Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s always been the case with Tesla. I still have no idea how the yoke with no progressive steering and a tiny button for a horn ever passed any sanity check. Not to mention the NHTSA.
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Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
651–660 of 848 posts
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:…
Oh I got the sarcasm, I was just agreeing. And I also agree about worse is better. To me the most tragic part is that "worse" has become almost as costly as doing "The Right Thing", mostly due to the extreme flexibility and rush to the market from vendors and libraries. Our foundations weren't as sketchy when the concept was invented.
It has definitely gotten much worse. The only thing keeping me sane is hacking solo projects in languages with great tooling. I don't think I can even stomach interviews anymore, let alone the whole application process farce.
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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> Because tesla as a brand is uniquely tied to musk.
Which is because he is in the media a lot.
I can understand the impact on your brand as things are, but it would be interesting to see how well other manufacturers would stand up to scrutiny.
> musk wasn't tesla's face and main profiteer of any purchase.
The face bit of it makes sense.
As for "main profiteer", he is the single largest shareholder, but its about 13% shareholding - 87% of the profits belong to other people.
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#654Earlier 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…
MG has exactly the same issue. Default to radio for some weird reason and no real "off" without disabling the whole system.
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Conway's law strikes again!
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple doesn't have different software platforms for low vs high cost phones. Why is a car different? It doesn't even have as much functionality.
I think it's fair to say that the software in a modern car contains lot more functionality than an average smartphone. Drivers just aren't aware of how much is happening in their car each second.
To someone that knows nothing about car SW architecture, that is surprising to me, I would have expected a number of control loops for things like fuel injection, ABS brake control, drive-by-wire, EV battery charge and discharge, etc. each running on their own processor due real-time safety considerations. These I would expect to be different implementations and parameterizations of the same control theory maths.
On top of this comes some functionality to control windshield wipers, lighting, AC, seat heating, etc. Stuff which is probably not top-tier safety critical, but still important. I would expect that stuff to run on one, maybe two processors.
Then comes the infotainment system, running on its own processor.
Sensors are supplying data to all processors through some kind of modernized CAN bus and some sort of publisher/subscriber protocol. Maybe some safety critical sensors have dedicated wiring to the relevant processor.
A lot of variations on this seems possible with the same SW platform, tuned and parameterized properly. The real-time safety critical stuff would need care, but is doable.
Am I completely off the mark? Can you give some examples of where I am going wrong?
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to add one more thing to your point, if embedded devs work really hard and make the code work faster/better all reward you get is an _even_ more underpowered chip for the next version. Hardware procurement is cut-throat, sometimes they have mandates to reduce component costs and the procurement people WILL reach them. Often procurement > product in the power dynamics so no matter how bad the product gets those p…
If the OEM stayed with the same chip for several years, wouldn’t the price go down over time?
Car OEMs are modern day colonial plantation owners, they know cost structures of suppliers and schedule their price cuts. They already have an annual cost saving quota. Prices don't just go down but go down just-in-time.
It would make zero sense if I drive to a Walmart and demand they sell to me with monotonically lowering prices as function of date since registration of my reward card, but in cars they do.
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The main topic is software and it is still treated like a part you can just outsource and plug in.
Since cars are primarily being bought by sculptural aesthetics of the exterior and above all their brand they continue being bought for those who feel the need of a status symbol.
At the core there is still a lack of a long term strategy and above all stability to build on - not saying it is an easy task.
In the end the customer has to suffer with abysmal usability, reliability and ever changing mental models. And don’t get me started about the touchscreens everywhere situation…
It isn’t just software though - VW moving development and above all production engineering and planning to china since they failed coming up with an efficient solution in Wolfsburg is basically saying it all. [1]
Dire times ahead and i hope for the best.
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m in a loaner 2025 Volvo right now and I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised with the Android Auto setup. I thought I’d never again use anything other than phone projection, but nope — I can install Google Maps and Spotify and sign into both, and then my profiles and everything are right there including search history, and it’s actually more seamless and integrated than switching between CarPlay and the native/ou…
Give it five years and it will be guaranteed garbage. Spotify will refuse to run on an unsupported older Android without the latest DRM API, while Google Maps will crash your system randomly, requiring you to disconnect the car battery to jumpstart it again. Volvo will offer you an upgrade of their proprietary device at the low price of $1899. It's puzzling to see this push for general computing on devices that need…
I've been using Apple CarPlay on a car that was manufactured in 2016. There are some occasional issues with the infotainment system, but CarPlay works as well as it did nearly 10 years ago. It is much more likely that CarPlay will continue to function just as well whereas proprietary systems made by car manufacturers are going to start showing their age.
Re: Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automated Emergency Braking has made driving significantly safer, according to the statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_emergency_braking_sy...
I would argue that the software quality of ADAS systems is very different from Infotainment. Infotainment systems are a race to the bottom on BOM+SW price point. ADAS OEM's understand that there is a human cost, liability, and reputational cost for failure. The real risk with these monoliths is when companies start to remove the distributed/redundant nature of safety critical systems, in order to reduce hardware cost…
OTA updates scare me, as does any type of constant connectivity that is even indirectly linked to safety critical systems.