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Software is eating the car

spectrum.ieee.org

461–470 of 549 posts

Re: Software is eating the car

#461

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…

I feel like this really is the biggest gap between Tesla and others. Other car companies treat software as an afterthought and may never recover.

Re: Software is eating the car

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh its funny.. of all the rust trend storm I cannot recall one mention of automotive industry usage (not that I imply it's not used.. I just don't remember hearing about that).. this is a place where I'd really love safer languages. btw any embedded car ADA shops ?

There's unfortunately no hardware or standards support for Rust, nor will there be any time soon. Silicon vendors don't provide Rust compatible toolchains, and the standards everyone is locked into is C/C++ only

There are also Ada, Basic, Pascal compilers, but definitly not on the car industry, and in what concerns Java it is only used by some infotaiment systems.

Re: Software is eating the car

#463
post #361

150 million lines of code in a Ford F-150? How is that even possible? A Volvo with 100 million lines including 3 million functions. This sounds like generated code to me. I can’t believe this is handwritten or even necessary.

A lot of that is third party libraries, same as with PC and phone software. And the OS itself.

Re: Software is eating the car

#464

Serious question - what alternatives are left for those of us who want a dumb car? I've spent the last three months finding out I can't get solar panels installed without a high-fidelity power-monitor tap connected to the provider's cloud, logging every appliance I use and what it's doing. Same deal with cars - they are on the internet and they generate evidence used to convict, and geofencing is coming. Other than s…

If you want a dumb car, buy used. Very old cars are dumb. And if you get the correct car you can fix it at home for cheap and barely have worse fuel economy than todays cars.

Re: Software is eating the car

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once home i broke open the manual and found 4 different “driver assist” and “driver comfort” functions. After disabling them all the terrifying behavior ceased. I have these and absolutely love them. Sometimes, they do need to be turned off in bad weather, though.

The problem is that you don't know ahead of time when 'sometimes' is which is worse than nothing.

Not that I'm defending the technology in this case, but I notice that some people still believe it's unnecessary to read the user's manual of a modern car. Maybe this mindset has to change.

Re: Software is eating the car

#466

Once again, a plea for moderation from those calling for a return to analog gauges. Remember that outside of Tesla, automakers are generally pretty conservative and most computing in cars outside the head unit is decentralized MCUs that don't connect to the internet. And within the head unit, CarPlay/Android Auto has moved most of the work to phones.

Analog gauges have been controlled digitally for many decades now.

A professor of mine was writing code for BMW around 30 years ago. He said they were filtering the RPM so it would appear that BMW engines are solid and heavy.

Re: Software is eating the car

#468

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 o…

Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) can be dangerous, but these systems are being put into cars with the flimsiest data to support them. No serious trial has been performed to test whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/evidence-mounts-for-effecti...

Re: Software is eating the car

#469

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…

Two months ago I sold a dead-simple Toyota truck I'd driven for 14 years and bought a new, loaded Honda. The difference in the complexity is of course astonishing. The yota didn't even have usb. You could climb into the engine compartment and sit there. The Honda has pretty much everything a modern car can have, and you can't even see empty space in the engine compartment.

I _could_ get on your "just give me simple" bandwagon. A part of me was proud of the low-tech, rusty durability of the Toyota, I admit it. Still, I'll also admit I like most of what the Honda can do. I like the phone integration and that I can toss it down on a pad and it will charge while I drive. I like that the wipers, headlights and high beams all activate when needed without input from me. I like that it remembers my seat and mirror settings and restores them when I enter the car. I like keyless entry and remote start. I like the backup camera. I like adaptive cruise control, collision mitigation braking, and lane keeping assist. I like torque vectoring all wheel drive. Heated and ventilated seats are awesome.

Of course, if I were to try to keep this car for 14 years I might regret it, I don't know. Honda makes good cars but there's a boatload of stuff to break, lol. I think I might be better advised to trade it in at five years or so, but I do like the tricks it can do.

Re: Software is eating the car

#470

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…

Two months ago I sold a dead-simple Toyota truck I'd driven for 14 years and bought a new, loaded Honda. The difference in the complexity is of course astonishing. The yota didn't even have usb. You could climb into the engine compartment and sit there. The Honda has pretty much everything a modern car can have, and you can't even see empty space in the engine compartment. I _could_ get on your "just give me simple"…

> high beams all activate when needed without input from me.

Not a hard trick since high beams are almost never needed. Only to tell people it's their turn to go at the 4-way. They're only marginally more useful than fog lights.

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