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Software is eating the car

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Software is eating the car

#251

Post by notjes »

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…

Having a cheap, dumb car that you can repair yourself would destroy like 100m jobs.

Re: Software is eating the car

#252

Post by fuzzer37 »

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

I actually used to work as a test driver for FCA, and we were specifically told to report on knobs/dials not working or wiggling too much. Our training had us touch literally everything in the car that moved. Albeit, I'm not sure how much of that feedback was actually acted upon, based on the quality of some of those cars.

Re: Software is eating the car

#253

Post by incanus77 »

I drive a 1985 VW Vanagon. While there have been many, many times that I have wished for some comprehensive diagnostics, and am considering an engine swap at some point, when I drive and there is literally zero distraction from electronics or touch screens, it’s wonderful. I did add a CarPlay-enabled deck for directions and road trip music, but otherwise everything is manual.

Re: Software is eating the car

#254

Post by elihu »

I remember back in the early days of Linux how we'd say that using a proprietary OS is like owning a car with the hood welded shut. It seemed so obviously ridiculous. Yet, that's basically where we're headed now.

In some ways that's a good thing: EVs require much less physical maintenance. (At least, their drivetrains need less maintenance. Whether the rest of the car does depends on the manufacturer.) But on the other hand, depending on how heavily locked-down the car is, it'll be hard to do third-party modifications and older vehicles are going to be at high risk of having security vulnerabilities as soon as software maintenance for old vehicles stops being a priority for the manufacturer.

Re: Software is eating the car

#255

Post by garaetjjte »

tyingq wrote: post #120
henrikschroder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audi's 2022 e-tron GT moved back to more physical buttons, and only has one infotainment touch-screen, unlike a bunch of their 2021 models where there's at least two different infotainment screens.

I really miss "real buttons", meaning not just something tactile. Things like a power button that actually opens a circuit. Or a volume dial that doesn't lag because it's actually a potentiometer and not a rotary encoder. Too late for all that, I suppose.

Though there's nothing preventing electronically controlled buttons working with imperceptible delay except crap software.

Re: Software is eating the car

#256

Post by ketralnis »

jedberg wrote: post #241

The problem with this is that auto companies are not software companies. They may have good engineers there, but they are hamstrung with a culture that considers software as an add on cost center at best. Perfect example: I have no way to report software bugs to Honda. I've found a few and collected detailed reproduction data. The best I can do is give it to a sales rep in the service department and hope they send it…

On the other hand, having seen the software industry I don't really want its values applied to cars.

Games used to be shipped on chips to customers with the assumption that they could never be updated, but now the expectation that that's possible results in multi GB release day patches. Games used to be shipped to consoles without network access but if Blizzard goes out of business tomorrow, Starcraft II will just fail to boot because the software you get isn't enough to run the game. Games used to make most of their money by selling you a fun game that you wanted to play, but now they make most of their money from DLC's or selling in-game currency.

I don't want my car to move fast and break things. I don't want my car to fail to drive me to the hospital because it has updates to install. I don't want my car to drop features it had when I paid for it because some PM's bonus depends on me using their monetised features instead. I don't want my car to be measured by "works on my machine"-level QA. I don't want my car reporting telemetry. I don't want my car's UI to become unuseable over time because the developers shipping constant updates to it are working on the newer hardware instead of the hardware I have. I don't want parts of my car to stop working because an app developer doesn't support my car anymore. (I've lost access to many an iOS game because of this without changing any hardware myself.) I don't want my car to stop working because it doesn't support TLS 4.0 or 6g and the licence server requires it. I don't want my car to stop working because it can't find the licence server because Volvo went out of business, or even just decided they didn't want to support me anymore. I don't want my car to fail to unlock because of a network blip. I don't want my car to suggest I go to McDonald's instead because of an advertising deal.

That's what embracing the software industry's norms will get you. Awful QA, shortsighted dependencies, terrible incentives, and the ability to monetise you.

Re: Software is eating the car

#257

Post by tyingq »

garaetjjte wrote: post #255
tyingq wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really miss "real buttons", meaning not just something tactile. Things like a power button that actually opens a circuit. Or a volume dial that doesn't lag because it's actually a potentiometer and not a rotary encoder. Too late for all that, I suppose.

Though there's nothing preventing electronically controlled buttons working with imperceptible delay except crap software.

Well, and sometimes "deliberately crap". Like power buttons. I don't want to have to count to 10 while holding a button to "really turn it off".

Re: Software is eating the car

#258

Post by crysin »

wyre wrote: post #234
rootusrootus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If electric cars ever become widespread Exclude Tesla and most all EVs on the road today are just normal cars that happen to be electric.

Why is special about Tesla that makes them not a “normal” car that happens to be electric?

Tesla cars have a distinct look and a "prestige" whereas something like Ford's new F-150 will look nearly identical to its gas guzzling brother. There's an ego carried behind Telsa's branding and marketing that other car manufacturers don't feed into even in their own EV offerings.

Re: Software is eating the car

#259

Post by _jal »

Judgmentality wrote: post #243
_jal wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers tend to love it when their opponents think they've found a cute legal hack.

IANAL, but I'm curious if you are. In my experience, lawyers tend to get a lot done by intimidation. Remember all those ridiculous lawsuits from the RIAA over downloading illegal music? Well, it turns out when people actually took them to court they won every time. But people settled out of fear. Sure, if the lawyers are actually trying to do things legally first and adhering to the letter of the law, I'm sure they'r…

I am not. I work with lots of them.

I think we're talking about two different things. Yes, the RIAA was running an intimidation campaign. By and large they didn't care about any particular case.

That's quite different than a plaintiff coming at a car manufacturer over sketchy click-wrap agreements.

Re: Software is eating the car

#260

Post by mixmastamyk »

bri3d wrote: post #220
mixmastamyk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they still record and just upload when you go to the dealer and they plug in the cable?

There is an extremely limited amount of diagnostic data recorded by most cars (Tesla aside) - absolute limits, performance counters, and freeze-frame diagnostic data. There simply isn't much storage, and again, Tesla aside, most manufacturers don't want to have to buy high-write capable flash of the sort that could cope with constant logging. The most invasive is probably airbag blackbox data, which is stored upon de…

Nice, thanks. Maybe I'll look into a newer car then, was holding off because of this.
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