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Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

arstechnica.com

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Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#111

Post by adrianmonk »

Etheryte wrote: post #7

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.

The article does say Android will be used, but it doesn't say it will be used for anything other than infotainment.

It isn't totally clear, but there is one fairly strong hint that there will be separation. They quote Singer (the person in charge) as saying, "What we are now doing with these so-called enabling functions is taking them out of customer functions, putting it in a middleware software layer." In context, it seems to be contrasting that against designs where the car's basic functions were too entwined with infotainment, so "taking out" seems to suggest separation.

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#112

Post by wil421 »

grecy wrote: post #87
vgoh1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wholeheartedly disagree with you. haha Go back to a BMW of 1990, and it's not that much different from a new car today. Fuel injection, air bags, ABS. Internal combustion engine, exhaust, radiator, transmission. etc. etc. Heck, even back then it was perfectly normal for a car to get better than 10L/100km (23.5mpg) There have been incremental improvements for sure, but in all honesty it's the same thing, just tweake…

Disagree with you and I have sources.

A 1990 BMW 3 Series got 18 miles a gallon and a 2019 BMW 3 series gets 30 combined. 1990 had a 5 speed and the new one has an 8 speed.[1] The power and efficiency of ICEs are night and day vs the 90s.

You could literally same the same thing about anything and it would be a huge generalization.

“It’s just a CPU/RAM/Disk/Nic with a monitor and keyboard. We had those in 1980s and it’s only incremental every since.”

[1]https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=41157&...

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#113

Post by dwyerm »

kortex wrote: post #71
castratikron wrote: post #60

>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.

Is your OS time at least battery backed? I can tell you that nightmares start when all your clocks go back to 1970 on boot, and you need a clock to validate certificates on boot...

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#115

Post by karolist »

vetinari wrote: post #104
aeyes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you are looking for. In a new 3-Series you can turn the steering wheel with your index finger, there is no manual transmission, you hear fake engine noise. The 15 year old car offers a completely different driving experience and he might prefer it over the bland, comfortable new car.

It went somewhat downhill with F30. See those slim runflats? Runflats save space in the trunk for the spare, and them being slim means they are hard. So in order for the ride to be softer, the axle suspension changed, and much softer silentblocks are being used. The result is, that your drive doesn't feel like your car is sitting on rails, like E90 or E46 did, instead it is muddy and jelly. Another disaster is the st…

E90 came with RFT tires and at least E92/E93 lack spare wheel well in the trunk. I dunno about E90, it might be an option there like it was in E60s (but it's very rare).

They didn't use electric steering thankfully. It went downhill starting E9x though, the materials used inside wear much quicker, the suspension and road feel is somehow less than E46 and the chasing of weight savings but increasing comfort through electronics and servos means the car is heavy still but you no longer get that satisfying door or bonnet thump like you did in E39/E38/E46, which were pinnacle of BMWs engineering IMO. Cabin noise insulation is also less than pre 2005, I assume because of weight savings. The post 2005 cars are so complicated that non-enthusiast ownership is most likely a bad experience.

/335xi N54 owner

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#116

Post by cameronbrown »

castratikron wrote: post #88
dognotdog wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balkanization is about right. In my experience developing driver assistance systems, there are enormous efforts spent on political turf wars instead of proper design and engineering. 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…

I've worked in that environment before. It doesn't help when upper management has no software or hardware background whatsoever (e.g. MBA or "sales" or whatever) and in that case the only way they see things is in terms of dollars. One time I was working on a new project and I wanted to put an SD card on the board so that we could have a log. I was asked how much the log was "worth" so that they could justify the cos…

> One time I was working on a new project and I wanted to put an SD card on the board so that we could have a log. I was asked how much the log was "worth" so that they could justify the cost of the extra hardware.

Very much like testing. Incalculable if you need it (and you certainly do), but managers who don't understand, just assume that you're doing something wrong if you need to "waste time" reading logs or writing tests rather than adding features.

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#117

Post by mdorazio »

grecy wrote: post #87
vgoh1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wholeheartedly disagree with you. haha Go back to a BMW of 1990, and it's not that much different from a new car today. Fuel injection, air bags, ABS. Internal combustion engine, exhaust, radiator, transmission. etc. etc. Heck, even back then it was perfectly normal for a car to get better than 10L/100km (23.5mpg) There have been incremental improvements for sure, but in all honesty it's the same thing, just tweake…

This is like saying if you go back 10 years, computers still had RAM, hard drives, CPUs, and GPUs so they're basically the same as today while neglecting the fact that there have been significant improvements in all of those and a modern computer would run circles around one from 2009.

There aren't many noticeable improvements in cars from one year to the next, but over the span of a full model change, you usually get fairly significant improvements in safety, fuel efficiency per horsepower, and in-cabin features.

Also note that we haven't reached maximum ICE performance yet, either. For example, Mazda is soon to release their Skyactiv-X engine, which is a sort of hybrid spark and compression ignition system with a large fuel efficiency increase over traditional engines.

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#118

Post by opencl »

mrguyorama wrote: post #103
ivanhoe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the same applies for people criticizing the fields they know little about. I'm pretty sure that not all electrical engineers in the world are idiots and that there's a solid reason why they've chosen the grid frequency as a standard way of doing it. One thing that comes to mind is that the crystal oscillators frequency is very temperature sensitive, so probably not ideal solution for using in ovens?

It's because it saves several dollars on the BOM, and really an oven probably doesn't need a hyper accurate clock

Grid frequency actually is hyper accurate in a lot of places. i.e. in the Western US the grid is regulated such that a clock running off it will never deviate more than 2 seconds from the atomic clock derived National Bureau of Standards time [1].

Compare to a typical quartz oscillator which will gain or lose around 15 seconds per month.

[1] https://www.naesb.org//pdf2/weq_bklet_011505_tec_mc.pdf

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#119

Post by dwyerm »

Neil44 wrote: post #72

A big driver not mentioned is differentiation in the market, now that the trend is for platform sharing across manufacturers. Essentially the same car being sold by several different manufacturers with the only differences being the badge on the back and things like the infotainment system fitted. By carving out a big ecosystem early they’re getting a head start in that area.

We're changing to auto market into the cell phone market? Oh no.

"Well, I get Free Miles(tm) with the Chevrolet, but it throttles at 70MPH and the radio only plays Pandoa. Or I can get the exact same car from Crysler, with no throttling, but the miles come in bundles of 1000 and radio apps are $5/month."

Re: Volkswagen’s plan to create a new car operating system

#120

Post by asdfman123 »

dognotdog wrote: post #77
castratikron wrote: post #60

>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

Balkanization is about right. In my experience developing driver assistance systems, there are enormous efforts spent on political turf wars instead of proper design and engineering. 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…

I think you described exactly why writing good software is hard. Not because writing good software is an intractable problem, but because politics often takes precedence over it.

In the business world there is a lot of room for BS so people get away with it. But in software, it can doom a project.

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