81–90 of 335 posts
This reminds me of being a 3rd party selling service to some company and they constantly ask for us to implement features that they could easily add - but can't. They don't say that flat out but we all understand what's happening..
Admittedly it was a long time ago, but I worked in the semi industry and this isn't how things were done. We manufactured batches of totally obsolete EOLed devices for various customers when they had sufficient volume. Devices that are in volume production (e.g. for cars) are carefully managed by people who do nothing but ensure that they're available in the right place at the right time in the right volume. In order…
What an irony. Car makers with their volumes can buy decades worth of these STM32s for the price of a single car...
> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...
Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture? Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.
All that shit's still not in stock anywhere. And remember that ARM, x86, etc. only defines the processor architecture. The I/O is far more important in a control application and I/O is anything but standard across platforms.
For one product we ended up buying a vendors entire supply and redesigning the product to use it, crossing our fingers that the supply chain would have unwound itself by the time we ran out of inventory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture? Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.
There's an incentive for chip vendors to not standardize since it makes migration hard and drives vendor lock-in. The CPU cores are one part but equally important is the peripherals and external featuresets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture? Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.
Those processors aren't made on high reliability processes. You don't want your ECU built with the same media processor as the infotainment system.
> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an irony. Car makers with their volumes can buy decades worth of these STM32s for the price of a single car...
Come on, let's say they get the STM32 for a quarter for a really high volume. There are tens if not hundreds of them in a car. 25k car would give you 100k stm32. 1k-10k cars is hardly decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Toyota accelerator-gate is largely a farce. Almost all of the people involved with Toyota unintended acceleration were over the age of 65 and had the poorly designed loose floor mats in their cars. Even if they had perfect readable John Carmack tier coding they still would have lost.
But every automatic I've ever driven (not many - I prefer a clutch) moves forward unless you're pushing the break in. In the rest state, it's in motion.
The problem isn't Toyota, the problem is a broken system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Window controls are safety regulated modules in modern vehicles. They detect the closing force and reverse direction off the required motor torque exceeds av threshold so that you can’t accidentally or intentionally choke someone with the windows. This feature is required by standards bodies and some regulators. All of this is achieved with a single <$1 part, fixed torque clutch... But who in the world wants to int…
Kids/dogs plus automatic windows…
> “We were able to substitute alternative chips, and then write the firmware in a matter of weeks,” Musk said. “It’s not just a matter of swapping out a chip; you also have to rewrite the software.” https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22595060/tesla-chip-short...
Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture? Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.
But I'd also like to throw in:
- 16 years or so ago, the US side of the Auto industry was trying to steer towards PPC. Motorola/Freescale's presence in the market probably had a bit of a play in this, as well as ARM's then-status of 'not quite powerful enough to be future proof.' A StackOverflow post from 2012 [0] seems to indicate they did indeed standardize, whether they moved on from there is another question.
- Most Carmakers probably -don't- want to change designs outside of a refresh. There's a few reasons for this, including both external (updating documentation to repair network) and internal (when I worked at a place that did software/services for a US automaker, we had to submit pages of documentation/paperwork to change a couple of items placement/wording in a dialogue box.)
[0] - https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/26035/whats-...