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Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war

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

#581

Post by LeonM »

arkh wrote: post #545
TylerE wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as everyone used to clown on Tesla for it, the vast majority of cars would be better off with an iPad glued to the dash.

Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.

For those unaware: the Volkswagen Up! is a small, low-budget car produced by VW group, it's also sold as the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii. AFAIK it was only sold in Europe and Latin-America.

A family member had a early-gen Up!, and the OEM display (build by Navigon) that sat on top of the dashboard was removable, but used a proprietary connection, not USB. I believe it snapped on with magnets, which I remember thinking was quite nice.

The detachability was mostly for anti-theft reasons I presume, but quite quickly an aftermarket started to form to replace the OEM screen with other options, including phone mounts. I don't think VW envisioned that, but I thought that a detachable mount for aftermarket satnav, phone mounts or other accessories was quite smart.

I did wonder why they didn't just make it a phone mount as standard so you can basically BYOD, which could lower the price of the car further and probably be a better experience anyway.

> Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.

Thanks to your comment I looked into it again, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see the newer generation Up! actually does have a OEM phone mount now, how cool! From what I just read it uses an app to integrate with some of the car's features.

More car manufacturers should do this for their budget cars. Have a few physical buttons for controlling built-in functions (namely HVAC), and let the user's phone provide the entertainment, navigation and other driving aids. Maybe even ditch the radio interface, and just have an amplifier and speakers build in.

It's a shame that phone OSes are moving away from on-device 'driving mode' in favor of Android Auto and Apple Carplay. I get it though, larger screen makes for easier controls and thus safer to interact with while driving, but still...

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

#582

Post by pjc50 »

brightball wrote: post #408
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…

It was encouraging to hear an exec from Ford recently say essentially this in an interview. The legacy manufacturers seem to realize that Tesla is eating their lunch because of their lack of vertical integration. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve but will be interesting to see what effort achieves.

BYD would eat their lunch even more if they were allowed to.

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

#584

Post by GenshoTikamura »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #528
mdavid626 wrote: post #518

Looking back at the last 10 years how my fellow developers write code, the last thing I want is software defined vehicles. No one is rewarded for writing good code or for handling all the edge cases. People are rewarded for getting things done. The problem is, that this approach works e.g. for non-critical web applications, but not for cars, which are dangerous, heavy object traveling at high speeds. Every car I've d…

The direction is likely inevitable. Modern cars already are software-heavy, even without full autonomy or flashy features

It is only as inevitable as consumers' alreadism-driven apathy. The moment they recognize that Car As A Service is something out of the sane world and having a means of transportation that can simply expire or be blocked remotely for a far-fetched TOS violation is against their interests, all inevitablism goes up in flames.

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

#585

Post by gizmo »

LeonM wrote: post #559
metadat wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't understand this sentiment. Should all VW drivers have a "I hate Hitler" sticker on their car too? Because in case you aren't aware: VW was started by the German Labour Front (part of the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler himself oversaw early development of the first models. Why the need to apologize for the CEO of the company that you buy products from? Should we also have an "I hate Foxconn" sticker on every Apple…

After WW2 Volkswagen didn't change their name or Nazi branding (if you haven't seen the uncropped version of the VW logo you're in for a surprise) exactly because people in Allied countries refused to buy German cars after the war. Even if VW or BMW or Mercedes had rebranded and apologized it would have made no difference. Their ties with Nazi leadership was too strong for any apology to be credible. What Frenchman would buy a Nazi car over a French car in 1950s? And so the German car companies focused on domestic sales, which meant they had to appeal to humiliated (former) Nazis for sales for which any rebranding would have been a negative.

German car companies absolutely were boycotted after WW2 in much of Europe (and rightly so) and boycotting Tesla for Musk's antics is consistent with that.

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

#586

Post by m000 »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #452
mrheosuper wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aviation standards allow boeing building their infamous 737-Max

That wasn't a malfunction but rather a flight control feature the pilots didn't know about. (Iirc)

But that's the point! A professional pilot misunderstood/was unaware of a new safety feature, despite their professional experience and continuous training.

So, is it really sane to put similar features in cars, where you get your driving licence at 16/18, and then that's it?

This also goes for the huge screens on the console. A pilot has been trained for each commercial aircraft model they fly to navigate their way around the numerous controls. But putting a tablet in front of an untrained driver? It sells well because it makes you feel as a pilot. But at the same time, it is a huge distraction and there is zero training to cope with it.

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

#587

Post by raxxorraxor »

pnw wrote: post #255
throw0101d wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's your objection to LTE? Tracking, phoning home (with related privacy issues), etc : * https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/09/flaw-in-kia-web-portal-... * https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/five-...

That's a concern for privacy focused individuals, who are a very small fraction of the consumer market, despite being common here on HN. If the last few decades have shown anything, it's that most consumers don't rank privacy highly as a desired feature for products in anything but the most abstract ways. There's zero chance a car manufacturer is going to nuke some of the most desired features of modern automobiles f…

Some privacy concious customers know that data collected by China is less relevant than data your own legislation could get access to, but that is a different point.

It just should be said, that all these features could perfectly be implemented without violating privacy. You just have to use another system not from Apple and that other advertising company.

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

#589

Post by GenshoTikamura »

ponector wrote: post #566
rustcleaner wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but you can be a bro and make sure that hardware is close to the surface somewhere for easy access, its presence isn't required to start and operate the car (either firmware check or the immobilizer performing metrics), and its removal does not cause an obvious and annoying alert during operation (IE removal should not make the car appear to be in a 'degraded' state per its indicators). You are complying by insta…

It is mandatory to have and it is in checklist during annual vehicle check. Without it it is not street legal. And the car should show an error in case the module is removed/failed. Those safety add-ons are there for a reason.

Those are not safety addons, those are surveillance ones

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

#590

Post by whstl »

namaria wrote: post #509
loeg wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

The bane of every cargo cult cloud op. I worked with a company that had maybe 20 devs total, > 30 "microservices" in kubernetes and one of the most complex bits of the deployment was handling Greylog and Elasticsearch. Still they couldn't manage high availability, despite logging all the things. Go figure.

I once worked for a unicorn that got near-zero traffic during the pandemic, but nobody could understand why some services were struggling to stay up.

Datadog was costing several thousand euros per month despite near-absent customer traffic. But the name made finally sense because all the data in there was absolute dog shit from reboots.

So yeah too much logging can be bad.

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