Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

insideevs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 848 posts

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#481

Post by qwerpy »

rossjudson wrote: post #469
homefree wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It makes me sad that a bunch of people who've never used/adjusted to the Tesla yoke are all but guaranteeing (via whining) that yokes are going to disappear. The yoke is great after you've adjusted to it, and I don't care about proportional steering at all . That's complexity I don't need.

The proportional steering with a yoke on their trucks is awesome. I did not want a yoke, but I wanted the truck and had no choice. I now can’t imagine going back to any other kind of steering. You acclimate to it within minutes.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#482

Post by demosito666 »

0_____0 wrote: post #403
rapfaria wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was working at $samsung_competitor, my NDA'd next gen android phone prototypes (a huge motherboard with a screen) were sent some years earlier. Like Samsung is on S25 now, and we would get boards for S27... It takes a long time for these things to evolve.

I feel like I'm on crazy pills sometimes when talking with people who deal mostly with software. I think SW engineers sometimes think that engineering generally looks like what they do, when in reality SW is a deep outlier wrt process...

The word “engineering” in SWE is just plain wrong. Present day software development has nothing to do with engineering outside of some very niche markets (aviation, mission-critical systems, embedded controllers). The term vibe coding came up really handy because it describes how 99% of software is developed much better than “software engineering“, with or without LLMs. That’s why it’s always fun to read such discussions of hardware vs software people.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#483

Post by smilekzs »

tacker2000 wrote: post #81

Software defined vehicle? Never heard of this term. More marketing buzzword BS. Yes, Tesla has one of the best user interfaces in a car, and has set the bar high. But just because they have OTA updates it's now called a "Software Defined Vehicle"?

From first principles I think the concept can make sense. From car-specific function-specific ECUs, to platform-shared (but still function-specific) ECUs, then to Zonal architecture and domain controllers. The goals: consolidate and generalize HW across the lineup moving model-specific bits to FW/SW/Config (amortizes the development cost and simplifies certification), and also simplify wiring (saves you precious copper wires which are costly, messy, and heavy) because you can pretty much just plug every miscellaneous sensor or actuator to its nearest "anchor point" without worrying (too much) about arbitrary ECU limitations.

See Rivian's intro on their ECU design and Zonal architecture: https://youtu.be/6ZBko4TvfJY?t=137&si=-SKL_iFqZFnHE8nQ

This might sound like purely implementation detail, but having the (non-safety-critical) "business logic" of a car as software gives the manufacturer flexibility to late-bind behavior as new use cases / demands inevitably get discovered.

Something can simultaneously be a good idea, buzzword'd by marketing, and/or deviate from the original intentions.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#484

Post by natch »

imglorp wrote: post #390
whatever1 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, this seemed to be the right strategy since they were able to be profitable in a very crowded market. Yes, the new companies try to verticalize everything from components to software, but none of them seem profitable (marginally Tesla passes the bar, but not so sure if you took away all the subsidies and carbon offsets). So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?

To what extent was a clean sheet design a huge advantage over the legacy makers? And to what extent were the subsidies an advantage? They phased out after 200,000 units and Tesla has sold millions.

Tesla took the hit for the transportation industry, working their asses off and pioneering the costly ramp up to mass production of EVs, so the subsidies are the government compensating them for having not taken the easy path that the legacy auto makers are taking with their continued production of polluting gas cars and their half-hearted introduction of compliance cars.

Since government wants to encourage transition to sustainable energy, and oil and gas have been subsidized for decades, not to mention the tens of billions in bailouts for legacy auto, putting things in perspective shows that legacy auto should get the brunt of any criticism here, and the relatively smaller subsidies to Tesla are offsetting the larger investment Tesla has made.

The beauty of it is that the money is actually paid to Tesla by the legacy auto makers who have not stepped up or have stepped up only at a scale of virtue signaling, if you look at the sales numbers.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#485

Post by loeg »

latchkey wrote: post #289
acheron9383 wrote: post #199

As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software talent, but because they have no ability to actually build the electronics alongside the software, which is ultimately what constrains embedded software. Without the right hardware, the constraints are just insurmountable, you can not do X feature because board A…

I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing... https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/

> The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails.

I worked for a $ ~billions revenue software storage vendor who had the exact same issue (excessive logging wearing out under-spec'd flash drives).

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#486

Post by Zanfa »

jmb99 wrote: post #409
sarchertech wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My CS degree concentration is embedded systems. I love embedded programming, but it would probably cost me $200k a year to do it versus the backend distributed systems stuff I do now.

Admittedly I don’t know your salary or market, but it is possible to make decent money in embedded. Connections & market timing are both vital though, in my experience, as well as being actually good at your job. I’m in Canada so numbers are way different, but salary-wise I’m in the ~75th percentile software engineers in my area, my title is embedded engineer, and I’m fairly junior (3 years out of university, ~6 year…

Problems like this always come down to salary. I love embedded (hardware in general, really) and would absolutely love to do it, but during my entire career, the salaries for embedded have been so much lower than you get for slinging JS/web shit. And now with 15 years in, the gap is even worse.

At this point, when I wanted to get back into hardware, it made more financial sense to outfit my home office with all the measuring instruments, debuggers, tools and other equipment necessary for embedded work and do it as a hobby. If I had the space, I could even get full-size CNC machines and still come out ahead cash wise. It’s insane.

It’s no wonder they can’t find experienced embedded devs, when it makes no financial sense to stick with it over a decade.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#487

Post by [deleted] »

whatever1 wrote: post #399
imglorp wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To what extent was a clean sheet design a huge advantage over the legacy makers? And to what extent were the subsidies an advantage? They phased out after 200,000 units and Tesla has sold millions.

Tesla has earned since 2017 over $10B in carbon offsets. That is in addition to the state and federal incentives.

[deleted]

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#488

Post by cyberax »

owenversteeg wrote: post #464
cyberax wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That statement is factually inconsistent. It's not. It just stores the last speed/wheel position/brake state data that it receives when the "collision imminent" condition activates. In some cars this can be literally the same signal that deploys the airbags. > Look, the European Commission stated that it cannot be hacked Pretty much. It's just a normal LTE radio, that is normally inactive. It technically is hackabl…

Sorry, that's incorrect. I have actually read the law and its relevant standards. The standard requires at least two pre-accident locations to increase accuracy and other fields with pre-crash data are encouraged. And come on. Car manufacturers, which are notorious producers of insecure software, are legally mandated to make an inexpensive device which includes an LTE radio and a connection to the vehicle buses, and…

The MSD (minimum set of data) is defined in: "CEN 15722 ESafety - ECall - Minimum Data Set".

The original standard version defined only one location datapoint, the more recent version defines two additional _optional_ points ("recentVehicleLocationN1", "recentVehicleLocationN2"). It also allows specifying the number of passengers.

The mandatory datapoints include the location and direction of the vehicle, but they can be acquired as needed.

> I can't tell if you're trolling me, but your average blackhat only needs 1 of (shitty car OEM software/LTE radio/vehicle bus connected device) to break into a system.

I'm not aware of black hats hacking into a modem that is passively tracking the mobile networks. It's theoretically possible, but I'm not aware of such feats.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#489

Post by mavamaarten »

iknowstuff wrote: post #449
latchkey wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing... https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/

You’re using a software fault which wore out the flash as evidence of poorly designed electronics?

If the flash was better, the product wouldn't fail so quickly. It's really a combination of poorly designed electronics, and a software bug wasn't there, the fault wouldn't have popped up so early.

Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

#490

Post by kqr2 »

felineflock wrote: post #410

About a year ago the Ford CEO (who is also Chris Farley's cousin) explained why legacy car manufacturers could not make good software: each of their cars have 150+ modules, each of them from several suppliers, each of them writing their own software. For every software change on each module, they have to go to a supplier to ask because of IP rights. That is why Ford is/was trying to build a new generation of modules…

They also dictate that their suppliers will all use AUTOSAR which is a legacy framework that makes even toggling a GPIO difficult.

https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/leq366/comment/gm...

  you'll spend a few more months sitting in online seminars while some talking head explains why it takes 6 hours to configure a million goddamn things so their garbage tool can shit out an entire Italian resaurant's worth of spaghetti code just to blink an LED at 1Hz. Except it's not 1Hz, it's 10Hz, or 0.1Hz, or some other bullshit that you didn't want, because you muttered the wrong incantation to the configuration utility somewhere around step 2 out of 800, so guess what, you get to back and do the entire fucking thing again.
Post reply on HN