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Software is eating the car

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Re: Software is eating the car

#181

Post by jacquesm »

Nothing worse than automotive software. Buggy, slow, terrible user interfaces, outright dangerous and in many ways much worse than the systems they replace or augment.

The automotive industry has a long long way to come - assuming it will happen at all - before they can be said to be responsible software vendors.

Case in point: my - former - C class Mercedes that made two pretty good attempts to kill me by slamming on the brakes in a situation where that was totally unexpected and caused a perfectly safe situation to turn into a critical one. If not for playing ping pong for many years I highly doubt I would be writing this. After the first instance I had the whole car checked out to see if there was any fault in the system, the answer was that it was all working perfectly (that time the car had braked whilst on a very narrow bridge sending the car into a skid which I managed to correct before going over the side). Three weeks later it did it again, this time apparently because an advertising sign in a turn generated such a strong radar return that the car thought I was about to have a frontal collision. Again, out of nowhere an emergency stop.

I sold the car and got one where the most complex piece of software is the aftermarket radio, it has ABS and an ignition control computer but nothing in the way of 'advanced safety features'.

My vehicle actively trying to kill me is something I can do without.

So: as far as I'm concerned much less software on board of cars, open source it all if possible and roll it out much slower so we can get the bugs out.

Re: Software is eating the car

#182

Post by _ea1k »

_benj wrote: post #99
SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code…

I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope just because we have two more industries that have gone the same transitions, aeronautical and aerospace. Back in the day airplanes where just knobs and levers, and we didn't have the reliability that safety that we have today. With aerospace, I mean, software engineering as a discipline started with aerospace! If we write "starup code" (i.e. CRUD web…

> I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope

TBH, I have similarly optimistic views, but for completely different reasons. The truth is, the worldview has changed completely in the past 100 years.

In the old days, if you failed at operating a saw, you hurt yourself badly. Now we slowly are starting to expect sawstop and other solutions to reduce injury.

The same thing is happening in cars. We no longer expect perfection of the human as we augment them in various ways to both reduce the frequency and severity of collision. Its the early days yet, and its very much the "startup code" mindset with cars having way more bugs than its ever but also producing safer outcomes.

Car software is getting worse, but we're better off for it.

Re: Software is eating the car

#183

Post by iso1210 »

justaguy88 wrote: post #81
jonpurdy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently bought a used 2016 Spark EV (having a baby and needed something other than my motorbike). It does have a touchscreen, but mostly for extraneous information and radio functions. Everything else has dedicated knobs and buttons. (The one dumb thing is that the fan speed updates on the screen, rather than just having ticks above the knob.) It is a California "compliance car", which means it was just a modified…

I'm guessing that all-touch is just cheaper these days, no QA testing for all the little mechanical bits

It annoys me about capitalism. There's a massive incentive for manufacturers to cut corners to save $100 on a $30k car, as they sell 10,000 cars and use the $1m to pay themselves a bonus about how great they are.

Almost everyone will want to pay $30,100 for the better product though, but the market can't differentiate on that.

Re: Software is eating the car

#184

Post by notJim »

clairity wrote: post #170
azornathogron wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars have more design features that improve crash survivability (better airbags, better crumple zones, tested with more realistic crash tests, etc). Those seem like a pretty unalloyed improvement to me. I'm not saying you're wrong about the things you mentioned, but cars really have got safer, in important ways.

yes, airbags and crumple zones do improve safety, but even those are not without negative consequences, like bigger, heavier vehicles (which is more dangerous to others) and higher sense of psychological safety leading to being less considerate, less attentive, and more reckless. that's not to argue that those tradeoffs aren't net positive, but that they're still tradeoffs to be considered, rather than short-circuiti…

Do you have any evidence for these claims? This just feels like luddism to me.

Re: Software is eating the car

#185

Post by bri3d »

waiseristy wrote: post #144
pjmlp wrote: post #31

Best of all, it is all written in C and C++, with all the security it entails.

Well, sort of. It's all written in MISRA C and a very special version of the C++14 standard https://www.autosar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/standards/adap... Definitely still possible to write buggy MISRA code, but its the best we got unfortunately

A lot of modern ECUs are "written" in modeling tools like Simulink and then compiled into auto-genned MISRA C which is never touched by humans, as well.

I'm certainly not trying to say automotive code is in a good place, but it's not the same as a 1+ million line hand-written C project like some people think when they see the numbers.

Re: Software is eating the car

#186

Post by sharkweek »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code…

I would prefer a car that is almost entirely mechanical because mechanics make way more sense to me than software.

The old crusty mechanic I take my 20+ year old 4Runner to for service complains about this a lot. Cars don’t make nearly as much sense to him as they used to.

Just to be clear, I appreciate improved safety that technology brings to cars, and I know I can’t have it both ways.

Re: Software is eating the car

#187

Post by notJim »

jude- wrote: post #103
xxpor wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscription model?

Some of the extra infotainment stuff (read: media content) is subscription only. Some functional extras like full self-driving or faster acceleration are one-off purchases. The rest of the software -- all the things you'd expect the car to do -- comes with the vehicle and gets regular OTA updates.

I think with Tesla the only subscription is "premium connectivity", which is basically a cell data plan. The car works fine without it. Even the nav will still use traffic data for routing, it just won't visualize it for you.

Re: Software is eating the car

#188

Post by peter303 »

Peter Hubers tome The Bottomless Well considers software as the apex of the energy pyramid. Each level of the pyramid- animal, wood, coal, gas, electricity, nuclear, software- (I may have recollected the order not entirely correct) is more usable and powerful than the one below it.

You can see this pyramid in the evolution of the automobile: mostly petro-mechanical, then a growing fraction electrical, then an increasing fraction software.

I was not fully convinced by the book is that computing is a type of refined energy, but can agree with some of arguments for it. Other computer utilization like mass data centers and crypto currency support computing as the new wave of industrialization.

As an aside: Hubers thesis is the world will never run out of energy because we are constantly improving it, for example with or as software. Furthermore the amount of work per capita has grown with the quality of energy, and shall continue to increase in future.

Re: Software is eating the car

#189

Post by _ea1k »

bruce343434 wrote: post #87
MengerSponge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mazda doesn't get nearly enough respect for their work identifying and correcting this issue. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... Touchscreens/touch panels are shiny, futuristic, dangerous, dumb, and cheap. Manufacturers use them because they lower BOM costs, at the expense of usability and safety. Vote with your wallet folks.

Just looked at the mazda website and what are you talking about? They removed almost all the buttons from the interior to some sort of tablet.

Exactly, they replaced the separate buttons with a knob. Great that that physical controls might be needed, but this approach isn't better than the touchscreen. In some respects, its actually worse.

Re: Software is eating the car

#190

Post by duped »

brewdad wrote: post #180
duped wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm the dark pattern developer I'm not logging when the EULA is accepted or how many times they declined it.

I should think that owning a car for more than a few weeks without accepting the EULA could serve as reasonable "proof" that you had no intention of accepting it regardless of what is logged. Especially if the EULA is presented at every startup.

Prove that you didn't accept the EULA when you drove it off the lot, if the system was never designed to log when the acceptance was made.
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