If that was a main factor, surely then Mexico should be ground zero for next-generation car electronics design? Like, Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez.
You'd think the overhead of managing the supplier relationships would be more expensive than well-managed vertical integration. I'm guessing it's a failure on the part of admin to count their own costs.
Those employees might not be unionized, though.
> (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented).
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).
This makes it sound like the problem is that they either lack a person with architectural responsibility for the cars' electronics as a whole or that person lacks the skills necessary to do their job.
Bear in mind that all the electronics on a particular car are not specific to that car: there is a lot of reuse across product lines. And there are multiple vendors, each of whom is probably also selling the same, or similar modules to other manufacturers.
No, it’s the org and incentives structure - maybe the only people who have all parts that need to make change under their command are the board, and until now, the software was an unimportant part for them.
This aspect of the industry has seriously regressed. We started out trying to standardize and as vehicles have become more dependent on onboard networks manufacturers have gone completely proprietary and have put all information behind lawyers. The consumer is the real loser.
> every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented
> 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.
It is really hard, especially given you have to optimize for the lowest common denominator. For us it was a 512kb RAM microcontroller, we had to go to procurement to expand it to 2MB RAM and they were not happy about that.
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)
Think of the nightmare 5 years down the road when someone else has to then incorporate this protocol under their own new protocol, with the older ones nested inside.
Just to add one more thing to your point, if embedded devs work really hard and make the code work faster/better all reward you get is an _even_ more underpowered chip for the next version.
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.
I hate the penny-wise pound-foolish attitude both in embedded and Android phone development.
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.
Your account sounds accurate, but how fitting then that their cost cutting focus is losing them customers and potentially their entire company. VW is losing the EV war. Most manufacturers have already lost. Tesla and BYD are going to eat everyone's lunch. They either need to revolutionise their approach, or they're toast. I suspect they'll attempt to milk their existing supply chains into bankruptcy.
If the OEM stayed with the same chip for several years, wouldn’t the price go down over time?
Car OEMs are modern day colonial plantation owners, they know cost structures of suppliers and schedule their price cuts. They already have an annual cost saving quota. Prices don't just go down but go down just-in-time.
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.
Ironically, this method of managing suppliers was perfected by Wal-Mart.
LOL. That's what I was thinking too.
I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing...
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/
That’s always been the case with Tesla. I still have no idea how the yoke with no progressive steering and a tiny button for a horn ever passed any sanity check. Not to mention the NHTSA.
Oh, I wish they would install tiny horn buttons on all the vehicles in Vietnam! In that country, the horn is a method of communication, much to the ire of literally everyone trying to exist.
Excessive horning (made up word) is not just a Vietnamese thing. Italy is probably Europe's worst offender, with Greece a close contender.
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".
In india if you hit someone after sounding your horn you are not at fault as you gave warning and they didn't move. (It is far more complex than that but as always the real truth is too complex for a comment box - if you are trying to drive safe it is close enough, but this isn't a license to murder), As a result all drives will honk their own if there is any possibility someone might cross in front of them.
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.
Was something like 20 years since I was in India, but IIRC at least back then they didn't have a "priority to the right" traffic rule, but rather some kind of "the one who first honks has priority". Traveling in a taxi felt suicidal, drivers just honked when approaching an intersection and continued blithely.
Based on a quick googling, this seems to no more be the case, and there is a 'priority to the right" rule.
I saw something similar when visiting Latin America a few years ago, in a neighbourhood friends lived in. Some people would just go full speed in residential streets and hold the horn while crossing intersections because I guess that's what's gonna keep their car intact?
Latin America is “just” 33 countries each with their own culture (not to mention Brazil with its massive size).
Yeah, I know. I just don't want to self-doxx by mentioning the country.
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.
By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?
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.
> By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?
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.
I do agree consistency is probably the most important thing, but deciding which side should go first can have differences based on if you're driving on the left or the right.
Imagine a 4-way stop of 1 lane each way roads. Cars drive on the right in this example. One car rolls up traveling from west to east and another car from south to north.
If we give priority to the right, meaning the south->north traffic, they end up out of the way of the other car sooner than the car on the west to east traffic. They only need to cross halfway before they're unblocking the other traffic. If we give priority to the left, meaning the west-east traffic, the west-east car needs to cross the entire road before they start to unblock.
I ride a bike for a few months in India. The honk system worked quite well. As a small vehicle, you learn your place on the road. Largest first, even if you honk. Honking at every turn in small town works ok, but it is loud. so loud.
Ah wow, this explains so much about the idiot who didn't know how to use a 4-way stop and nearly drove into me the other day. I thought he's giving me a hard time, blaming me, when I had the right of way. Maybe he was just doing the "warning because he might hit" thing?
In Asia it's mainly used to signal your presence, like when you're overtaking someone. Just a little tap of the horn. Just the fact that you hear it say in the right corner behind you will make you not swerve in that direction. It's almost subconscious and really does improve safety imho. You can't possibly visually scan for all vehicles around you.
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.
It's been a while since I've been to Vietnam but most of the traffic is composed of motorcycle and not cars, so honking is indeed a signal of presence that's needed compared to just having the noise of a single car that's behind you.
(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)
When I got my driving license too many years ago in Italy, they taught me that a brief honk when taking over in interurban roads is actually mandatory (but nobody did it). I don't know if that rule stayed the same as they harmonized more and more the road rules to the European ones.
Horns were disabled in Chongqing at least a couple of decades ago. I’m not sure what it’s like now though, but the government in China can and will deal with excessive horning using means we wouldn’t consider in the west.
They straight up banned horning in Shanghai when I was there in 2017 using some kind of camera system IIRC, it was quite jarring when I continued onto Nanjing and the usual cacophony resumed.
They also banned lane changing over solid lines with the same camera system IIRC
Ya, China has no problem using camera/recognition tech to its fullest. I wonder if other societies will eventually be outcompeted (cheaper law & order costs means Chinese cities will be more efficient) or if there is some huge cost (privacy violations that lead to economic consequences) to this that will make it less competitive.
Well I think it’s just like any other authoritarianism, benevolent with a benevolent leader but harmful with a malicious leader
Looks like London is on track to deploy similar technology. They did a trial in Croydon recently that was considered a huge success. From what I understand they actually ended up with pretty decent buy in from the locals as it had a noticeably positive effect on the community.
We'll probably eventually see it in more western cities as time progresses. Unsure what to make of it tbh.
Although things are a bit shit in many places, I do love our planet and the weird and wonderful ways it works.
Were car horns disabled (broken deliberately) in Chongqing?
20 years ago each city/province was basically its own closed market. So if you were driving a car in CQ, it was probably bought and even made in CQ. They simply required that the horns be disabled.
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.
Was actually quite surprised by how "civilized" the driving was in our recent China trip. Don't think I heard a horn once in probably 20h or so as a passenger, did find the drivers up in Heliongjiang a bit bold with their lane weaving but in Beijing they drove great!
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.
Dongbei drivers are famous for their interesting driving (but I’m going by hearsay and that one famous song about it).
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).
Yeh the congestion on Beijing's ring roads is pretty awful. Orderly but awful, also less EVs than ideal.
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.
Huh, I drove in Italy for a week and a half and didn't notice excessive honking. I did notice tons and tons of tailgating.
When I was there (ages ago), the driver of the bus I was on overtook on a blind corner on a road cantilevered off a cliff. They did cross themselves before doing it.
Honking is a harmless replacement for solving disputes with handguns. You probably drove in low-stress environments.
There is a low-stress driving environment in Italy? Where's that?
Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.
A low amount of low stress people can be found late at night, on highways at negligible traffic hours, on the narrow and meandering country roads that everybody learns to avoid, in half-empty parking lots, and many other obvious uncommon situations.
oops, that might have been me. I kid. I only do that when completely lost trying to get out of an autogrill parking lot (!).
Italy is really 2 countries, north and south are quite distinct.
Where ever you are in Italy, you will be told by locals that you can't trust anyone from a town south of that place.
Even in Lampedusa?
What's the difference between them in terms of driving?
Try driving in Naples.
Naples is the first place I got honked at for not cutting the person off. I was at a stop sign, making a left turn onto a main road that had a steady stream of traffic. Apparently, I was supposed to wait a few seconds and then just creep out, cutting cars off on the way, which is what I believe the driver on the main road meant when he beeped at me and gesticulated wildly while I was sitting still at the stop sign.
That city was the first place where I saw a guy traffic splitting with a car. It was an ancient topolino, but my jaw dropped as he was snaking through traffic like on a moped.
Italy pales in comparison to Vietnam.
Lebanon. Especially Beirut. The honking. Every taxi driver that passed me if I was walking down the street. Honking. Honking. So much noise. All the time.
Six months I was there. Six months of honking honking honking.
Unfortunately like every city in Egypt. They have a hand permanently on a horn button.
I have experience of both Vietnam and India amongst other countries. The latter takes any country, including Vietnam, you can throw at it and wipes the floor with them when it comes to mindless honking.
and here you can get a 100 euro fine, for using your horn.
You can only use it, if its to prevent an accident from happening. that's it.
https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...
> The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails.
I worked for a $ ~billions revenue software storage vendor who had the exact same issue (excessive logging wearing out under-spec'd flash drives).
The bane of every cargo cult cloud op. I worked with a company that had maybe 20 devs total, > 30 "microservices" in kubernetes and one of the most complex bits of the deployment was handling Greylog and Elasticsearch. Still they couldn't manage high availability, despite logging all the things. Go figure.
I once worked for a unicorn that got near-zero traffic during the pandemic, but nobody could understand why some services were struggling to stay up.
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.
Oh most definitely. Maybe my sarcasm was a bit too subtle.
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.
Oh I got the sarcasm, I was just agreeing.
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.
It has definitely gotten much worse. The only thing keeping me sane is hacking solo projects in languages with great tooling. I don't think I can even stomach interviews anymore, let alone the whole application process farce.
I remember doing an interview with systems design using microservices and mentioning at the end "Well I guess that's it but if this was my personal project I would just have a single server and no native cloud bs".
The guy basically answered "Oh, same. I just ask for people to do microservices because that's how the CTO wants".
We had the exact same issue as well haha
These kind of problems only happen years after the software roll out so no one cares when you are under time pressure.
We sold physical hardware with bundled software, so we could actually create the problem via in-market software update that didn't exist at time of sale! Fun times.
HPE also had this issue with their ILO 4. New firmware fixed that issue but if your flash chip was already worn out you're out of luck and the only solution is to replace the entire motherboard.
Issue, or revenue driver?
Issue. We warrantied the longevity of those flash drives, and they were cheap anyway. The problem was mostly the customer pain.
You’re using a software fault which wore out the flash as evidence of poorly designed electronics?
How is writing excessive logs to a destined-to-fail flash chip in a car's electronics system not a poor design choice? Pretend the person wrote "poorly-designed electronics implementations/sytems" or similar, because that's obviously the intended meaning.
If the flash was better, the product wouldn't fail so quickly. It's really a combination of poorly designed electronics, and a software bug wasn't there, the fault wouldn't have popped up so early.
All solid state chips have a write limit
it isn't a software fault, it's a whole defective system that was designed poorly end-to-end: the software does something inappropriate, which the hardware cannot bear, probably because of a high level mandate to write too many logs and to be too cheap.
I understand the concept, but the question I have is why?
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.
I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’ This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy. Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff. And you’re left with bunch of MBAs trying to wing it in what is available which is - no talent, bunch of admineers, and a long list of supplier bills. They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I can go on and on about this, but one of us even tried to be Tesla trying to build our own zonal architecture - and are currently struggling due to costs, tarrifs and turnover. Also you can’t overnight change this mindset - building vs assembling. But there has to be some way and I’m too about to walk out the door due to ~10yrs of frustrations.
Get out if you can!
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.
Yeah, and then those contractors (like Continental) has sub-contractors (like Akka) and they have sub-sub-contractors (some random Indian software company) working on the side mirror winding logic.
In German cities with automotive industry, you’ll find thousands of these satellite companies.
And in Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia, etc.
> downfall of the german automotive industry
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
The main topic is software and it is still treated like a part you can just outsource and plug in.
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/4AprfR8Xkio?si=xKXUdgt5BRyZKRNE
Given that the driving characteristics of most of the cars on the road don't match a BMW, what're the real "real important car things"? The revealed preference seems to be that the things you listed aren't actually that important. Long term cost is. Maintenance cost is. Not having to bring your car to the dealership for service is. Having the car have a long lifetime is. Handling well is nice; sporty drivetrain is nice; but that sort of stuff is clearly just a luxury, and the bottom dropped out of the luxury market recently (see: LVMH restructuring). If you're going to buy a sporty luxury car, why not get a Porsche or something with more cachet? Obviously there are reasons, but BMW's in an awkward position.
> what're the real "real important car things"?
A good design from engineering standpoint. You feel it just instantly when you use the product. Interior is nice and will accommodate just about every possible driver comfortably with every control reachable. Suspension just works frkn great no matter how it was tuned (sporty or comfortable) and no matter how simple the design is. Same for drivetrain, you will acelerate/decelerate precisely how much you'd expect. And it's not a luxury it's a norm, even cheapest german or french cars have all this things sorted out. I'm speaking for the EU market though)
Agreed, Germany still makes some of the best cars in the world. Who is making them better?
Huawei,Xiaomi,Xpeng.
For example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maextro_S800
> They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems...
So they've just chosen death. Fantastic, great to hear.
Well, yes. The legacy car companies are ossified. They want to keep churning out minute variations on the same cars, and regard software as a thin layer for the entertainment system. They don't want to adapt to EVs, which force a redesign of the car as a whole. They're going to get run over by Chinese companies unless they can beg for tariffs to prop up their un-innovation.
Isn't the trouble that agile is not compatible with things that has to be thoroughly made, 'finalized before release', like in every mission critical production? Casuality and the dyamic free spirit primised has much much less space here.
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.
> They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings!
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.
Rinse and repeat across hundreds of components and your team "pays for itself"
"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?
And with the help of software your get: this algorithm works well to recognize signs using 2 cameras. We can alter it a little to make it work with 1 camera (huge savings) and losing like 10% accuracy. With a cheaper camera we lose again some accuracy but even more savings.
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.
"We asked one of the software guys if we 'could' use a single camera, and they said, 'uh... possibly?', so we pushed through!"
Not just the owners, but the other engineers.
I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.
I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."
In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.
Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.
That is one component in one model. Car makers have several models with maybe hundreds (or thousands?) of electrical components. Plus "cost-saving" has always been a surefire way of ensuring bonus.
Penny wise, pound foolish
It’s very obviously a rhetorical exaggeration.
Yes sometimes it’s a dollar or two and it really adds up quick. Sometimes 10’s of dollars. That door speaker can be few dollars cheap - you may get 2% more THD in a frequency band… the conversations can be really reduced down to ‘meh subjectively not noticeable’ but will save us a million. Add few of these things and now you have a shitty radio system but 5 mil in bank.
Speakers are a bit of a funny one, because, with the important condition that the amp needs to not be crap, they’re pretty straightforward to upgrade for the end user.
Yes but you make this small 5 cent change to 100 components and it adds up.
There have been attempts at it. Unfortunately, they consistently botch the execution so badly that most of the executives in the business have PTSD from the experience. And these were very expensive failures that become lore inside the companies. When they do acquisitions of small companies entering this market those end up getting smothered by the culture of the automotive companies.
Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.
The answer is that current car platforms were designed with flexibility as first goal.
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.
Then maybe they should let me buy some better damn chips so the experience isn’t so laggy.
I know, I know, shooting the messenger…
too bad computers aren't spark plugs
To be fair, this seemed to be the right strategy since they were able to be profitable in a very crowded market. Yes, the new companies try to verticalize everything from components to software, but none of them seem profitable (marginally Tesla passes the bar, but not so sure if you took away all the subsidies and carbon offsets).
So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?
I can tell you this works if your product doesn’t need frequent upgrades/updates and isn’t cohesive. In legacy auto world, you ask for one line of code change and the supplier slaps 100k bill. This is generally why things look old, outdated, carried over and buggy.
I totally agree with what you say. I am just not sure if the car market is willing to pay a premium to have this nicer fully integrated experience. Maybe there is space for a couple of premium makers.
My preference would be do less! Shift all the nav and entertainment to phone integration; stop trying to make half assed shit versions of those. How many billions were spent on that?
Oh we don’t want Google Amazon and Apple to have the cake and eat it too. See GM Rivian and Tesla not supporting CarPlay and AndroidAuto.
To what extent was a clean sheet design a huge advantage over the legacy makers?
And to what extent were the subsidies an advantage? They phased out after 200,000 units and Tesla has sold millions.
Tesla took the hit for the transportation industry, working their asses off and pioneering the costly ramp up to mass production of EVs, so the subsidies are the government compensating them for having not taken the easy path that the legacy auto makers are taking with their continued production of polluting gas cars and their half-hearted introduction of compliance cars.
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.
In Q1 2025, Tesla made $595 million on selling environmental credits/carbon offsets to other car makers. Net income for the whole company was $409 million.
Tesla has earned since 2017 over $10B in carbon offsets. That is in addition to the state and federal incentives.
How many issues due large companies run into thinking they can just throw money at it? Just look at google and stadia, or amazon and their failed game studio. They have immense money and knowledge and ended up with nothing.
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.
At the same time, we've had car companies putting out cars for 20 years with 10s of different modules built by different companies and things have been working just fine. Suddenly it's a problem because apparently everyone needs a giant screen on the dashboard?
Because the auto companies outsource everything, lay the risk onto the outsourced companies and expect that some significant percentage of them will go bankrupt every year.
With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.
Smells like Boeing.
I worked at BMW. I knew there was a project in there, using a certain ECU that was being quite problematic (as in, project being slightly late because ECU was a bit buggy and sometimes crashed when it was supposed to have almost 100% of uptime for legal reasons).
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 talent might not exist. Software development has been seen as the preferable career over electrical engineering for a long time now.
When I started my career I had a very keen interest in the embedded space, but when it pays half of what CRUD webapps pay I quickly changed to software only. I still tinker with embedded on the side and maybe at some point I can justify the cut in pay to go back to something I'd prefer to work on.
They don't have a culture that values it, at any level. Historically hardware was important and software was a nice-to-have addon cost center. That's the mentality that the people at the top are still in, and it trickles down.
> a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house?
I think in a lot of cases that would be Bosch, which is huge.
They did the opposite for decades in the hope to save some bucks, they outsourced everything so only business people remained.
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.
This also works the opposite way. If the software roadmap does not inform the hardware requirements, then minimization of the bill of materials will lead to the selection of crappy hardware chips.
If you’re making very low end HW maybe this is true. Because HW is something that you put into the real world there are other constraints such as power, cooling, space, security of supply, ability to ramp, cost, reliability, etc. The calculus for HW selection is much more involved than simply SW. Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. This is a very rare skill in 2025. Most SW engineers I’ve encountered cannot explain stack vs heap. Furthermore even fewer understand how to use malloc correctly.
> Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW.
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.
Blaming hardware people rubs me the wrong way.
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.
I feel like Subaru Eyesight violates this, which is why I’m so surprised with it. It’s a stereo camera system that just works so darn well. I’ve got to imagine the hardware that runs it is not insignificant.
This is weird because the microprocessor industry owes a lot of early success to automotive companies. Motorola 6800, Intel 8061 (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vaul...) etc. Quoting wikipedia: "the name "Motorola" by linking "motor" (from motor car) with "ola" (from Victrola), which was also a popular ending for many companies at the time, e.g. Moviola, Crayola"
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?
Motorola were a car radio company originally
I’m in a loaner 2025 Volvo right now and I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised with the Android Auto setup. I thought I’d never again use anything other than phone projection, but nope — I can install Google Maps and Spotify and sign into both, and then my profiles and everything are right there including search history, and it’s actually more seamless and integrated than switching between CarPlay and the native/outer car UI.
Give it five years and it will be guaranteed garbage. Spotify will refuse to run on an unsupported older Android without the latest DRM API, while Google Maps will crash your system randomly, requiring you to disconnect the car battery to jumpstart it again. Volvo will offer you an upgrade of their proprietary device at the low price of $1899.
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.
I've been using Apple CarPlay on a car that was manufactured in 2016. There are some occasional issues with the infotainment system, but CarPlay works as well as it did nearly 10 years ago. It is much more likely that CarPlay will continue to function just as well whereas proprietary systems made by car manufacturers are going to start showing their age.
> Google Maps will crash your system randomly
They’ve at least got some incentive to keep this working so they can keep showing you ads.
> typical release cycle of GC devices
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.
> There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car.
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.
The version in Volvo and Polestar's is actually Android Automotive, which is it's own Android distribution with it's own version of Maps/Spotify etc. Funnily it even has Android Auto functionality too.
Restated: “Android Automotive” != “Android Auto”
Although it didn't use to have Android Auto, which was awful. Because as you alluded to, Android apps are not automatically available on AAOS. As it happens the music app I use is not available on AAOS, so until Volvo added Android Auto support to their cars I could not get a good experience with my music.
Yes, Android Auto has some of the standardized interface features I was talking about, allowing the general computing needs to be fulfilled by a device brought by the user.
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.
Why did you think you'd "never again" use anything like Android Auto?
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.
Overall I’m a fan of the projection model, and I definitely see the benefit in longevity as well as the ability for older vehicles to get a retrofit head unit that adds in the projection interface.
My reflection was only that I was surprised at how well the built in apps worked when I tried them… but I definitely take it on board that it’s unlikely to still work this well 5, 10, or 15 years from now, so it’s important that the car still has projection available as a fallback.
Having your accounts, preferences, and history follow you into the car without juggling cables or switching UIs is exactly the kind of seamless experience SDVs should be delivering
This is only half the story, working for a major vendor, we sell both hardware and software, the whole way up to a full customisable well integrated platform. The manufacturers are deliberately choosing less capable systems, or taking thing piecemeal.
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.
> customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money
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.
Well, consider, you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't.
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
This is, incidentally, why it's so important to have a free market in software separate from hardware, despite what Apple may think. You can't have a free market competing on every possible feature; some features are going to be dominant. So people will choose cars based on size, aesthetics, price and brand .. but not on the quality of the software, which is very hard for them to evaluate even on a test drive.
> you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't
At the time, I did not pay much attention to the software, because I never expected it could be so bad. Now I know better, and my next choice will consider software as one of the main factors (I don't be buying a swasticar anytime soon, though).
If VW and all other product manufacturers of products containing universal machines as components were forced to charge customers a 100% sales tax on all such end-of-chain products, UNLESS all (and I do mean all, down to the controller on the SSD or the battery controller or whatever) universal machines in the product complied with the following:
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.
There are other competitors for that segment, even the Q4e on the same platform has better UI. People still buy the ID4 because it's not enough of a deciding factor.
Hyundai/Kia make very good EVs. I am extremely happy with my new Kona. I would not say the software is amazing, but it is responsive, nice to use and has pretty much everything you need.
Amazing claim to read considering I have experience with modern Audi software on the daily and it is an utter dumpster fire.
I have a VAG ICE vehicle and had a problem with the navigation system not working. When I brought it in to get it fixed, they apparently put a completely new version of the software on the hardware.
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.
> 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.
The ID 4 is coming off a recall and sales stop because the doors would open when in motion if the handles got wet.
I can't recall any car that didn't have any 'teething problems'. Some cars I've owned had multiple recalls. Of course it doesn't look good, but often it's to fix the probability of a problem occurring: it's not that the doors instantly swing open when touched by a drop of water.
Go for a Hyundai.
You only have to develop those interfaces once for high end cars and get your money there. Rest is then just one of the small modifications.
Not at all, a high end car will use an entirely different architecture to a mid/low end...
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.
What you mean by different architecture here? I've never seen a situation where manufacturers choose fundamentally different architectures between price points on the same platform. I feel like I'm misunderstanding what you mean though.
Someone like Ford for example will have several software platforms, some for low cost vehicles, some high, some that are adaptable between trim levels.
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.
Apple doesn't have different software platforms for low vs high cost phones. Why is a car different? It doesn't even have as much functionality.
I think it's fair to say that the software in a modern car contains lot more functionality than an average smartphone. Drivers just aren't aware of how much is happening in their car each second.
To someone that knows nothing about car SW architecture, that is surprising to me, I would have expected a number of control loops for things like fuel injection, ABS brake control, drive-by-wire, EV battery charge and discharge, etc. each running on their own processor due real-time safety considerations. These I would expect to be different implementations and parameterizations of the same control theory maths.
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 am also not deeply into this stuff. But there is more going on in a car than what you list.
One probably surprising thing is that an LCD dashboard is usually driven by multiple rendering stacks. One is for the complex graphics and eye candy. The other one is responsible for brake and engine warning lights etc. and is considered safety critical. The second one is very basic and often partitioned off by a hypervisor.
A lot of these controllers are running more than just control loops. They are also actively monitoring their system for failures. The number of possible failure conditions and responses is quite large. I had instances where e.g. the engine warning light came on because the ECU detected that the brake light switch was faulty. In another instance, I had powered steering turn itself off during a drive because it had developed a fault. These kinds of behaviors are the results of dedicated algorithms that are watching just about every component of safety critical systems that can possibly be monitored.
All of these software systems are provided by different vendors who develop the aplication software based on either their own stack or operating systems and middleware provided by other upstream suppliers. It don't think it's uncommon for a car to contain multiple copies of 3 or 4 different RTOS stacks. Nobody at the car manufacturers is enforcing uniformity in the software stacks that the suppliers deliver. The manufacturers tend to want finished, self-contained hardware units that they can plug in, configure and turn on.
I mean there is just no way that that can be true.
Because a low and high cost phone do essentially the same thing, whereas a high trim car will do things like steering assistance in a way the low trim does not do at all.
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.
Yes, different platforms have different architectures. Within a platform, the system level architecture will be relatively fixed. OEMs will part subsystems out to different tier 1s for different vehicles on that platform, but that's (ideally) just plugging different boxes together on the OEM side.
There's a lot of very expensive development tools (e.g. dSpace simulators) that rely on this model of automotive development.
It was encouraging to hear an exec from Ford recently say essentially this in an interview. The legacy manufacturers seem to realize that Tesla is eating their lunch because of their lack of vertical integration. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve but will be interesting to see what effort achieves.
BYD would eat their lunch even more if they were allowed to.
Tesla was eating their lunch in terms of software, integration, capabilities, apps. Then rivian came along and a few other companies doing a much better job than the awful legacy companies.
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.
Rivians and Lucids cost tens of thousands of dollars more than 95% (not an exaggeration) of Teslas. Completely different markets (and size of market).
Was it the one with Verge?
>Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers
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.
I had one of the most popular published projects on mp3car.com back in the heyday. It actually got me into a few strange meetings with companies that were actually building this stuff, like Clarion. I had literally designed, built, and installed a superior product to what they shipped as a one-off for fun in 3 months, but to them I was just a token enthusiast.
The vocabulary that these people started throwing out was absolute nonsense. It was pretty evident that "vehicle informatics" was fucked the second someone said those words out loud. And here we are more than 20 years later and still no closer to getting it right. Despite being seemingly well regarded, even Tesla's in car systems are just awful. And it's more impossible than ever to fix, modify, or replace on your own.
Agreed!
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.
> 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’m sure I’m in the minority, but I pay for ad-free navigation.
Sounds like a potential business opportunity! I don't know much about cars, how much is standardized in car electronics? Would it be possible to build a infotainment module that you could sell to several car manufacturers with only minimal modifications?
I think I've heard of something called an ICANN(?) bus that is used to communicate stuff in cars and is fairly standardised, maybe?
ITYM "CAN bus" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus
Pioneer has been selling standard-sized Android Auto head units for over a decade at this point.
It's CAN, and it's old serial technology.
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.
That's what many OEMs have been doing for decades and this is exactly what many SDV have been trying to get rid of, since integrating many different products from many different manufacturers are slow, let alone iterating and designing new features.
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.
Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know.
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.
As an embedded developer I usually point to the fact that there is generalist hard and software available for the primitive problem an infotainment systems needs to solve. At least for that side I don't see how generalist pc hardware wouldn't suffice and fit probably 95% of use cases.
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.
How much extra work have automakers made for themselves by pridefully(?) refusing to use Android Automotive to handle some of the very things that auto makers are worse at?
As much as everyone used to clown on Tesla for it, the vast majority of cars would be better off with an iPad glued to the dash.
Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.
For those unaware: the Volkswagen Up! is a small, low-budget car produced by VW group, it's also sold as the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii. AFAIK it was only sold in Europe and Latin-America.
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...
>>> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
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.
FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …
I mean the EEs / MEs can certainly turn out a board and housing in under 6 months, certainly on a yearly cycle. Though for the current automakers, they don't have a team for this so it would take them probably 3 iterations to get good enough to actually scale it to a mass market car, and that is if their team has good talent and strong leadership.
You're right that legacy OEMs can't pivot overnight and start fabbing their own boards, but unless they move toward tighter integration of hardware and software (or lock down long-term partnerships that function like internal teams), they’re going to stay in this awkward middle ground.
>Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
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 nice thought experiment, but I doubt the US will ever do something as pro-consumer as this.
This seems like it is also a „purchase department got the cheapest crap instead of something reasonable“ problem. You don’t need to actually make your own electronics if the specs are decent and the features match your needs.
> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.
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?
When you design electronics you have to produce millions of, it takes a couple of dev 'spins' and usually a couple of prod 'spins' to get to the mass market board. Usually the PMs, EEs, MEs and SWEs get together and spec out a schematic, then the EEs will create the first draft of the board. There is usually extra connectors and test points on this board to ease testing and development. Once they verify it powers on, I as an embedded software engineer, start producing the software to get it running, or 'brought up'. While that is happening EE testing is going on for all sorts of things like EMI, power, communication speeds, etc. Besides the software I actually write, the chipset vendor's drivers need to be added and tested as well, there are always little things that take longer than they should. I've lost a lot of schedule to very subtle issues with chips. As we progress along, the schematic or layout gets updated and new versions are produced. Maybe the traces need to change to reduce EMI, maybe a chipset isn't workign well or we find a cheaper equivalent and swap it out. Then once everything looks good we move to a production version, all the test points are removed, and we start putting in orders for the parts we need in volume. If you want a million of something you usually have to order in advance. Then you start bringing the factory online, helping with factory test software...and well the point is the cycle time for all this is like 6 months for a tight ship. More like a year if the kind of thing your making is novel to the team since you need a longer dev time.
I’m not sure if you’ve worked around hardware but a year is not very long in these environments, and that 5 year plan is less like a sensible, let alone obvious step to take and more like a crazy leap of faith.
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.
Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place.
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.
Because they are not electronics companies, and further more they are terrible integration companies.
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.
Precisely, such a change represents substantial risk in an incredibly risk-averse industry. People at orgs in such industries are in constant CYA mode, looking to point responsibility (and therefore blame) to anyone else.
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.
It is possible to put out a fire by dumping cash on it, but there's a minimum amount that you need to dump at once for it to work. They cannot stomach the amount required, so they just feed it in one handful at a time, which of course just causes the fire to grow.
When I was working at $samsung_competitor, my NDA'd next gen android phone prototypes (a huge motherboard with a screen) were sent some years earlier. Like Samsung is on S25 now, and we would get boards for S27... It takes a long time for these things to evolve.
I feel like I'm on crazy pills sometimes when talking with people who deal mostly with software. I think SW engineers sometimes think that engineering generally looks like what they do, when in reality SW is a deep outlier wrt process...
The word “engineering” in SWE is just plain wrong. Present day software development has nothing to do with engineering outside of some very niche markets (aviation, mission-critical systems, embedded controllers). The term vibe coding came up really handy because it describes how 99% of software is developed much better than “software engineering“, with or without LLMs. That’s why it’s always fun to read such discussions of hardware vs software people.
If you're curious why it takes longer than that, check out this primer on the HW dev cycle.
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.
> In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?
It's because these companies are more about vendor management and regulatory compliance than building things. It's a totally different mindset.
The VW and Rivian tie up for electronics will help answer if a traditional automaker can catch up if the electronics integration bit is taken off the table.
Back when there were all the rumours of an Apple car, I was hoping that this was actually what they were working on.
> you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year
The Model S came out in 2012 so they’ve had well over a decade to catch up.
Are the PM women or not qualified?
Remove the LTE chip and all functionality related to ads, support wireless CarPlay and android auto, and use physical buttons. You’ll win every award in the industry.
Mazda has done a great job at this so far, very minimal screen which automatically just shows CarPlay, and buttons for all the normal car stuff, which also isn’t overdone. The only flaw is the scroll wheel to interact with the screen, which is just slightly too clunky in apps with too many options
My 2017 Mazda cx5 refuses to not play the radio. There is no "off" for the audio, you have to choose a source. I use my phone, via bluetooth. But sometimes, for unknown reasons, the car does not connect with the phone. It then falls back to the last source chosen before BT, which is radio. Okay, so I created a flash drive with an mp3 of 30 seconds of silence, played that, then went back to bluetooth. This failback strategy worked one time, then it also failed to recognize the flash drive, and failed back to radio, again.
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.
Long pressing the source button turns off audio and keeps it from turning on automatically on the next start. This at least lets you explicitly decide when you want music.
Re: radio always turning on, my LDV eDeliver 9 is the same but worse - sometimes the radio comes on immediately, and sometimes it takes about 20 seconds. You can’t preemptively mute it in the latter case. There’s lots of other weird quirks with the radio (e.g. going into reverse switches to a low-volume radio if you were previously playing music or a podcast in CarPlay). It’s as-if almost any change in the audio switches the radio on. Other than that, it’s a great van!
Ah yes, Mazda. The car company which won't even give you a fuse box diagram, and instead says to contact the dealer if a fuse blows.
https://www.cx90forum.com/threads/fuse-box-diagram.172/
Something foul and malign is afoot at Mazda these days.
While not dramatically better, just a few posts down[0] someone paid for the "Welcome to Mazda" service manuals/program for $30 and shared the fuse box schematics
[0] https://www.cx90forum.com/posts/2706/
From the perspective of Mazda being malign, it's not the tiniest bit better.
MG has exactly the same issue. Default to radio for some weird reason and no real "off" without disabling the whole system.
Use the volume button as "functional on/off" for the radio.
I have tried that (not on a Mazda). The radio is still there playing whatever and if there is a valid station the now playing song has to be shown on the other useful screen. On I got the system to default to radio off, but that means I can't control my heated seats w=ithout turning the system on - there are several seconds of noise between getting the system on and it responding tol the volumn knob.
I think making manufacturers pay you back the whole car in a recall, or half the car and you keep it, for this kind of crappy design, would be a good thing (especially since I am sure the firmware is code signed lolol). Oh no more Matsuda or GM because they went bankrupt from fines and restitution? Cry me a river, sucks to suck cutting corners lol.
Mazda also managed to squander a huge brand and structural advantage by falling into lockstep behind other Japanese automakers in underinvesting in EV manufacturing infrastructure. Now they have to rely on their JV partner Changan to lead the way in producing EVs, giving up the core structural strengths that Mazda previously had in designing and building their own components - including software and controls, which in the Changan-led models have no continuity at all with Mazda's domestic models. They just superficially copy the Mazda exterior design language while wholly dependent on Chinese supply chains (and some Android Auto for the software, it seems) for manufacturing the actual EV.
While that might affect their market share in HN neighborhoods I assure you Mazda is making money hand over fist selling their boring non-hybrid SUVs to normal people. People love them and they sell.
I know Mazda makes good boring SUVs, I own one. I like Mazda's design philosophy, that's why I want them to succeed. In terms of vehicles sold, Mazda's sales peaked in 2017, the year before I bought my most recent one. As best I can tell, operating profit peaked in 2016.
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).
They have a low single digit percentage profit margin. That is not making money hand over fist, that is barely surviving.
https://www.mazda.com/content/dam/mazda/corporate/mazda-com/...
Mazda’s operating margin is higher than Walmart’s (along with many others). I think hyper scalable sectors like high tech and finance distort our OM expectations.
Operating margin is irrelevant, only profit margin matters for this context. Walmart hangs out in the 2.5% to 3.5% range, not materially different than Mazda. Either way, any business with a low single digit profit margin is not making money hand over fist. It might be different if Mazda had such a huge and loyal market share that their low profit margins are offset by low volatility of expected future sales (such as with Walmart/Costco), but that isn't the case at all with Mazda.
Their expectation is that their sales will be stagnant at best, but probably decline for the foreseeable future.
That doesn't seem unusual for automotive. What number were you expecting to see?
It's not about unusual, just that a low profit margin in a volatile industry is (with a downward trend in sales for almost 10 years), by definition, not making money hand over fist. That is why their market cap graph looks like this:
https://companiesmarketcap.com/mazda/marketcap/
A lot of people still don’t want or can’t really afford EVs given their limitations. I’d say it’s the majority where I live. I directly know only one person who has a full EV (not a hybrid).
I don’t think the Japanese automakers have squandered anything, yet.
We paid maybe a $10K premium for a used EV truck. It gets 2mi/kWh. Most parts of the country are paying ~ $0.125 per kWh, so that’s &0.06 of a dollar in electricity per mile.
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.
For commuter with charging access at office or home EV makes sense. For me making 300+ mile round trips with no charging infra (pull in at the gas station in the foothills) and low overall mileage EV is trickier.
If that’s your common use case (with no stop on the destination side of the trip), then it’d limit your options to high range vehicles.
There's a stop, it's just in the middle of nowhere. 20 minute charge would be annoying but survivable assuming they had them in say Lone Pine. And yeah, 20 something mpg and 16 gallon tank multiplies out to a large range.
You're in luck! There's a dozen Superchargers available right in downtown Lone Pine: https://www.plugshare.com/location/60596
Including supply and generation, we pay $0.148 / kWh, and yeah, I average $0.06 charging my EV at home on a slow, inefficient 120V / 15A. (Some day I'll upgrade, maybe.) I've never charged anywhere else (except for free at the used car dealer where I bought it.)
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.
China is currently making affordable EVs, though they might not meet (American) expectations of things like range. There’s no reason why traditional automakers couldnt be doing the same had they not focused on larger ice vehicles, hydrogen, or the luxury market.
Hopefully they figure it out because I love my Mazda 3 hatchback and would buy an EV version of it in a heartbeat. Not only is it very fun to drive (I have a manual transmission) but the interior design is excellent.
Mazda's target market is quite different from the EV buyers one, at least here in Europe.
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.
> underinvesting in EV manufacturing infrastructure.
This has been a fantastic decision, as a large number of EV manufacturers have gone bankrupt.
I bought a Mazda3 a few months ago and I love it. It is exactly what I want as a driver.
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.
When I was doing my car shopping two years ago, I was initially considering another Mazda, specifically looking at the Mazda 3 AWD Hatchback. Their high tech features were significantly behind the other Japanese auto manufacturers. Some features like the ability for the car to automatically stay in a lane were not present.
When looking at who is doing it right, I wouldn’t put Mazda on a pedestal. They simply are behind the competition.
Generally agree but they are laying the path to enshitification. You see you can get turn by turn directions on the HUD, but only through their app where they want you to pay $10/mo for the privilege. Same for inputting addresses into their crappy nav system.
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.
Really? I rented a cx90 with hud and with CarPlay and Apple Maps I think it had turn by turn directions
> Remove the LTE chip
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.
Oops somehow a switch has attached itself to the fuse of the LTE module in my vehicle.
Won't work if the cellular modem is powered directly off the ECU's fuse or is embedded in the ECU itself.
Yeah, would not. I am glad my 2025 vehicle has a fuse for the telematics module.
Nice. I wish mine had a dedicated fuse for that.
wire snips enter the chat
Wouldn't be the first or the last time that a car has a different build out for different locales - as differences go, that's pretty minor.
Ok but that doesn’t really solve the problem in Europe.
I mean we can also change laws again in europe (in favour of that) - but we could also keep it as a separate module. So the LTE chip only gets used for an emergency call and nothing else. No remote control.
Unlikely to happen, but possible (not 100% safe, but good enough).
If you don't turn on the LTE chip, it can take a while to get registered or a network in order to perform an emergency call. If the LTE module is turned on (the same applies for mobile phones) the network operator will know your coarse location because of the LTE specification itself. Furthermore, all communication equipment is legally required to support Lawful Interception; and LTE is no exception to this.
Yes, that is sadly true, but they have that data via smartphones anyway.
But remote controlling the car is something different.
Ok but if you change the laws then you don’t need a different build.
Was my sentence that unclear? I constructed it as a OR. Either change the laws (my favourite solution as I don't like enforced modification of my car) - or use a technical solution to just meet the law.
> required
That’s…terrible
Are there new vehicles in the U.S. that don't have an LTE chip and antenna?
...why? Seems pretty sensible to me?
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/smart-mobili...
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).
>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.
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.
> That statement is factually inconsistent.
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.
Sorry, that's incorrect. I have actually read the law and its relevant standards. The standard requires at least two pre-accident locations to increase accuracy and other fields with pre-crash data are encouraged.
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 MSD (minimum set of data) is defined in: "CEN 15722 ESafety - ECall - Minimum Data Set".
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.
Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location.
The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants. The common OEM implementation these days is that the physical device that does eCall does several things, including eCall, over the same cellular radio. There's nothing stopping the OEM from connecting to a random website and eval()ing the result.
You seem confident in the security of this unhackable system so I will point out some of its other security weaknesses. Several eCall device implementations include Bluetooth modules (both "unused" as part of hardware and implementations that use Bluetooth.) Bluetooth is as secure as a wet cardboard box, so you could take BlueBorne or one of the six million other Bluetooth exploits that work on a non-discoverable device just sitting on the shelf, get in that way and boom, you can transmit whatever you want over the cellular radios. Vehicle infotainment systems are pretty insecure on average and are frequently hacked, so you could take over the infotainment system, get into the CAN bus that way and then send bad data to the eCall system, which is in the business of processing and responding to CAN data.
But those are just a few of the million ways; you could write up attacks all day long and you wouldn't scratch the surface. The facts are: this is a system with cellular radio(s), a CAN bus connection, sensors that constantly listen and interpret data; this is a large attack surface, built by OEMs that write notoriously insecure software. It is, by any reasonable judgment of those facts, a pretty hackable system. And yet, the European Commission goes around telling people that it "cannot" be hacked.
Anyway, this will be my third comment in a row here telling people that their comment is plain incorrect, so I'm going to have to leave the discussion here. I hope that my words provide some food for thought - for the next time that a system that could track you becomes legally mandatory.
> Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location.
I have the standard open, and I don't see it.
> The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants.
Sure. So just choose an automaker that doesn't provide data subscription services and/or don't pay for them. The eCall requirement in itself doesn't require tracking.
Because you have to just believe that they are followed, and cannot verify it.
Your privacy should not rely on the government's "trust me bro" and it's like we forgot about China owning SS7 last year lol. No, it is plainly obvious to me that the mandate for eCall and the lack of an owner off switch for it is for nannying and surveillance FULL STOP. No option to opt out must be treated the same as the violations to privacy they are attempting to pre-construct the conditions for.
Well, for starters, the SIM card in the eCall system is only needed to receive a callback from the 112 service if the call drops, which the system automatically picks up. You can actually dial 112 without a SIM card in your phone, as a GSM device without one can still connect to nearby radio towers in a "limited-service set," better known as "emergency calls only."
I know some carriers have strange quirks in their SIM provisioning systems. For instance, it may take more than a few minutes or require a specific type of coverage (like UMTS) for an otherwise "dormant" SIM card to activate from limited service on short notice.
I found an article about eCall Callback that confirms this is a known problem: https://eena.org/blog/resolving-the-ecall-callback-issue/
Some people don’t like built in trackers
It's not a tracker. It activates during an accident, or via manual action.
Hopefully those same people know what ANPR is and how does it affect them.
Of course it is. We're just told differently until a leaker proves differently. Twenty years too late to do anything about it
And naturally of course you don't carry a cellphone with you while you drive...you know, that device with accelerometers, GPS and an LTE chip that you leave powered on all the time on your person?
I don’t. What’s your point
Of course I am free to carry it or not
You are also free not to use a mode of transportation. You can, for example, buy an old car, register it on a historical number plate, and you’re good. There is no retrofit requirement. If you want a new car, suck it up.
I'm always amused at people who deem future and freedom of choice incompatible and effectively stating that the end game of all progress is absolute slavery and obedience.
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
Omg what am I going to do. Yes yes. You know I’m selling trackers online and just lobbying on hacker news.
You seem to be wasting your precious “armchair psychologist skills” here on hn.
Ah yes, brilliant reasoning. "You carry one device that can be tracked as long as you're carrying it so what's the problem with having tracking baked into your vehicle?"
There are so many things in a modern car that track you. eCall is the smallest problem.
Indeed there are: https://medium.com/@doctoreww/day-2-your-car-is-trackable-by...
And “modern” is going back over a decade. So most cars on the road.
I can actually remove my number plate. One tool, five minutes, car still drives.
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.
I wonder what is your estimated ratio of number of active CCTV plate readers to that of cell towers out of a city and back in the country?
I’m certain you aren’t that important for anyone to care.
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.
> I’m certain you aren’t that important for anyone to care.
Storage is cheap. We know the NSA hoovers up everything it can and puts in a database. This is facile reasoning.
> So you can get help.
How many accidents resulted in fatalities because 911 couldn't find the victim? What's the percentage on that you think? Is there _no other way_ to get help other than this system?
> I’m sure someone more qualified than you would have already reported if
You're just full of confidence. Pray tell where it comes from. What makes you believe this is true?
> You're just full of confidence. Pray tell where it comes from. What makes you believe this is true?
I trust in people who look for this stuff as a daily job, or because „they’re here to get you”. Because you know a sim card in the open is really easy to verify. And there are thousands of them driving around but also easily approachable sitting targets in every possible setting.
But you double down. I find this discussion pointless.
> How many accidents resulted in fatalities because 911 couldn't find the victim?
You’re missing the point of the eCall system. Think out of the box. What if there is no witness? What if everyone in the car cannot get help
Everyone who could reach out for help, received it. Can you tell the same about those who weren’t able to contact first responders in time? Maybe they’re still missing! It’s called survivorship bias.
Sounds like you are trying hard to be obnoxious.
If it always has a cell tower connection, it is a tracker and... do you even operate?
Well… do you? eCall sim is passive, activated only in an emergency or explicitly as a response to the action of the occupants of the vehicle: https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/bosch-explains...
Almost everyone has a phone you don’t need a second one built in to your car.
Almost like sometimes people get seriously injured in car accidents and can't get to their phone, assuming it's where it was left prior to the accident.
Will your phone be easily accessible after a crash with rollover?
Let people decide if their fear of death warrants all kinds of surveillance on them and not shove that down their throats as in "we know that many of you would opt-out of being tracked so we made it mandatory", alright?
Usually not always.
There's nothing at all sensible about legally mandating that all cars must have a device which can be used for surveillance. Still less so for something which is at best a marginal gain in safety.
One more thing to increase cost, fragility, security concerns, in an age when virtually everyone already has a cell device anyway.
Physical buttons are a huge need. Its so distracting navigating through screens to change the temperature while driving.
That’s interesting - what vehicles require you to do that? I know the usual suspect is the Tesla, which I have, but I never have to navigate through menus to change the temperature while driving.
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.
> 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.
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.
We can - but we don’t need to clutch our pearls about infotainment screens as if they are some sort of special moral insult relative to what’s very common in today’s driving communities.
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?
We are talking millions of cars driving at a speed that can kill people both inside or outside the car. Anything you can do to reduce those distractions is a net positive for society. Less death.
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 live in America it’s just not enforced. Even cops do it. I don’t do it because I just don’t need to but you can watch people doing it for yourself if you pay attention.
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.
It is enforced in at least some parts of the US.
I haven’t been to every part of America, but based on the travels I have done there is very little, if any enforcement.
In Canada at least, cops have special dispensation to be allowed to use their phones while driving.
Ford SYNC.
https://pictures.dealer.com/s/surprisefordvtg/0292/10a2adba8...
It's like a window into hell.
As a Linux fan and owner of a Sync 1.0 vehicle I feel your pain. I want to replace it with something aftermarket, but the cost of a dash kit is pretty steep if you want one of decent quality. I reboot it weekly, which takes minutes, so it doesn't freeze during the week. I'm guessing there's memory leak that takes a while to accumulate.
Original SYNC was actually embedded version of Windows. It’s running QNX now and Android for future versions.
I've got a Ranger with SYNC 4. HVAC has its own set of buttons and dials below the display, but you can use the touchscreen widgets too if you want to.
https://www.ford.com.au/content/ford/au/en_au/home/owners/te...
Depends on the vehicle. Maverick Sync 4 moved HVAC controls to touch screen for 2025 models.
Just bought a 2022 Mustang to avoid the 2024-2025 series for SYNC 4 and the removal of physical buttons. Car is nice but can’t get past the whole digital set up.
We rented a BMW which had all climate settings on a touch screen. That touch screen crashed once and we couldn't turn the air con off without trying to reboot the car which isn't exactly trivial since there isn't any obvious off button.
Subaru require you navigating to second screen for climate modes. Simple temp adjustment has buttons, but the screen interactions for basic usage feels dangerous as a driver.
This is the feature I dislike most about my outback. Some systems just need buttons so you can operate without looking
Kia’s EV9 solved the problem of needing to look at the climate touch screen behind the steering wheel. That way, the driver cannot see it.
(Really. They did. No, you can’t adjust the steering wheel position enough to fix the problem.)
Typo: “Behind” -> “by hiding it behind”
I’m being pedantic but the OP did specifically say they need to “navigate through screens to adjust the temperature” which I think is different than setting climate modes. Not that I’m defending that you might have to do that specifically, but I was responding to the OP’s specific wording.
Even buttons can be distracting. Instead of just a hot/cold knob, some cars have ˚F up/down buttons you have to spam.
Doesn't Tesla require you to navigate to a second screen when changing the fan speed?
The OP said changing the temperature which is what I responded to.
Also at least personally I never change the fan speed but just set the temperature I want.
Tesla added a feature via a software update a year ago that lets you change fan speed by holding the left steering wheel button.
If I had to use a touch screen to change the temp on my car, I'd probably leave in the garage.
The industry keeps chasing "connected experiences" and ad monetization while ignoring what most drivers actually want: responsiveness, simplicity, and reliability
Slate have done this and it's really quite compelling. You even get window winders.
https://www.slate.auto/en/personalization
"Have done this" implies Slate has delivered even one vehicle. They have not. I hope Slate succeeds, but let's not get caught up in the preorder hype.
Yeah. Alpha "Motor" has been breathlessly hyping renders for years now, while declaring that their nonexistent vehicles have won all kinds of awards.
Oh, and every year there's "only three days left to invest!"
I don't even think they've built a single prototype. I'd be happy to be corrected but last time I checked, none of the "prototype" shells they showed off had a powertrain.
This is the same way that hn proclaims every single arxiv paper as revolutionary. I really wonder sometimes who is this gullible on the internet (kids? bots? I influencers?)
I was quite interested in this until I realized:
* 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.
Meh. Base Maverick is a <5' bed, no AWD, and towing of 2000lb but I haven't seen one doing any towing in the wild. But the owners seem to love them.
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 think the market for base Mavericks is pretty small. At that point it's really not providing much value over an SUV with rear seats that fold down. I agree not everyone wants to spend 40-80k, but that doesn't mean they want to spend $20k for a small no-frills EV in the shape of a truck with not many other similarities.
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.
AWD is only standard on the fanciest Maverick trim and not an option picked by the couple of folks I know with them. But that + the bed length doesn't seem to be stopping them from loving their trucks. Tacos also start at 5' IIRC.
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.
For a pickup truck, if you're buying it so it's "there when you need it," it removes a lot of value if it's gotta stay in the garage during the winter.
Though yes, I could see it being less important if that's not an issue in your area.
FWIW the Maverick handles 4x8 sheets fine - they go on the wheel wells and the tailgate with some straps to hold them in place.
the f150 ev doesn't have a long bed. for those of us who haul stuff no truck works (until we step to the f250 or bigger)
It's not a truck. It's for people who need more than a car, but less than a truck. A Cuck? (oh, wait...) A Truar? Either way, those specs are plenty for the average person that just wants to haul some stuff, or pull a small trailer, and not burn too much energy while doing it (or not doing it).
The window winders I can do without. Not sure that even saves a noticeable amount of money at this point with electric windows such as commodity.
I seem to remember Jeep saying manual window winders were actually more expensive once you factor in the costs of having them as an option given how cheap electric ones are when they dropped them for the new Wrangler. Might still be cheaper if you only manufacture with them and don’t offer electric but the price difference can’t be that high.
Is it about price or reliability?
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.
>I never had a manual window winder fail
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.
Old enough to have owned multiple cars from the 80s, but not from new!
However I do live in the UK so they were European/UK cars - Vauxhall, Volvo, Citroen, Renault.
Manual windows can and do fail, but in my experience not as often as electric ones. There’s just less to go wrong.
In my experience, they both fail but differently.
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.
> I never had a manual window winder fail to work
I have. It jammed. When I tried to release it the glass fell out (into the door).
I've had manual winders fail
same, the cable style are prone to seize. the older manual winders that use a segment of a sheet metal gear and levers were bulletproof though.
All depends on how they market it. Wind down windows to me today is an aesthetic statement - “we are selling a cheap, no frills vehicle - look see! Even wind down windows”
Such positioning could be what the intended customer base react well to.
Add handles like winders, but make them only have 5 degrees of travel up and down, so that they operate like the regular buttons :)
Which turns it into more uselessness for marketing rather then practicality.
For example, mechanical window winders would need a whole extra disengagement or locking mechanism for child proofing.
Manual windows already had child proofing: Rear windows only go down part way so that kids can’t easily climb out.
But that car isn’t intended for customers transporting kids. Two seats.
My biggest concern is lack of a stereo. Did they include speaker cutouts and wires, or are you looking at a $1000 labor bill, minimum?
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).
The presented solution from Slate is a mount for a Bluetooth speaker.
I mean, they did something, for sure, but they sure as hell didn't do "this" ;P. What they are doing is more in the line of not providing even hardware, much less software, which is an entirely different paradigm... like, they don't even provide speakers?!...
It'd be great if they make an engine swap package for existing trucks with optional battery sizes.
Don't know about the rest of the world, but the EU requires e-call (automatic emergency call after an accident) for all new cars now so you can't sell cars without an LTE chip.
... but you can be a bro and make sure that hardware is close to the surface somewhere for easy access, its presence isn't required to start and operate the car (either firmware check or the immobilizer performing metrics), and its removal does not cause an obvious and annoying alert during operation (IE removal should not make the car appear to be in a 'degraded' state per its indicators).
You are complying by installing it, the customers are the ones [easily] removing it [because you were a bro].
It is mandatory to have and it is in checklist during annual vehicle check. Without it it is not street legal. And the car should show an error in case the module is removed/failed.
Those safety add-ons are there for a reason.
Those are not safety addons, those are surveillance ones
It's surveillance if the car manufacturer wants to use it for that.
Really, it's only surveillance, thinly veiled as safety. The reality is that my car is no safer with an LTE modem. Zilch. Zero. It's purely surveillance, if you don't fall for the marketing.
In fact, I'm going to find mine and faraday that shit this weekend.
Which they inevitably will.
Please do not intentionally conflate the two concepts. Connectivity is one thing. Using connectivity for surveillance is another.
If a car is connected to the internet, it does not automatically mean that it is also collecting car data and sending it somewhere.
Is the modem always on or does it only get activated on an accident? If it's the former then cell towers log your location.
Let me guess: you are afraid of the surveillance, use only cash for payment, pager for connectivity and have no permanent address?
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.
That is a blatant reductio ad absurdum. People should have the right to reasonable privacy without being homeless and off grid.
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.
The Nissan Leaf is (was?) what you describe, apart from the LTE chip. The LTE doesn't seem to do much without NissanConnect (which was actually written by Bosch).
Hyundai is physical buttons and CarPlay. That’s why I got Kona EV, and Ioniq5 is well loved.
I have heard CarPlay royalty is quite big - has anyone some numbers?
Edit: maybe my information was old - some sources say it costs nothing
There are no licensing fees or royalties for CarPlay or android auto.
It does cost time/money to integrate, like any feature
Can you implement CarPlay now without the MFI chip?
AFAICT USB-C iPhones don't have the same restrictions as lightning ones - https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/15/iphone-15-usb-c-port-compatib...
That's just for cables, I think you still need MFI (and all the paperwork and approvals and cost and the chip itself) that go with it if you want to implement a CarPlay receiver.
Does anyone prefer wired CarPlay over Wireless CarPlay?
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.
> Does anyone prefer wired CarPlay over Wireless CarPlay?
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.
Someone was so annoyed that they built Raspberry dongle themselves, and based on the stars, someone else was too: https://github.com/45clouds/WirelessCarPlay
Wait till you see how much it costs (in sales) to NOT have it. Eg: I won’t buy a car without it.
Generally yes, but I would buy a car that has no screen at all, just give me a phone holder on the dash.
Yeah all I want is something that holds the phone and gives it a USB-C port that charges it, lets me play media through it, and lets buttons on the wheel control the phone (volume, next/previous, and programmable go forward/back x seconds buttons).
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.
It's the latency that kills me. Let alone the stupid "you're an idiot if you let this screen distract and kill you" message that pops up, it seems to take a good 10+ seconds to sync with the phone and "come alive".
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.
But some do, don't they? It seems to me that Hyundai will initiate the phone connection right when you open the driver's door. Then, as you sit down and start the car, the infotainment has already booted up and the phone connection comes online almost immediately.
Also, during short stops, the screens go black but the connection is kept up, so when you re-start, there is no delay.
That’s good to hear - the experiments I’ve had with the wireless CarPlay has been mediocre, but it’s only been a few rentals.
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.
Then you want the Dacia Media Control.
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
The issue is you're still driving a, somehow, even worse Renault.
“I want this feature, someone should do it.”
“These guys do it…”
“Oh no, not those guys!”
We could instead discuss the feature, but no.
The latest Duster is actually really nice - if you haven't tried it I would strongly recommend it.
This is what the Slate truck is promising. I won’t buy it without CarPlay, personally, but you can put your money where your mouth is, supposedly.
The Slate truck won’t have CarPlay because it won’t have infotainment at all. If you want Carplay buy one of the dozens of offerings from companies like Alpine and have it installed at one of the thousands of stereo shops across the country. You’ll get exactly what you want from experts in what you want.
Or 3d print a mount for my old iPad and not need CarPlay at all.
Sure, that’s the point of the slate truck! Seems like a car for 3d printing enthusiasts.
Physical controls are worth it for me. Having a press to talk button, track advance and volume controls on my steering wheel is a pretty nice quality of life feature. I could do without a screen if the car has that.
I’d rather have a big screen for GPS.
My car even has a relatively small console screen but still prefer it over my (non-plus size) iPhone. I could live with just my iPhone on USB but consider the center screen a plus. (The vehicle is pretty good about climate control etc. on buttons.)
My old ford tourneo custom has a well placed phone holder. I use this and a MagSafe charger plugged into usb port on dash. Works great, I can use my phone, or anybody else can use the van and their phone, it’s really easy. Just looked and newer models have great big touch screen instead :(
You might be interested in the Slate truck when it comes out. It's too early to tell, but I like their philosophy.
I mean I have that already, a Volkswagen E-Up that has a cradle for a phone with a USB port behind it for charging. They even have an app that connects to your car directly(through Bluetooth! No fancy subscription based nonsense) and shows you all charging/energy consumption figures.
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.
And what happens when phone sizes change? I've certainly had phone clips that didn't comfortably fit a new phone with case.
You get a new holder. The one that came with our e-Up was too small for my S24 Ultra, so I just got an adapter on eBay for like £3 and installed a new holder(with wireless charging!). Where there's a market need someone will provide a solution.
I think phones are about as big as they can get, unless we genetically engineer larger hands.
I'm not sure why you have the downvotes. Even it's mostly just about GPS, the built-in screen is better than iPhone on a somewhat dodgy clip attached to a vent someplace. Unless the car were otherwise compelling--and it's a pretty competitive market--not sure I'd buy a car without CarPlay.
I want a car with a phone holder built in! My phone will always be higher powered and more update than any tech in the car.
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.
The more premium Opel Astra K models had a phone holder built-in (optional accessory, but you get the point) that would also charge the phone. Practically no one bought it so they removed it in later models.
> My phone will always be higher powered and more update than any tech in the car.
Carplay is your phone, it's like having an external monitor
You'll win your customers' love. The industry's awards? Who cares!
Removing LTE would remove key features that drivers want, including real time traffic updates, remote controls and streaming media? What's your objection to LTE?
The grandparent said
> 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.
> What's your objection to LTE?
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-...
That's a concern for privacy focused individuals, who are a very small fraction of the consumer market, despite being common here on HN. If the last few decades have shown anything, it's that most consumers don't rank privacy highly as a desired feature for products in anything but the most abstract ways.
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...
Some privacy concious customers know that data collected by China is less relevant than data your own legislation could get access to, but that is a different point.
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.
I just want to be able to disable things even if they're default on. Or if not a software toggle, perhaps pull out the SIM card so the connectivity goes away.
You're not using a smartphone?
> You're not using a smartphone?
I have an iPhone with no social media apps. Mainly use it to check e-mail, Maps, weather, and SMS/RCS.
I feel confident that there is minimal third-party tracking, and that Apple themselves are relatively honest.
I think the idea is your phone will do that for you via carplay (etc)
That's a huge assumption. Cars had cell connectivity long before smartphones showed up. Onstar predates the iPhone by a decade.
I don't think it's a huge assumption. It was in the past, but not anymore.
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.
The only problem with CarPlay (and presumably AA) is lack of integration with the car…
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).
My car puts my phone contacts in my navigation. That's a software limitation of legacy car manufacturers.
Right, and Apple Car Play does it out the gate. So much so that I can say "Navigate to Doctor X" and it does it. And it did it without convoluted requirements on the vehicle side. And it will continue to do it, because Apple's navigation isn't going to rot like the car manufacturers will.
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.
The moment you pick a non-techie off the street and help them see the amount of data collection occurring, you have another person who proves the assumption. It's not a huge assumption.
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.
What percentage of consumers do you think consider privacy as a feature in their car purchasing decision?
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 percentage of consumers do you think consider privacy as a feature in their car purchasing decision?
What percent of users understand how much data is being collected about them?
I have never once seen someone use the manufacturer provided traffic data, navigation, or "streaming media" over their phone when given the choice. Let's be real; it's just an excuse to try to subject customers to another subscription fee.
Beware connectivity in cars, it is not for your good, it’s all about telemetry and profiling.
Why does anyone need any of those except maybe remote start. The rest are handled though CarPlay. Nobody wants built in navigation that the phone already does
If you keep that car for a decade or so the cellular connectivity may remove itself. Like it already did for 3g cars.
If you're gonna build that crap in at least go back to a standard-sized replacable module.
Looking back at the last 10 years how my fellow developers write code, the last thing I want is software defined vehicles. No one is rewarded for writing good code or for handling all the edge cases. People are rewarded for getting things done. The problem is, that this approach works e.g. for non-critical web applications, but not for cars, which are dangerous, heavy object traveling at high speeds.
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.
Automated Emergency Braking has made driving significantly safer, according to the statistics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_emergency_braking_sy...
I would argue that the software quality of ADAS systems is very different from Infotainment.
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.
I believe you, that these systems work. However, I watched too many videos about cars on which it doesn’t. Many of them were expensive cars. Phantom breaking is really scary to me. I’d rather have full control of the car, than letting some system randomly emergency brake the car for no reason. ABS and ESP one can anticipate. ESP usually can even be turned off.
I am not working directly on this but as far as I understand phantom breaking was mostly a calibration issue with earlier versions of front radar AEB.
OTA updates scare me, as does any type of constant connectivity that is even indirectly linked to safety critical systems.
Statistics work on generic population but mush away a lot.
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.
Do we even have one documented case of a careful driver being killed by car software ?
I have a new EV9 and the software on it regularly causes near miss accidents. I’m waiting to see accident statistics after it’s been on the market for a while. They’ll be dismal.
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.
The future we want: The Ford Econoline rebooted with diesel-electric hybrid and full EV powertrain options, kei truck style flatbed with foldable sidewalls and tailgate, built on an actual frame so custom bed options are now possible, fully analog controls, no connectivity or center console display of any kind.
I want the center console, but not hooked to the rest of the car. Instead, it’d have a standard screen, and a jog wheel that’s compatible with third party computers.
I’d settle for a bluetooth (call and music) capable fm radio though.
Serious question: Have you ever driven a vehicle that didn't have a center console display? Not having an ipad in the middle of the dash vying for your attention is pretty sweet.
The direction is likely inevitable. Modern cars already are software-heavy, even without full autonomy or flashy features
It is only as inevitable as consumers' alreadism-driven apathy. The moment they recognize that Car As A Service is something out of the sane world and having a means of transportation that can simply expire or be blocked remotely for a far-fetched TOS violation is against their interests, all inevitablism goes up in flames.
The worst one is automatic brights. Some cars don't even have a button to disable it, and it's only like 75% reliable at detecting an oncoming car as to not blind the other driver.
Interestingly, for me this worked very well. On my BMW M235i it was flawless. It had normal beams, and one could turn on the auto beams. One button to switch it on/off. I really liked it, as it was easy to activate, did its job, and when in doubt, I could deactivate it easily (button).
On my VW Golf GTD (mk7) it works also pretty good, only the activation/deactivation is strange. It uses the same switch, which is used to switch on the beams. Depending on the current state, it activates the beams, auto beam or turns it off. After more than a year of ownership, I still don’t know how to use it. Sometimes when I need to turn it off, it doesn’t turn off, but does something I don’t want it to do.
So I have serious thoughts about driving “software defined vehicles” in the future. I mean, and the article has confirmed this sufficiently, the core competence of the established car manufacturers is not software. I don't trust the newcomers like Tesla or the Chinese manufacturers for the time being. In my opinion, the same standards should apply to software in motor vehicles as in the aviation industry. And there can't be things like permanent internet connectivity, on-the-fly updates or anything else that is suitable for consumer entertainment devices. So I'm seriously considering whether my next car should be an “analog” one - but it's going to be difficult, a Lada [1] (not so exotic in Germany, where I live) is only available second-hand because of the Russia sanctions. I'm happy to accept alternative suggestions!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lada_Niva
There are safety standards for automobile software: ISO 26262.
Software for steering or braking systems is of high quality. It's not the same team that does the infotainment.
My car randomly braked today because it thought a car on a side road was pulling out. Not just sound the alarm but actually apply the brakes. Fortunately I didn't have a tailgater behind me.
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.
This happened to be on a highway when driving my friends car with all these assisted driving "features" while in cruise control. I was going up a small hill and for whatever reason there was a car stopped right at the top that I couldn't see. So the car slammed the breaks while I was in the middle of swerving out of the way. Which caused me to swerve more than I had intended. After I regained control it removed the breaks and attempted to return to the 80mph I was at previously which caused more problems because I wasn't ready for that.
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.
Yes, YES! Exactly! I'm hanging onto a couple older cars now because the new stuff is terrible!
This happened to me a couple of years ago where the car I was driving decided that one of those water-filled tanks ahead of a barrier on a road under construction was in front of the car just because the road was curving hard to the right. It was very scary. It almost caused an accident by itself. I don't remember how the brake assist cleared, but the fact that there's nothing one can do to make the computer not break is very scary.
That happens decently often. This is the reality for all systems aside from braking system in trucks perhaps, which are more sophisticated.
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.
Never had this happen in an EU-spec 2020 Audi A4.
This subthread is about ISO standards. The implementation quality of the new safety systems varies wildly.
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.
Same thing happened to my wife, while driving at about 110km/h…luckily no one was behind her.
Braking at any point is safe with a competent driver behind. There's a reason we know our stopping distances and don't follow excessively closely.
Alas half of drivers are worse than average.
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.
That is unrealistic. If you expect the brake perhaps but the most competent thing to do in case of an emergency brake is doing nothing.
Not on a hard curve with oncoming traffic.
How do you square this with the article?
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.
The role of US regulators in the automotive industry is pretty different from what you seem to be expecting. They see their main goal is to set minimum, testable benchmarks for safety and give manufacturers freedom to achieve that in any reasonably justifiable way. The consequence of this is that almost nothing is required beyond meeting FMVSS and passing the tests it prescribes. ABS stopping distance is one of those tests, but a quick glance at the CR tests doesn't look like an FMVSS failure. The stopping distance simply wasn't up to industry norms.
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.
Ah interesting, I wonder if Tesla is an exception and if their systems do in fact follow ISO 26262. Standards are not necessarily legal requirements, and not necessarily checked by external people.
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.
Consumer reports is a non-profit last I checked
> ISO 26262.
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 don't understand the reasoning you are making here. Cars have had advanced safety features like emergency breaking for a long time now (e.g. Toyota Crown Majesta 2003). Furthermore, there are many safety features that are controlled by software (e.g. airbags and seatbelts) that exist in all cars manufactured today.
Well.. just Google "unintentional airbag deployment."
Equipment that isn't controlled by software is also prone to failure. Unintentional airbag deployment is a very rare phenomenon.
Some of them were caused by nothing other than faulty software. Which is the point. The more links in the chain the higher the overall failure rate. Which has implications on MTBF but also on overall failed deployments.
You literally trust your life with medical devices full of software, those that conform to “piece of paper” standards, such as ISO 15708
> You literally trust your life with medical devices full of software
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.
I’m not sure I understand everything you said but I went with Dacia Duster, it’s the affordable brand, but I like that I can have a new car that has the controls and everything like a car from a decade ago… (lol) physical buttons, relatively good quality as they get to rely on Renault’s everything, I don’t need to go to settings to open the glove box, they don’t try to “out-innovate” everybody with ads, subscription heating, goofy scroll-knobs, or non rectangle screens. You can put CarPlay and Android Auto in it if you want.
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…
They also have a poor safety rating from NCAP (at least they did 2 years ago), because they don't fit their cares with electronic aids such as emergency automatic braking, which is just another reason to buy one.
The electronic safeties are negligible compared to the mechanical crushing on impact
A fender bender is lethal in a Lada
Projecting that "software had to be fully validated and finalized before the product entered production" was the stale old days and "make the car better over time" (i.e. out being driven) is the bright future by the automotive industry is far beyond worry.
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)
I'd trust BYD more than Tesla but I don't want to have to trust anyone. I drove a 20 year old Honda still to this day, but literally every new car has software in it and it won't be an option in the future. It's just too profitable to gather the data that they generate. It's a privacy nightmare. I'm still appalled that Tesla got caught pulling footage of people having sex in their own vehicles, but the legal world has no intention of doing anything about it.
> I'm still appalled that Tesla got caught pulling footage of people having sex in their own vehicles
Anywhere I can read more about this? Sounds terrible.
How is Tesla, a 21 year old company that has shipped seven million cars across the world (including the worlds best selling car) a "newcomer"?
They only really became relevant ~ 10 years ago, I don't think they began selling lots of cars until ~2018 or later.
Also, as many of the well known manufacturers have been going for 40 to 60 years, and some of them for over 100 years (Rolls Royce, Ford, Mercedes, etc...) then 25 years is a newcomer :-)
That Niva is so nice! Just very very fuel inefficient, but man can it do off road in the hills of Albania. Take the one with the low gear and the diff-lock (and heated seats!). It's a joy to ride that thing (although not on the freeway). I also considered it, but even before sanctions is was very expensive due to taxes (here in western Europe). But it's so much fun.
Aviation standards are the way they are because if you have an engine problem you can’t pull over to the side of the road. But yes, something approximating these for road conditions is a good idea imo.
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.
Having an engine problem on a back road is one thing, having a software-system-integration-what-the-hell problem on a Autobahn at 180 km/h +/- is a different story. And yes, I do not want my family in the car at that moment.
Having an AC problem in death valley in the summer could be troublesome.
Yea if it affects brakes, acceleration, or steering it's a huge huge problem.
Or even just AC (think visibility).
Hey... I hear the crowd yelling "let's have a speed limit on the Autobahn, 100kph, see how we fix many problems at once" /s
Aviation standards allow boeing building their infamous 737-Max
It was Boeing that intentionally hid the importance of a system much more relevant than flight characteristics of a plane. That is an intentional violation of the spirit of the safety checks.
That wasn't a malfunction but rather a flight control feature the pilots didn't know about. (Iirc)
But that's the point! A professional pilot misunderstood/was unaware of a new safety feature, despite their professional experience and continuous training.
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.
Ah I misread the comment as being about design quality rather than documentation and training.
That's a very Boeing friendly way of putting it.
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.
My recollection is it applied flight control input when the pilots did not expect it. The system was documented but not present on other 737 models.
Definitely not trying to be Boeing friendly fwiw.
Yeah, that matches my understanding. It was the
> a flight control feature the pilots didn't know about
phrasing that made me take issue. To me, it implies that if just the pilots had known about MCAS in detail, the crashes wouldn't have happened, implicitly placing the blame on them. While the reason for both the faulty system and the lack of knowledge can be attributed to Boeing trying to save money, which I think is a more fair target for blame.
a feature that is activated when SINGLE sensor goes haywire instead of two
The core competency of most software companies is not software, I'm not sure how GM thinks it can do anything halfway decent (it can't).
I visited Detroit last year and went to the GM headquarters. It’s open to the public with no appointment. You can wander around the Escherian maze with no guidance. A physical manifestation of every business decision GM has made in the last four decades.
Are you talking about the Renaissance Center? Of course it's open to the public, there's even a hotel inside.
Yeah I mention it’s open to the public because it really is GM leaving you to your own devices.
By aviation standards, wed be stuck with 1950s tech. Even for aviation, aviation standards hold saftey back
You seem to be confusing aviation standards with aviation regulation.
They're not separable. Who do you think is coming up with the standards?
I think they can be separated though there's certainly overlap. But standards are going to be coming largely from pilots. Regulations are coming entirely from bureaucrats.
BMW i3 is great for city/town if you’re OK with electric. Not 4x4, but minimal “assist”, just traction control. Internet remote stuff is optional but nice.
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.
>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?
To be fair: only small parts of those cities. E.g. no Waymo to LAX.
Not to AUS or, as far as I’m aware, SFO. They also screwed the pooch in Austin by making Waymo available only through Uber, with no way to ensure you actually get a Waymo rather than a broken car driven by someone with a serious BO problem.
I think you missed the part about the fully autonomous future.
We aren’t there yet.
And won't be for a very long time.
Just buy a car from the people, who dedicate their career/lives to making cars and have done so for decades. You aren't smarter then them. Your "serious thoughts" and "opinion" about what standards should apply are not yours to worry about.
> Just buy a car from the people, who dedicate their career/lives to making cars and have done so for decades. You aren't smarter then them.
Is this then logic that gets airlines to buy from The Boeing "Are door plugs supposed to stay in?" Company?
Thank you, I'm fed enough with living in the world governed by the people who dedicate their carrer/lives to make it a peaceful, prosperous and free place (as in freedom) and have done so for centuries
I want a 7-10” central display that spends 99% of its time showing CarPlay but also has a radio if I need it, the backup camera when I’m in reverse, and lets me change a couple of settings for convenience features like auto locking etc. Everything else can be dials, knobs, and buttons. My Mazda3 is perfect for this and I’m quite sad that I’m almost certainly not going to be able to find anything like it by the time I come to replace it.
Most cars from the mid 90s until the mid 00s (sometimes later) have this: you replace the double-DIN factory head unit with an aftermarket CarPlay-compatible head unit. $200-$1000 (depending on how much you want to cheap out), easy DIY install or pay another couple hundred bucks to a stereo shop to install it for you. You now have a 7-10” central display that boots to CarPlay but can do radio/bluetooth/aux/satellite, and turns on a reverse camera when you shift into reverse. Climate control and everything else is still physical switches, because car manufacturers were still making cars properly.
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.
I did this to my old car, but I skipped the CarPlay cause that's too glitchy. It's just aux or bluetooth.
Halfway through reading this comment I was thinking “Yup that’s why I like my Mazda3.”
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)
I would love to have both. The scroll wheel is convenient when I’m driving, but the touchscreen would make entering a new address much easier, as it’s very annoying to do now by scrolling, and voice dictation doesn’t work well in my language.
I do agree with that, and the newer Mazdas let the screen act as a touch screen when stationary for just that reason.
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.
I have a 2024 Kia EV6, and this is pretty much what it does: Central screen displays CarPlay, backup camera, and infrequently-used settings controls, dials and knobs for most things, one secondary touchbar (row of buttons, but it’s really a touchscreen so the buttons can change) for climate controls. Pretty much perfect, although only wired CarPlay. (The 2025 models apparently have wireless.)
Climate controls, including in-seat heating, as well as radio/media is exactly the stuff that needs actual hardware knobs that are always in exactly the same place and that I can use by knowing where in 3D space they are by muscle memory and feel without looking.
We have an EV9, and the user interface is so pathologically bad that we’re planning to get rid of it.
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…)
You can get tiny USB dongles that convert wired CarPlay to wireless. I bought one and adore it! https://www.geekbuying.com/item/AB019B-Wireless-CarPlay-Adap...
Hyundai is actual buttons, not touch.
Look at aftermarket MMI boxes. They do this for $150. (Screen and controls not included because they use the factory ones.)
Someone should tell an automobile manufacturer. It’d save them ~ $1B.
Shoutout to the thing I got for my mom's Merc where it's a literal 10 second installation to have carplay in a 2011 vehicle. Swap the built-in navi box with a $75 Aliexpress plug - bam, CarPlay/AA all wirelessly on the main screen and controllable by the standard navigation knob.
Car companies have to worry about regulatory compliance, certification, approvals, as well as warranties; aftermarket manufacturers do not have such concerns (at least to the same degree).
It’s a box that forwards a carplay / android auto UI to an LCD, and snoops the cam bus for button press events.
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.
If a stereo is defective, it might require a recall for replacement, which is very expensive. Additionally, anything which connects to the vehicle network has the potential to cause safety issues which can be even more expensive.
What is an "MMI box?"
Multimedia Interface?
Thanks. Seems to be some kind of Audi-specific branding.
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.
Audi, BMW, Volvo, Mini, and others.
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.
Is there?
My Renault Megane e-Tech is basically this[1]. Well it's a 12.3" screen but if you're in the UK you can get the one with the smaller screen. Not sure why you'd want that though.
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...
This is basically exactly what I have with my 2010 Chrysler 300 and 2010 F-150s with aftermarket stereos. And they didn't cost me $80,000.
New and a little older, maybe up to 5 years old Hondas are like that.
My ideal car:
- 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.
Apologies, everyone, for the poor formatting by the way. It seems HN does not in fact support markdown lists.
I was shopping for a new car and could not fathom why would you buy one that is heavy on electronics and especially software. Software does not age well unless it is designed in a controlled environment like aviation, which is not what happens with car systems. Besides the risks of being locked out of bugfixes in the future the software features are marginal to the overall experience and utility of the car. I would argue that cars made today are hardly any better than the ones made a decade ago. The problem is that making similar cars is not that profitable unless you spice it up and sell that feature for a premiuim.
Pretty much that exact list is why both of my cars are 94 Buick Roadmasters (admittedly, no factory Bluetooth, but yes on everything else).
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.
2010 Crown Vic is newest of that kind of car. I like it.
Same. This is why I am rooting for Slate (https://www.slate.auto/) to succeed. I hope everyone in this ridiculous software war loses and in the end they realize that there is a huge market for just basic no-frills car.
While I definitely hope Slate is a huge success and I really love its premise, it's a shame that, judging from their homepage images, the dashboard is an LCD screen, no dials.
Their vehicles remind me of the Datsun trucks I saw as a kid in the 80's. I believe back then their value proposition was that they were cheap too.
A Honda Civic 1999 fits you perfectly. No need to wait anymore.
No need to drive a shitbox. These points are easily covered by 90s/early 00s decent Italian/German cars.
Those are money-pits. Even if nothing goes wrong, everything is complicated and premium.
I don’t want anything without CarPlay anymore but I agree with your general sentiment. Google maps while driving and the ability to respond to messages by voice is great.
What you're describing is a 1990's car, except for the bluetooth part. I would buy one like this too, assuming it's half the price that is. I've never used the mapping software on any of my vehicles, google maps on my phone is way better.
I do like me a good 90s car. Honestly, though, my above-listed criteria would be my ideal car. But, a good number of cars up through the 00s would be enjoyable for me, if not exactly perfect. For example, the 2007 Dodge Charger is pretty good. :)
My 2013 Scion FRS is exactly this. I think you can get the GT86 or BRZ currently in similar spec.
Sounds like my 2011 Camry, which I absolutely love and hope to never sell.
this with embedded solar panels in the car would be my ideal next car purchase, everything else is unnecessary spending and clutter
I would really rather that cars didn't run software, or at the least the minimal software to get the job done where there is no other option.
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.
> it works great 99% of the time
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 ?
> But one time it got confused with over head sun
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.
The cars I know lock their doors automatically when they go at a certain speed (e. g. mine does at 20 km/h). Doesn't yours?
It does. But that isn't what I want it to do. I want to manually lock the doors as soon as I close my driver side door.
Does it work better when you use the key fob from inside the car? I would expect that because they surely tested a "unlocked accidentally and locked again right away" kind of scenario.
At least on ours, it tries to maintain the invariant that all doors lock at once (for aesthetics?), so you cannot lock anything if any door is open. It also likes to auto-unlock, but not auto-lock when you’re outside the car.
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.
About a year ago the Ford CEO (who is also Chris Farley's cousin) explained why legacy car manufacturers could not make good software: each of their cars have 150+ modules, each of them from several suppliers, each of them writing their own software.
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
They also dictate that their suppliers will all use AUTOSAR which is a legacy framework that makes even toggling a GPIO difficult.
https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/leq366/comment/gm...
Surely that's not why the interface is a laggy 10fps piece of shit and the touch latency is over 200ms. If my iPhone 3GS from 2009 can display the UI in 60fps without lagging like crazy then so can a $100k BMW that's straight from the factory. It doesn't need hundreds of extra modules.
I have driven several different, rather new, cars over the last two years. The most hassle-free experience was the second cheapest of the bunch, a 2024 Opel Corsa GS (a Stellantis brand). I actually was sad when I had to give it back.
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.
I think the article was focussing on the advantages it would bring to the manufacturer. Fewer control units, less wiring, hence a faster build time. Putting everything in one place is easier from a manufacturing point of view.
> Consumers have had it with clunky, slow automotive technology, and the modern car is so computerized that a seamless electronic interface is an absolute necessity.
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.
I wouldn't even mind replacing the analog meters with a computer screen if it worked well. Instead it's a laggy slideshow where the tachometer is just basically an arrow randomly appearing in different places a couple times per second.
You're part of a small minority of people that want to had old and outdated _infotainment_ systems. The only exception to this is that people want to have climate control knobs and buttons for some features (e.g. heated seats, driving-mode, etc). However, this is not what the article is discussing.
The article is discussing moving safety critical functions like door handles and drivetrain into a centralized computer. This has been a disaster so far, and consumers hate it.
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.
Embedded-systems programming is not taught, and no one is willing to pay for training. The result is that development is outsourced to entities that claim, falsely, to have the knowledge. Eventually the consequences of the fact that they do not have the knowledge surface in an undeniable manner, and the only way to cover is to make a great show of a fresh start. (This affects all industries, not just automotive, but right now that is where the spotlight shines.)
Automotive has the problem of overwrought frameworks and no-code tooling that make it hard to fix problems and make improvements. Once the original devs are burned out or laid off the codebase rots and gets handed off to maintenance devs who barely know how anything works.
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.
Companies are not willing to pay what the people who know embedded deserve. $150,000, $200,000 and up for a JavaScript webshit "engineer", $100,000 max if you work in embedded, unless you have a super specialist knowledge maintaining software on NASA's remaining PDP-11s or whatever that they can't afford to lose.
Fortunately that is incorrect. I mentioned in another comment, but I’m well over $100k USD equivalent in salary alone as an embedded engineer, working in a relatively low cost of living area in Canada, graduated 3 years ago. Working for a “regular” company.
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.
That's good to hear. Maybe Canada's got its head screwed on straight when it comes to assigning value to software roles.
My CS degree concentration is embedded systems. I love embedded programming, but it would probably cost me $200k a year to do it versus the backend distributed systems stuff I do now.
Admittedly I don’t know your salary or market, but it is possible to make decent money in embedded. Connections & market timing are both vital though, in my experience, as well as being actually good at your job. I’m in Canada so numbers are way different, but salary-wise I’m in the ~75th percentile software engineers in my area, my title is embedded engineer, and I’m fairly junior (3 years out of university, ~6 years full-time experience). I’m working with some other embedded people who are in the 95th percentile for software engineers in the country. The main problem is there are very few high-paying embedded jobs; conversely though, there seem to be even fewer highly-skilled embedded engineers looking for work. I recently interviewed at a company paying 50th-85th (based on experience) percentile trying to hire pretty much any competent embedded engineer, and their problem isn’t insufficient salary, it’s just a lack of applicants or any skill level. From what I’ve heard, the same seems to be true pretty much everywhere.
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.
Problems like this always come down to salary. I love embedded (hardware in general, really) and would absolutely love to do it, but during my entire career, the salaries for embedded have been so much lower than you get for slinging JS/web shit. And now with 15 years in, the gap is even worse.
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.
it is possible to get an embedded-adjacent job that pays well over 500k (my friend was bit banging FPGAs), it'll just be at an HFT instead of a car company
It’s definitely possible. There are probably a few embedded engineers making over $1M. But those are all outliers. It’s a whole lot easier to make $500k in web dev.
I took an embedded course in university where we programmed the AVR AtMega 328p on the Arduino UNO not using the Arduino libraries and compiler. Make files and setting up an environment.
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.
Programming embedded devices is not the same thing as "embedded-systems programming". The latter means, first and foremost, that the software is not allowed to crash, ever, for any reason, else it is people's lives.
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.
Why do the hardware companies make things so difficult?
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.
Because then customers would see how rubbish the hardware actually is.
There are a few reasons, using the hardware manufacturers’ logic.
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.
RTOS-based development varies significantly from RTOS to RTOS, so I’m not sure how much it’d help to learn to use one. On the other hand, most fundamental OS knowledge is fully transferable to RTOS, so that would be helpful for embedded developers to understand.
Yes, there’s a ton of specificity. Could probably say that about kernel dev too. But there is a ton of things people do that’s a lot more generalized. Of course I’ve used very little of specific things I got tested on in my day to day over the years.
It is safe to say that Computer Engineering has a problem with enabling knowledge transfer.
Yes! But it's also obvious that the industry doesn't have a prayer to ever reform. Stuck between proprietary and NDA's chips everywhere, using proprietary and NDA's toolchains and development kits, to product proprietary DRM'ed products.
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.
I can find 1000s of posts or blogs or whatever on every React nuance, Rust thing, LLM trend, or whatever, but nothing even describing what "real" embedded programming looks like in any fashion (I'm not counting blinking an Arduino LED here).
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.
Can't speak for cars specifically, but other software built to comparable standards requires a super rigorous process including detailed specs, risk analysis and mitigation, detailed design, comprehensive automated and manual testing against the soec including test coverage, tons of documentation on everything and finally a third party certification on everything.
The process is so far removed from typical web and business slop that it's an entirely different world of its own.
I'm not sure this is exactly the problem. It sounds like turning the car into a platform with changeable parts has caused both organizational and technical problems.
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??
It needs two! One to keep engine fires out of the passenger compartment[1] and one to keep unauthorized users or code out of your infotainment and control systems.
[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(engine)
All cars and should be equipped with two firewall extinguishers, one for the network and one for the passenger compartment.
It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible. Since they're going to ship updates anyway, a lot of focus is on minimizing the cost and hence OTA.
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.
> That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.
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?
The rest of the car doesn't function within specifications for years. That's what recalls are fixing. These days, a lot of software recalls are being issued to work around physical design "bugs". The Tesla cybertruck frunk pinching issues are a well-publicized example.
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.
Not open source but mostly reverse engineered, and automotive: the PCM code for GM’s LT1 engines. The only thing that could be considered a bug is the behaviour of wide-open throttle fuelling, which was completely acceptable from the factory but made aftermarket tuning a bit tricky. Specifically, the fuel calculation routine would use the most recent BLM (short- and mid-term air-fuel ratio correction factory as measured by the O2 sensors) when calculating fuel delivery when wide-open, rather than locking it to a constant; the “most recent BLM” may be for a completely different area of the tune (like mid-RPM low throttle), where things like vacuum leaks or even just intake runner inefficiencies have a much greater affect on AFRs than when wide-open. This can result in either too much or too little fuel being injected, and under- or over-shooting the target AFR.
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.
> It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates
Exactly that was done for decades.
Until 1994, the year of the first software-only recall, maybe. Things have changed.
Heck, manufacturers were issuing service bulletins to fix the fuel maps in their cars in the 1980s.
It was not. Recalls have included software updates (sometimes via component replacement) since ECUs became common in the 1980s. Reverse engineering the binaries and flashing updated parameters is actually how ECU tuning used to be done.
But those cars are no longer competitive. There is only a marginal buyer group who wants to drive these "bricks", which would also unlikely pass the requirements set for new cars.
> It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible. Since they're going to ship updates anyway, a lot of focus is on minimizing the cost and hence OTA.
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)
They are not complex, so less breaking point to begin with. Also some bugs are considered not critical enough to do recall, they can be fixed when the owner return their car for maintainence. But now even those small bugs will be fixed by OTA update
Purely from a manufacturer's perspective (not personal opinion):
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.
> It's not practical to produce a car that never needs updates. That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.
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.
Updating the software in the computers that control the car has traditionally been combined with providing diagnostic support for it through the dealerships, not done OTA. Having an OBDII connector has been mandated in vehicles for a long time, you plug something into it that lets you either listen to CAN bus traffic or reprogram an individual Electronic Control Unit (ECU).
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.
> 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.
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.
One problem is that the ECUs are fairly dumb, they each have a limit on how fast you can send CAN frames to them without overflowing receive buffers. The protocol to reprogram them starts by asking the target ECU how much of a delay is needed between each frame then needs to keep to quite tight timing constraints when sending the new flash image, I have written a Linux network protocol module to do this.
I2C is also a bus, just one that's less reliable and involves more custom work to use.
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.
I absolutely enjoy speed compensated volume. It's nice to have about the same apparent volume inside the cabin as road noise increases while not being very loud when going slow speeds or stopped.
>That would be a bug-free system, which is impossible.
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.
the people that design UI/UX is not the same people that write software
If you get updates at the dealership, you don’t need a network firewall.
This is all the more frustrating as I'm in the security side if IT, and have been trying to teach myself C and assembly for embedded development and understanding how malware and vulnerability exist in this ecosystem and how I can help address these issues.
You can find router firmware sourcecode online and find pretty egregious vulnerabilities if you're really trying to learn.
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.
The people who actually can do it are not underpaid. These days they are brought in to do cleanup. They can name their price and pick their assignments.
>The people who actually can do it are not underpaid.
The pipelines to create more such people are sorely lacking though
Only if you’re looking for top dollar when you graduate. Which unfortunately a lot of people are. It makes sense, most people pick this field for the salary and not out of passion (like the vast majority of professions).
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.
Everything is just outsourced to the lowest bidder anyway
I've been taught 8051 programming at my university. But I'm an older Gen Y, this could be going away for all I know.
Embedded programming is definitely still taught... in EE.
ok but why tho??? I have a lot of interest in embedded system
can someone tell me if there are any course that taught this??
I learned embedded in the school of hard knocks.
Yeah but I want to make my time effecient, because failure which cost hardware can be expensive
> Tesla was able to fix this with a software update over the air, something no one else could do for a braking system. That was impressive, but the example presented a worrying question: Did engineers not do stopping-distance testing before they shipped the car to customers?
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.
Electric cars can’t even.
Why does your car need an internet connection? I don't use the built in maps since my phone has a map and a connection.
what is the killer app of a connected car? businesses might want to watch their fleet but does anyone else care
Some features I've found useful:
* 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.
> giving me the current fuel and battery levels in the app
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.)
In some areas you pay different rates to charge your EV at different times of the day. If that is the case for you then you will want to pay attention to and control charging. Normally you will want to do a get your car charging at the cheap rate, but sometimes you are willing to pay triple costs because you need to leave soon and there isn't enough remaining range. (your car matters - my PHEV only gets 30 miles from a full charge, so I'm always low when I get home, while many EVs get several hundred miles and so really only run low when on a road trip)
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.
Re charging times, there are several aspects here:
* 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.
The Lincoln thing reminds me, there was an article posted on HN about how a researcher found a vuln allowing him to track and unlock any LTE-equipped Subaru.
https://www.wired.com/story/subaru-location-tracking-vulnera...
to be honest, we are now at the stage where everything that CAN get an internet connection, WILL get one eventually. Be it your god damn dryer or fridge or lawnmower...
Just bought a fridge. It was very difficult to find one with normal doors, a freeze door (not drawer), no stupid water or ice-making gizmos, and no wifi. There was literally one single choice in the dimensions I needed, unless I spent 6x as much on a European import.
You don't have to connect your fridge to wifi. Sometimes you can ignore a feature. Adding wifi to a modern fridge is really cheap (a micro controller is better than a mechanical thermostat or so I'm told - often wifi is included in a micro controller even if you don't use it)
> Why does your car need an internet connection?
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.
> Why does your car need an internet connection?
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.
Let me ask it a different way. when the cell carriers turn off the xG towers and those features fail to work will you spend your own money to get the replacement controller or just do without
Turning the climate control on ahead of time, especially when the car is parked outside. Easily worth $10k extra to me over 10y of ownership.
The author mentions "military grade firewall", as a must have in a vehicle. Genuine question; What's a military grade firewall?
As someone who has been working in security for past 10 years and systems / network admin for another 10 before that, I don't even know what a firewall is supposed to be any more.
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.
A stupid requirement.
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.
The threat is not exactly zero. In some cases, thieves can get physical access to the bus from outside the car, and then inject messages to unlock it, start the engine, and drive away: https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
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.
There are plenty of cars on the road today where theft is as easy as splicing two wires together. And yet grand theft auto isn’t very common at all even with all of these cars capable of being stolen in 10 seconds are being parked unsupervised on just about every block. Seems there are other filters in the overall system of society that are effective in keeping these unsecured cars from getting stolen today.
> 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
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...
It begs to ask why a headlight ought to have a data connection and not just power connection like most other cars of say 20 years ago. But even then when does the arms race end? Someone given enough time can cake apart a car to access any piece of it. A slim jim gets you to the hood release and the ecu of a say 2000 honda civic in 20 seconds. Was this a real world issue however in the 2000s, people hacking into drive by wire early obdii era cars like the s2000 to assassinate them with misdirected inputs or whatever the threat vector might be? Not really. Old fashioned ways to screw with people are simpler and cheaper.
> The car could be airgapped with the dealer network used to flash software updates like they do with most other cars before EV era.
I would rather have OTA updates than enable parasitic middlemen to siphon money out of me
A firewall built by the lowest bidder, that barely functions, but is robust to even bored Marines deciding to play with it.
I think anybody using this term has a shallow understanding of network security and just bundles it all mentally into a “thing” that stops all the bad stuff from happening.
I know that "military grade" has some relevant distinction in automotive. For example, normal car parts are designed to withstand "up to 80°C" and military grade means "up to 120°C". That has an impact on material choices and cooling.
No clue about firewalls though.
One of the most fun things I’ve done as a white-hat pentester was making a moving train open its doors at 60km/h, over CAN, from 6000km away.
I don’t know what constitutes a “military grade firewall” but presumably something that stops that. Or at least tries to.
Such a thing exists though usually not called “military-grade” per se. It is more similar to a data diode [0] than a classic firewall but has significant differences from either.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
Ah, yes that's true. I had actually forgot about this type of thing (did study infosec at uni)
An idiom meaning strong and resilient.
I wonder if that is a "Genuine question"..
"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.
I guess it's the same as a 'bulletproof firewall'. Just a colloquial saying indicating both high importance and required quality expected for operation in strong adverserial environments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_Mercury
Helpful article, thank you!
a firewall that prevents someone getting direct access to CAN bus and ECU, and sending messages like: "Key present", "Engine start", just by connecting to the wires of the headlight lamp (by prying a fender next to headlight)
I am awaiting a hatchback or sedan like this:
https://www.slate.auto/en
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.
After using it for 3+ years, I'd really miss automatic cruise control.
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).
I can confirm that Volkswagen is borderline incompetent when it comes to software - a few months back, my 2020 Audi A4 (and those of tens to hundreds of others) all started having the same issue, where the infotainment will randomly reboot every 5-30 minutes (taking out nav, the backup camera, and the parking sensors with it, and requiring a PIN to get back into the system).
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.
These companies fail because vertical integration, and even a monorepo, is needed to make these efforts successful. This is completely at odds with the existing OEM/Tier 1 business model and engineering process grown up around it. Also, neither OEM nor Tier 1 have software cultures up to the challenge.
This is why the Chinese OEMs, Tesla, and Rivian are able to move fast.
Bingo! That's exactly it. That's what Geohot said as well about the reason of their failure.
Why is a monorepo hugely beneficial here and what do you think they are doing right now ?
General Motors was in the lead then they just quit. It was stunning to see all of their incredible self driving Cruise cars vanish and then overnight see them all replaced by Waymos. It was like watching the downfall of Xerox PARC.
There's another huge constraint that the article and a lot of responses do not seem to mention:
- 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!
> When the Model 3 first came out, it took far too long to stop in Consumer Reports testing, thanks to bad anti-lock braking system (ABS) calibration. Tesla was able to fix this with a software update over the air, something no one else could do for a braking system. That was impressive, but the example presented a worrying question: Did engineers not do stopping-distance testing before they shipped the car to customers?
Narrator: No, they really did not.
Hardware companies trying to build software, without actually understanding software.
There's a reason why Apple, Nvidia, Tesla got where they got to.
It's an absolute shame Apple killed their car project
Apple has famously poor software ("better than Microsoft" is not an impressive bar to clear). Apple (and Tesla, for that matter) "got where they got to" because they're luxury fashion brands, and luxury fashion brands don't compete on actual quality, they compete on perceived quality, which means that the most important skills they need to understand are marketing and presentation.
Apple is not a software company, their software is absolute dog shit (for the amount of money they invest into it)
I've long wondered why no car manufacturer has gone for an open source model. Certain things should absolutely be locked down (for example, the airbags and other critical safety features) but there is absolutely no reason the HVAC and Infotainment system need to be closed source. Open it up and let hackers go crazy, then just "borrow" the best options out there for next year's model and everyone wins!
Apparently there are folks working on converting ICE vehicles to EV, using open source and reverse engineering to integrate discarded proprietary EV components (battery, motor, inverter etc).
https://openinverter.org/ https://youtube.com/@evbmw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898280
There could be a sort of "ARM" or "Android" but for cars.
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.
> "Android" but for cars.
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.
Android Automative, so far as I understand, is basically a head unit. I don't think it does all the body controllers, self-driving, etc.
I have been wondering the same, but slightly differently.
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.
Related plea from someone how hacked their Hyundai's head unit: https://programmingwithstyle.com/posts/howihackedmycarpart5/...
And past HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32447650
Because there are regulations for the infotainment system as well. For example, you can't watch videos or read SMS/messages. Not to mention that the infotainment system likely has access to the CAN bus, through which you _could_ impact other safety systems.
Doesn't the OBD2 port give me the same CAN access? I just bought one of those generic adapters and was going to mess around with it.
The OBD2 port is behind a gateway so it is not the same.
Automotive-grade Linux is actually a pretty big thing but cars being put on the roads still need to pass through approvals. It's not "hackers" doing anything they feel like.
Just talk to Canoncal, or IBM, make a NixOS config, or just do something. How hard can it be? My father’s 5 yo Volkswagen van has an 80’s looking UI, the touchscreen is already failing. Going from the normal UI to CarPlay is just jarring, any 2024 Linux distro looks, feels and acts more modern. What are they doing over there??
I could probably whip him up something nicer if only there was just a Nuc or something in there somewhere.
It isn't just the UI. You need to (re-)read the article. They have a bunch of interconnected systems that need to talk to each other, the existing methods are fit for purpose.
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.
While I don't dismiss your general point, I will say that anyone who says "how hard can it be" really needs to consider they are falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In my experience, that phrase is (typically) a red flag for the latter.
I'll let you know why I finally get my own van, add DC powered Nuc-like with a touchscreen and just run Gnome on it. Or, to make it more fair, I'll put LineageOS on it. Very touch friendly.
This strikes me very much as one of the things where the answer is probably very simple but also very difficult.
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.
Simple to think of, difficult to implement.
Yep, I can see it.
IMHO, Tesla stubbornly refusing to launch an App store will be seen as is its biggest failure when one of their many competitors finally takes on this challenge. They have millions of iPads bolted onto electric wheels, and for some reason refuse to monetize it.
No one is talking about the terrible wages they pay developers.
On average, the best people will tend to better jobs. Salaries are half of places like Google.
Of course their software is in trouble.
Software isn’t super hard I suppose, but you still need a dozen “rockstar devs” and $1mil in licensed software to push out a car, so yeah probably it’s a minimum $5-10m exercise for basic software that can just drive around.
And if you start talking about razzle dazzle infotainment smart phone experiences, well that’s where you get the $1b price tag from.
My startup is actually aiming to disrupt the low end of this with a generic VCU that lets you design any vehicle you want and then tweak a few arguments to set how it should be controlled. The goal is to let you build a Slate-like car or truck (infotainment excluded / BYO) without writing software.
Interesting, mind sharing a bit more about the startup?
We use a production VCU hardware with custom software. It currently supports most of the VCU functions you would find in a production vehicle, including in-built CCS2 and NACS charging on the single controller (wires directly to socket).
We’ve put customised versions of our product in a few commercial vehicles, mainly retrofits. Our backstory is that we’ve been consulting in custom E2E vehicle controls for a long time and now we’re productising for better scalability of our expert team (capturing expertise in product so we can eventually take a step back).
Currently doing an angel/seed round: looking to raise US$ 250K. Very close to profitability due to low burn rate and having a lot of existing IP, so not planning to do any subsequent round like Series A. We think it could grow into a $50m company with low headcount in the style of Airbnb. Based in Australia.
Willing to invest $5 if you're down... :-)
Thank you for the interest, I wish VCs shared your enthusiasm haha!
Genuinely though, if you're interested in getting rid of 1 (1) share hit me up balu [at] xdapierdolnik [d o t] pl
We really need the right to modify our vehicle software, with zero 'safety' or 'environment' camel noses to shoe-horn in the total lockdowns we see prevalent today. 'FOSS' hardware should be exempted from a whole bunch of regulations to make it enticing and accessible to technicians, home builders, and boutique bespoke builders. What we don't want is Tesla's/Apple's model, we want the GNU/Linux on Talos II model with no surprise NSA backdoor management engines.
Like... can we pleeeease have this already!??
> We really need the right to modify our vehicle software
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.
https://archive.is/dQ7oH
as a car guy and software engineer I just want to say car's need way less software, way more separation of concerns, more standardisation and more open platforms, but most of the money is made on service, so the manufactures are incentivized to make closed systems.
Not necessarily less software, but more open software. There's been a lot of legal action around "right to repair" recently - I think there was a major decision regarding John Deere tractors a few years ago. But honestly, when it comes to cars, I haven't seen any significant decisions. I hope I'm wrong. Not 100% sure.
Not less software, no software. Have a quick flick through this video:
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.
> These are companies that have typically seen software as a problem to be solved, not a design to be experienced.
Some unexpected Kierkegaard in there (I only recently learned Dune was referencing it).
> Thus, the double-edged sword of SDVs. They are more upgradeable and flexible than their predecessors, but that advantage allows companies to deliver under-baked software with a “fix it later” approach.
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 is funny that developers are always looking at the processes of car making to improve their own extremely broken ways and now it is car-makers that "should" be trying to be more like the agile software devs.
As a dev the last thing I want is a software-defined car. Look what we did to TVs.
This stuff is exhausting, I’ve never been happier to drive a 93 manual than hearing about infotainment systems.
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.
This thread is becoming huge and so searching through the comments is not easy. Nonetheless it’s my impression that little or no attention was directed to the regulatory compliance needed for vehicles to be marketed under the rules of UN (known as UN/ECE Regulations and approval scheme) and similar approaches worldwide. Which means that roughly speaking that the security and safety of the car being sold today rest assured until I don’t change (upgrade) the software governing its functionalities. It’s totally unclear how it might be possible at least in Europe to upgrade major parts of vehicles software without breaking its approval. Comments on this?
I would love a car platform that ran open source software, I think a lot of people would buy hardware they knew all the software was controlled by the owner. The way electronics plays into cars at this point is quite excessive, even seats and windows are running software.
Car software is so thankless and opaque.
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.
ADAS is generally considered 'adverserial software', few drivers welcome it and many switch it off at ignition.
So unfortunately regardless of Toyota's possible prowess in the field it's unlikely to receive many plaudits for focusing its efforts there.
I understand, but that's partially caused by compliance software being problematic.
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.
Drivers consider it adversarial because it not only "takes away control" but also because it messes up their feedback loop.
I'll give two examples.
From a recent Toyota rental (~2024 RAV4): The lane departure system (which seems to have 2 stages?) gently corrects your steering if you get anywhere NEAR a line in the road. It's not a clearly-artificial buzzing in the wheel or a tug at your hands, it feels extremely subtle, like driving over a seam in the road. Every time I drove that damn thing I found myself second-guessing the surface and wondering if there was something I hadn't noticed in the road.
From a few years ago, some other rental: Automated brake force increase thing. If you abruptly lift off the throttle and quickly move to the brake pedal, it felt something like doubling the brake force. Why? Because apparently studies have found in many collisions, the driver didn't come close to using all of the braking force, because they don't know how to drive. Okay, so it makes you safer, but no can no longer know how much braking force you're going to get from moment to moment?
Do these systems not create a dependency loop where the very senses the driver is _supposed_ to rely upon to safely and smoothly operate a vehicle are blunted (seemingly) arbitrarily by some computer system?
It can both be true that this makes cars safer, while at the same time making drivers hate the systems. I don't disable ABS on my car because it does something I cannot do (high frequency brake control of each individual wheel), but I sure disable ADAS whenever I get a chance!
I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver".
The fallacy is that simply because a low-probability event hasn't happened to you, doesn't mean that you wouldn't benefit from assistance if it did. It seems to be a combination of optimism bias/competence bias/dunning-kruger. Systems that can mitigate "human error" are extremely critical and desirable, even by highly skilled/talented/trained machine operators like airline pilots.
Anyhow, it feels like your specific critiques apply to proactive systems, which actually don't really fall under the umbrella of what I'm outlining per se.
Proactive systems are either very intentionally engaged (i.e. lane centering or adaptive cruise) or highly theoretical and not widely implemented, for example, proactive driver assist in TSS3, if enabled (which it isn't fresh out of the factory for reasons you likely outline here), makes subtle corrections to the driver's experience, e.g. engaging brakes when cars ahead slow down or on curves. I have strong hopes for technology like this as being a good bridge between the challenges of full driver assistance and current technology, which, at the cutting edge, is undoubtedly impressive. They may very well not be there yet, which is suggested by Toyota's reluctance to make this the default experience on their equipped vehicles.
Conversely, reactive systems like AEB are widely tested by regulators and, for example, the IIHS, and should only ever genuinely engage in emergency situations. Certain systems do this better than others, which is software/sensor based. Some do exceptionally. Some do not.
Quick note:
(~2024 RAV4): Uses TSS2.5, not TSS3. There appears to be a large difference here in competence. I haven't driven with either system extensively.
> I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver".
Sure; and I'm sure you likewise recognize that there's a difference between "This could never help me", "I don't need this", and "I don't want this". People don't live their lives by making game theory optimal choices at every turn. There's also a difference between a safety regime offered as a cost-extra feature on a car, a regulatory requirement on a car, and a regulatory requirement on an airliner.
I think my overall take on that is I don't actually have this strong desire to preserve people's freedom to be unsafe on public roads.
Perhaps, if it were truly a personal decision, I'd be more charitable.
Only car companies? Isn't it rather that everybody and their hamster is pivoting to become a surveillance company, if you just manage to cram software into whatever it is you're doing? Get extra score for making it "AI"!
That's it, it's time to start a FOSS car project which is operated by poor lawsuit-proof individuals, because we will need to "steal" existing ECU firmware and incorporate it illegally into this FOSS car project. The idea here is to component-wise replace all the major computers on a bunch of well known car makes and models, creating a standardized car model (software platform), so we can kill trackers, black box recorders, take back control over power and efficiency from the ecofascists, etc.
We are only as sovereign as we are willing to fight, and if voting worked do you think they'd let you? lol
I was able to pair bluetooth once in my car, but that was it, no more bluetooth. Nothing works for me anymore haha
To throw a curve into this discussion, I'm not entirely clear that software companies have any clue how to enter this space. Cars are supported for far far longer than your average software system is expected to run, nowadays.
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.
Writing software, and doing it well, is expensive and time-consuming. It's like manufacturing anything else from scratch. It requires an investment in resources and expertise, proper planning and execution. Much like building a car, you can build software inefficiently. But if it comes out like shit, that directly affects your bottom line.
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.
I would like a list of those companies making "software defined" vehicles so I can avoid them.
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...
"So Who Wins?
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."
> Consumers have had it with clunky, slow automotive technology
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.
IMHO, a computer car and even internet-connected car is fine. However, I want a computer car that I actually own. If it's my car that I paid for, I should have full access to the software that runs it. If not, then I don't own the car, I'm just renting it.
Vehicle manufacturers could barely build a functional and usable "infotainment" systems.
Now these same dinosaurs want to build and ship "software defined vehicles"? What a joke.
I looked into getting an aftermarket replacement for my sucky infotainment system; replace it with an Android tablet or something.
But it seems like too much trouble, if I could even do it.
Alas, I understand why, just not enough people want it. Unlike the engine mod market, where aftermarket ECUs are a thing. Unfortunately, it sometimes involves the wiring harness, which is very expensive to mess with.
It's not just about the software but about the hardware architecture of the car. Legacy manufacturers are coming from a situation where they are integrating hardware and software from a lot of different suppliers. This makes upgrading the car a very tedious process and slows down the process of getting suppliers to fix issues and provide new firmware in a timely fashion. It's worse for them because they often want to do ICE and EV variants of the same car. Which means sticking with the same supply chains and associated issues.
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.
Legacy corporations have a very hard time incorporating fundamental technology shifts (moving from ICE engine/drivetrain dominant designs to software dominance). They walk into the future looking backward, unable to identify/vet the team skills needed going forward, leading to silly hacks like: 1) hire from "big s/w companies", 2) pay high salaries to poorly vetted people, 3) adopt all the new fashionable buzzwords like "software defined vehicle", 4) force new teams every inch of the way to justify design choices to mediocre legacy management.
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! :-)
From the article: "Evidence of that dichotomy is not hard to find. As automakers have introduced vehicles with more advanced computing and electrical architectures, they have also struggled to deliver bug-free software on time."
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.
I worked on a project to create a software-defined still/video camera.
It did not succeed, despite some very smart people on the team.
This stuff isn’t easy at all.
Cars now have computers, cellular internet connections, cameras, microphones, privacy policies... I can barely find the words to describe just how frightening the status quo is.
Indeed. Reading the comments here makes me a bit more grateful for my early 2010s vehicle. I added a Bluetooth module so I can play music wirelessly. My phone magnetically connects to an air vent and starts charging. I open Maps and tell it where I want to go. Done. :)
The wildcard here might be consumer tolerance
no excuses... it was their primary business since ever and software wave is coming from 60s when human went to space, so software as car engines are relevant long time ago, they couldn't tolerant this mess with providers, ECUs and technologies, that long, for their core business.
> These legacy companies have poached big hitters from Apple, Tesla and Google. They’ve sunk billions into it.
Part of the problem might be poaching high title people from embedded tech companies while not doing anything for developer compensation.
One of these things is not like the others. Tesla, for good or ill, needed to write a full stack for their EV. Not only did they need to do it, but they did in fact do it and ship it and develop it over several years. Recruiting a Tesla software guy is probably the best choice between these three. And he'll cost you less.
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.
> One of these things is not like the others. Tesla, for good or ill, needed to write a full stack for their EV.
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.
Android automotive doesn't come with software for battery management and functions like climate control, headlights, error notifications, and other driving functions. But it does provide the best toolchain, widget set and user interface framework for those functions. It also comes with support for multiple screens, multimedia, multiple languages, speech recognition, app stores, cameras, wifi hotspotting, OTA updates, modes for vehicles in motion, Bluetooth, pointing devices so you don't have to be all touch all the time, etc.
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.
Old car is massive amounts of mechanotechnical engineering, with some software for keeping the beast under control and provide some basic entertainement.
New car is basically a computer on a simple chassis with an equally simple drive train. Software and battery tech is everything.
I'd argue that chassis tech is more sophisticated in the BEV case due to more weight. Adaptive dampers, air springs, rear-axle steering, etc. might not be necessary on a comparably sized ICE vehicle.
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".
it's a lot cheaper to pay one exec a couple million than to staff a medium-sized software engineering org: even 500 people at an average fully burdened cost of $250k is $125m/y.
One major issue has been that paying a developer market rates is practically unthinkable to traditional automakers. If you were to apply to a mid/senior job in Michigan, you might get offered $125k. The typical workaround has been to establish "software offices" on the west coast with separate pay scales and separate corporate structures that largely function as internal "external" vendors. The C suite are able to pretend they're not overpaying, and the teams getting work done are able to attract people closer to market rate.
Well, it’s not just about pay scales. The developers just don’t want to live in Detroit (or even Ann Arbor) for the most part. And coastal East isn’t really that much cheaper for the most part.
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.
Yeah I get this is their calculus and am suggesting it's exactly why they are failing.
I wasn't disagreeing with you; I idly did the mental math, was surprised at how high it was, then thought through how I'd probably finger-in-the-air that it would take a couple thousand eng years to build a whole car OS. You're building safety critical software, so you're going to start with a very serious test effort, etc. So finger in the air a good chunk of a billion dollars a year for many years.
Cheaper, sure. But it’s been ineffective. That’s the point.
Terrible mobile website for what its worth. Two sentences per in paragraph ad and I couldn’t fully read the article because it bogged my se2 down to a crawl. How I wish I could jailbreak this phone and install a real adblocker but alas not on magic version number.
> Access InsideEVs and over 450 other websites as e.g. motorsport-total.com and formel1.de without banner ads, personalized tracking and video ads for only 3,99 € per month.
"Reader mode" has been a saving grace for me. I use it at every opportunity, desktop and mobile.
If ios allows private dns you can set it to adguard dns, to get some level of adblocking
like airlines, car companies are generally a terrible investment.
Where is the Apple car? Was the project canceled, and why?
Yes, Titan was cancelled in 2024 after eight years of development. There's a good breakdown on The Information about why, it mostly boils down to software challenges (especially ADAS), leadership turnover and a fair amount of internal skepticism that it was even a worthwhile project.
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".
Somewhere in the last decade I became a curmudgeon who yells at clouds.
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?
> Also I drive a manual, which here in the US seems to be almost unheard of.
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)
> Also I drive a manual, which here in the US seems to be almost unheard of.
All of my last 5, including my current vehicle are manuals. Almost impossible to find and a dying breed.
Check out some listings on bringatrailer.com.
All I want my car to do is drive from a -> b. Connecting AirPlay is nice, but not necessary. All other touchscreen stuff is dangerous, crappy, and outdated the minute it's rolled over the showroom floor. Just stop, please.
>Now, they need to make compelling apps, slick new features and all-new electrical architectures that neither the companies nor their suppliers are used to using. They need to build Tesla-level upgradeability with far less willingness to ship unfinished goods, all while tucking it behind a military-grade firewall to ensure your car can’t be remotely hacked.
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.
If you want to know the many ways this is going to suck, then think about everything you've ever heard someone bitching about in the modern video game ecosystem, then multiply it by "but instead of people not being able to play a video game, someone might die".
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.
There is a 0.0% chance I am going to buy a car that requires a network connection.
All of this is complete nonsense and a huge waste of resources.
Especially for electric cars. These things are so simple that it is not funny. The level of sophistication required is barely much more then what went into a 1990s era Sony Walkman.
What a humiliating fail for modern automakers.
Legacy car companies haven't realized that good UX is no longer optional. If the system people use to interact with your car is unpleasant or unusable garbage, it ruins the whole car. Just like it doesn't matter how good your kitchen is if the waiter is rude and spits on the food in front of the customer.
And yet most of the companies don't seem to be willing to spend the one-time cost of getting the UX right.
I have a BMW with iDrive 7 and none of this feels familiar - am I in the lucky minority which happens to have chanced upon a good manufacturer which did a good job on integration - or am I so clueless that I don't recognize I am lookin at a dumpster fire?
DLC vibe anyone?
Well good luck.
If anyone ever wants to hear I got the Porsche CEO to step down for his terrible tech strategy. There is no hope
Software defined vehicle? Never heard of this term. More marketing buzzword BS.
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"?
From first principles I think the concept can make sense. From car-specific function-specific ECUs, to platform-shared (but still function-specific) ECUs, then to Zonal architecture and domain controllers. The goals: consolidate and generalize HW across the lineup moving model-specific bits to FW/SW/Config (amortizes the development cost and simplifies certification), and also simplify wiring (saves you precious copper wires which are costly, messy, and heavy) because you can pretty much just plug every miscellaneous sensor or actuator to its nearest "anchor point" without worrying (too much) about arbitrary ECU limitations.
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.
It's not just the user interface. UI is just the tip of the iceberg. It's also firmware for all those controllers all over the car as well.
Pretty cool seeing how all those little gripes with car tech stack up, kinda makes me question if adding more software actually makes things better or just adds more mess. you ever feel like simpler is actually safer when it comes to stuff like this?