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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

#621

Post by b112 »

xethos wrote: post #340
b112 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, Mazda. The car company which won't even give you a fuse box diagram, and instead says to contact the dealer if a fuse blows. https://www.cx90forum.com/threads/fuse-box-diagram.172/ Something foul and malign is afoot at Mazda these days.

While not dramatically better, just a few posts down[0] someone paid for the "Welcome to Mazda" service manuals/program for $30 and shared the fuse box schematics [0] https://www.cx90forum.com/posts/2706/

From the perspective of Mazda being malign, it's not the tiniest bit better.

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

#622

Post by __m »

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…

[flagged]

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

#623

Post by 0xFNaaNg »

whiteboardr wrote: post #472
garyfirestorm wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’ This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy. Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff. And you’re left with b…

Get out if you can! Spent 7 years at the three pointed star within design and UX - one day, when i’m over all i had to witness and experience i’ll write a book about the downfall of the german automotive industry. It’s all politics and due to constant battles and changing ownership throughout departments they won’t ever have a solid foundation. And i dare to assume that this goes for most of the automotive industry.…

> downfall of the german automotive industry

I hear that kind of statements all the time but if you take like real important car things germans are (still) pretty good: their cars handle really well, powertraian usually works perfectly smooth (or sporty), ergonomics is good to perfect, it will not rust for decades, list goes on ... The real things killing germans I think: cars are expensive and unreliable

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

#624

Post by javiercornejo »

no excuses... it was their primary business since ever and software wave is coming from 60s when human went to space, so software as car engines are relevant long time ago, they couldn't tolerant this mess with providers, ECUs and technologies, that long, for their core business.

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

#625

Post by namaria »

whstl wrote: post #590
namaria wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh most definitely. Maybe my sarcasm was a bit too subtle.

I definitely think that teams should think about what to log. Otherwise go with a live image kind of system like Smalltalk of LISP. The whole event sourcing paradigm and trying to just log everything and look at it later strike me as a poor reconstruction of that concept.

There is a tragic aspect to the "Worse is Better" essay that I see play out everywhere: there is a way to do something correctly but just throwing something together wins the race to market. Winner takes all and we're stuck with ossified bad decisions from the past. The idea that we can fix it later is just a lie. You can't do the foundation later, you'll be stuck with a structurally unsound edifice and forever holding it together under a completely unnecessary cognitive load.

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

#626

Post by PlunderBunny »

flax wrote: post #193
anon7000 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mazda has done a great job at this so far, very minimal screen which automatically just shows CarPlay, and buttons for all the normal car stuff, which also isn’t overdone. The only flaw is the scroll wheel to interact with the screen, which is just slightly too clunky in apps with too many options

My 2017 Mazda cx5 refuses to not play the radio. There is no "off" for the audio, you have to choose a source. I use my phone, via bluetooth. But sometimes, for unknown reasons, the car does not connect with the phone. It then falls back to the last source chosen before BT, which is radio. Okay, so I created a flash drive with an mp3 of 30 seconds of silence, played that, then went back to bluetooth. This failback st…

Re: radio always turning on, my LDV eDeliver 9 is the same but worse - sometimes the radio comes on immediately, and sometimes it takes about 20 seconds. You can’t preemptively mute it in the latter case. There’s lots of other weird quirks with the radio (e.g. going into reverse switches to a low-volume radio if you were previously playing music or a podcast in CarPlay). It’s as-if almost any change in the audio switches the radio on. Other than that, it’s a great van!

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

#627

Post by teekert »

encrypted_bird wrote: post #249
teekert wrote: post #146

Just talk to Canoncal, or IBM, make a NixOS config, or just do something. How hard can it be? My father’s 5 yo Volkswagen van has an 80’s looking UI, the touchscreen is already failing. Going from the normal UI to CarPlay is just jarring, any 2024 Linux distro looks, feels and acts more modern. What are they doing over there?? I could probably whip him up something nicer if only there was just a Nuc or something in t…

While I don't dismiss your general point, I will say that anyone who says "how hard can it be" really needs to consider they are falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In my experience, that phrase is (typically) a red flag for the latter.

I'll let you know why I finally get my own van, add DC powered Nuc-like with a touchscreen and just run Gnome on it. Or, to make it more fair, I'll put LineageOS on it. Very touch friendly.

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

#628

Post by eek2121 »

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…

Agreed!

They also want to treat it as a new revenue stream rather than as a value add, which ultimately hurts them.

We end users don’t want to pay a subscription for our car. Especially for things we already get for free on our phone.

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

#629

Post by pbasista »

GenshoTikamura wrote: post #589
ponector wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please do not intentionally conflate the two concepts. Connectivity is one thing. Using connectivity for surveillance is another.

If a car is connected to the internet, it does not automatically mean that it is also collecting car data and sending it somewhere.

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

#630

Post by widforss »

PopePompus wrote: post #619
brabel wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italy is really 2 countries, north and south are quite distinct.

Where ever you are in Italy, you will be told by locals that you can't trust anyone from a town south of that place.

Even in Lampedusa?
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