Why Carmakers Can’t Transition to Newer Chips

To elaborate on this, the feature sets on these low level microcontrollers are no standardized. There is no common API for them to implement. Even chips coming from the same manufacturer will have different hardware capabilities, and although low-level drivers can abstract that way to a certain extent, there will always be differences.

The biggest challenge is when you need to update your firmware to use a microcontroller from a different manufacturer. Often times these chips are specifically chosen due to the set of hardware functionality they offer, and the firmware is written to take advantage of that from the start. The two are coupled.

Now you are forced to use a different chip, and the firmware that was written for a specific set of hardware now has to be modified for a new chip that may have a different feature set. Things fine print on how things like Analog to Digital converters becomes extremely important.

Vehicle electronics have some real environmental challenges as well.

They have to function correctly

  * after they've been parked outdoors in Death Valley all day.

  * after they've been parked at -40 degrees for a long time.

  * when doused with slush containing road salt.

  * when their wiring harnesses deteriorate after a couple of decades of hard use.

  * at least for a few seconds after a catastrophic crash.

It takes the kind of risk-taking guts that Tesla exhibits to push new, better, electronic parts into test and production. Most car companies' executives, designers, and test engineers just don't want to take those risks.

The bigger the company, the more effort that’s needed to coordinate the parts. At some point one person can’t keep the whole in the head and has to lean on process. Tesla is small enough, and has a CEO that can keep everything in his head.

I think the Cortex-R chips are more targeted here- I think the V8-R chips are designed specifically for automotive use, so I assume they have appropriate ratings.

As far as I can tell, Tesla plays fast and loose, treating their product like a manufacturer of consumer electronics and not a manufacturer of a dangerous and durable good. That obviously allows them to out-compete other auto manufacturers who are more aware of things like product liability.

See the Toyota accelerator-gate lawsuits. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic... :

> However, on October 24, 2013, a jury ruled against Toyota and found that unintended acceleration could have been caused due to deficiencies in the drive-by-wire throttle system or Electronic Throttle Control System (ETCS). Michael Barr of the Barr Group testified[30] that NASA had not been able to complete its examination of Toyota's ETCS and that Toyota did not follow best practices for real time life critical software, and that a single bit flip which can be caused by cosmic rays could cause unintended acceleration. As well, the run-time stack of the real-time operating system was not large enough and that it was possible for the stack to grow large enough to overwrite data that could cause unintended acceleration.[31][32] As a result, Toyota has entered into settlement talks with its plaintiffs.

Not following software best practices(i.e. ISO 26262) can expose your customers to unnecessary risk and leave your company vulnerable to lawsuits. Tesla may learn a very expensive lesson one day, or they may get lucky. Time will tell.

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Depending on the design of your system and software stack, switching SoCs can be anywhere from a massive effort to a simple recompilation. Even switching architectures could be trivial for some components(i.e. a UI written in HTML5 making REST API calls) or a nightmare for others(ECU, ABS or other real-time algorithm written to use bare metal modules on the SoC without an OS providing abstraction).