71–80 of 257 posts
>some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function :O
I think this is a result of automotive technical progress slowing down. And I don't mean that in a bad way. For the past 100 years, we have been developing better and better cars, with both breakthroughs and incremental improvements in the drivetrain, safety, comfort, reliability, etc. Now though, cars are consolidating. Most car companies only have a handful of 'platforms' on which they build various models. For exa…
I can’t be the only one disappointed in this. Making cars at scale up to modern standards is really hard. Making great software is also really hard. I have serious doubts as to whether a company that does the former can have the culture, management practices, etc. to execute really well on the latter. The fact that Apple shut down its car division suggests there may have been some issues going the other way. I wish t…
Here's a standard climate control API, which doesn't touch the ecu stack.
And here's some mixins/ flexible RPCs so vendors can add custom functionality.
Alas, this limits vendor lock in, so that's precisely why I think it's unlikely to happen.
I think this is a result of automotive technical progress slowing down. And I don't mean that in a bad way. For the past 100 years, we have been developing better and better cars, with both breakthroughs and incremental improvements in the drivetrain, safety, comfort, reliability, etc. Now though, cars are consolidating. Most car companies only have a handful of 'platforms' on which they build various models. For exa…
I wholeheartedly disagree that automotive progress, on the mechanical side, has slowed down. The ride quality, handling, fit and finish, noise & vibe, chassis rigidity, fuel economy, reliability, have all been improving. Go back 10 years, go back 10 years before that, etc., and you will see incremental improvements. Beyond that, look at how much more "stuff" comes in cars today, but for the same amount of money. That…
Sluggish, puddy garbage of an experience compared to pure joy I can experience with my own.
I would say improvements were done to make things more cost-effective to increase margins, but not necessarily better cars per se.
Other things are with furniture I obtained with an older apartment - amazingly well built, can still hold together well after 50+ years. It was not luxurious back then, but would be definitely be luxurious now.
I think this is a result of automotive technical progress slowing down. And I don't mean that in a bad way. For the past 100 years, we have been developing better and better cars, with both breakthroughs and incremental improvements in the drivetrain, safety, comfort, reliability, etc. Now though, cars are consolidating. Most car companies only have a handful of 'platforms' on which they build various models. For exa…
>some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function :O
For example, ovens with clocks keep track of time through the grid frequency and if the grid frequency changes, the clocks diverge too.
>some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function :O
This is not surprising, as the team structures, at least as of a few years ago, were traditionally set up with tradtional manufactirng in mind, around parts and control modules, while the functionality exploded (within 1 or 2 generation of cars) and crossed those boundaries without adequate processes in place properly architect the interactions from a bird's-eye view, creating major computing power, network bandwidth, and most importantly to OEMs, cost bottlenecks.
And as cost is king, nobody wants to budge on increasing cost on their own module, and critical architectural decisions aren't made as much as put off until there isn't any other choice left except to hacking in the most critical bits with one eye closed and hoping somebody else's jenga tower falls first.
That, I imagine, is how you get that GPS time thing, I can see how it all started: "Oh, I can save $.30 on my module if I don't put in an RTC, that'll get me a nice bonus for cost saving, GPS is going to have one anyway ..."
>some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function :O
This is purely sloppy. Dealt with a similar issue on a UAV project. We elected to check for a gps time (which fails if, e.g. indoors), and fall back to os system time, with a note in the logs. It can't do anything mission critical without gps anyway, so this only even shows up in dev/debug settings.
But since the infotainment already dealt with time, they just used that as a "system clock" straight, so without infotainment there's no "system clock" to be had.
The key takeaway for me here is that they want to build an Android-based OS that will run both user applications and, say, your traction control on the same stack. Given the very mixed history of Android security, updates, and more, I simply can't see how this would end well.