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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

#631

Post by ericmay »

IcyWindows wrote: post #400
ericmay wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live in America it’s just not enforced. Even cops do it. I don’t do it because I just don’t need to but you can watch people doing it for yourself if you pay attention. If you’re focused on less death, sure we can criticize infotainment screens, but the energy is much better spent in demanding enforcement and in whatever we need to do to reduce car usage. Otherwise you’re kind of wasting your time, unfortunate…

It is enforced in at least some parts of the US.

I haven’t been to every part of America, but based on the travels I have done there is very little, if any enforcement.

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

#632

Post by oblio »

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

It's surveillance if the car manufacturer wants to use it for that.

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

#633

Post by jesucresta »

It is funny that developers are always looking at the processes of car making to improve their own extremely broken ways and now it is car-makers that "should" be trying to be more like the agile software devs.

As a dev the last thing I want is a software-defined car. Look what we did to TVs.

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

#634

Post by speedgoose »

mihaaly wrote: post #576
zelos wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automated Emergency Braking has made driving significantly safer, according to the statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_emergency_braking_sy...

Statistics work on generic population but mush away a lot. People are careless and inattentive beast of animals in our modern societies. Things are done for them, expected this way, they do not need to pay attention that much, which has lot of merits and advantages for the advancement of humanity. Dumb solutions doing as told and need to be handled expertly can be dangerous for modern people. Developing automation ri…

Do we even have one documented case of a careful driver being killed by car software ?

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

#635

Post by nelblu »

encrypted_bird wrote: post #268

My ideal car: - No Internet connection - No touchscreens - No LCD dashboard; I like dials. - 100% user-repairable; there should be no need to go to a dealer if one can easily fix a problem themselves or one wants to go to an independent mechanic (often cheaper!) - Buttons and (analog, not digital) dials for the media center - Media center with ONLY Bluetooth, CD player, and radio media center - Analog locks (not soft…

Same. This is why I am rooting for Slate (https://www.slate.auto/) to succeed. I hope everyone in this ridiculous software war loses and in the end they realize that there is a huge market for just basic no-frills car.

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

#636

Post by sublimefire »

encrypted_bird wrote: post #268

My ideal car: - No Internet connection - No touchscreens - No LCD dashboard; I like dials. - 100% user-repairable; there should be no need to go to a dealer if one can easily fix a problem themselves or one wants to go to an independent mechanic (often cheaper!) - Buttons and (analog, not digital) dials for the media center - Media center with ONLY Bluetooth, CD player, and radio media center - Analog locks (not soft…

I was shopping for a new car and could not fathom why would you buy one that is heavy on electronics and especially software. Software does not age well unless it is designed in a controlled environment like aviation, which is not what happens with car systems. Besides the risks of being locked out of bugfixes in the future the software features are marginal to the overall experience and utility of the car. I would argue that cars made today are hardly any better than the ones made a decade ago. The problem is that making similar cars is not that profitable unless you spice it up and sell that feature for a premiuim.

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

#637

Post by rfl890 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #504
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…

>Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Maybe it's time for an 'OpenCar' project, where a "standard car" model is designed for (all cars have ECUs, light controls, HVAC, etc…

A nice thought experiment, but I doubt the US will ever do something as pro-consumer as this.

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

#638

Post by awongh »

DanielHB wrote: post #551
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 worked in similar systems and you are 100% right. 80% of the time was spent on communication protocols between the different boards and microcontrollers. QAing and solving issues from short-sighted dozens of unique custom protocols that worked in non-standard ways (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented). When you have dozens of communication lines required between dif…

For american cars at least, I read that one of the reasons this process exists is because car companies want to work around union rules for manufacturing by outsourcing components of the cars to subcontractors that they can make deals with.

Ultimately it's a price control strategy to pit these suppliers against each other to lower costs. But it means that designing these electronic sub-systems isn't just a question of the design itself, but also of managing all of these supplier relationships as well, they all have different contracts, you would have to coordinate all of them at once to make sure things are interoperable, etc.

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

#639

Post by ponector »

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

Let me guess: you are afraid of the surveillance, use only cash for payment, pager for connectivity and have no permanent address?

It's safer and convenient to have a connected car. I like it that way. When you can open your car app and check the location where it is parked, amount of gas or request ventilation/ac.

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

#640

Post by jameshart »

jabl wrote: post #496
bluGill wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In india if you hit someone after sounding your horn you are not at fault as you gave warning and they didn't move. (It is far more complex than that but as always the real truth is too complex for a comment box - if you are trying to drive safe it is close enough, but this isn't a license to murder), As a result all drives will honk their own if there is any possibility someone might cross in front of them. India is…

Was something like 20 years since I was in India, but IIRC at least back then they didn't have a "priority to the right" traffic rule, but rather some kind of "the one who first honks has priority". Traveling in a taxi felt suicidal, drivers just honked when approaching an intersection and continued blithely. Based on a quick googling, this seems to no more be the case, and there is a 'priority to the right" rule.

By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?

Neither system describes how Indian traffic works, which is much more of an iterated cooperative fluid dynamics simulation, with the main rule being ‘don’t drive into people who are in front of you’.

And they drive on the left, so priority to the right makes no sense.

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