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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

#711

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

cameronh90 wrote: post #190
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember Jeep saying manual window winders were actually more expensive once you factor in the costs of having them as an option given how cheap electric ones are when they dropped them for the new Wrangler. Might still be cheaper if you only manufacture with them and don’t offer electric but the price difference can’t be that high.

Is it about price or reliability? I never had a manual window winder fail to work, but electric window buttons breaking or the motor getting stuck (e.g. in icy conditions) has happened at some point in every car I've owned. The convenience factor hugely outweighs the rare failures for me, but I could see why someone buying a Wrangler for its intended purpose might actually prefer the manual option.

In my experience, they both fail but differently.

Electric winders tend to experience motor failure leaving you with a stuck window. They don't stress the mechanism that much.

Manual winders, you would generally experience mechanical failure. If you were lucky, you broke the handle. If you were unlucky, you broke the gears and had the pleasure of watching your window fall into the door.

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

#712

Post by jollyllama »

awongh wrote: post #638
DanielHB wrote: post #551

Earlier 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…

You'd think the overhead of managing the supplier relationships would be more expensive than well-managed vertical integration. I'm guessing it's a failure on the part of admin to count their own costs.

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

#713

Post by analog31 »

numpad0 wrote: post #657
cebert wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically, this method of managing suppliers was perfected by Wal-Mart.

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

#714

Post by rad_gruchalski »

GenshoTikamura wrote: post #697
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are also free not to use a mode of transportation. You can, for example, buy an old car, register it on a historical number plate, and you’re good. There is no retrofit requirement. If you want a new car, suck it up.

I'm always amused at people who deem future and freedom of choice incompatible and effectively stating that the end game of all progress is absolute slavery and obedience. Other than having some vested interest in denying people's right to choose between positive and negative aspects of progress, or having a Stockholm syndrome towards those who have such interest, I got no plausible explanations to this psychological…

Omg what am I going to do. Yes yes. You know I’m selling trackers online and just lobbying on hacker news.

You seem to be wasting your precious “armchair psychologist skills” here on hn.

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

#715

Post by hedora »

speedgoose wrote: post #634
mihaaly wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I have a new EV9 and the software on it regularly causes near miss accidents. I’m waiting to see accident statistics after it’s been on the market for a while. They’ll be dismal.

Examples: there are pedestrians nearby and the car is in reverse so it wildly swings the acceleration curve around, cycling between “slam on brakes” to “1-2mph” to “why am I on the other side of the street and standing on the break pedal?”

Even without pedestrians it constantly changes the acceleration curve and this cannot be disabled in a way that reliably survives turning the car off and back on.

Once, a motorcycle was lane splitting, so the adaptive cruise control tried to race it and accelerated at the car in front of me. I had to slam on the brakes.

This is by design: There’s a chapter in the manual explaining the dozen different reasons it’ll fail to regen brake at a stoplight (or, from what I can tell, rear end someone on the freeway) because of low visibility. (Including being on a hill, not going straight, pedestrians, vehicles in other lanes, and motorcycles lane splitting.)

Changing from drive to reverse to drive disables one pedal mode. I’m sure that’s caused at least one collision (when you take your foot off the pedals it automatically accelerates, especially in parking lots).

I’ve had it override steering too. Sometimes it tries to force me out of the lane. Sometimes it wants me to stay in the lane so it overrides emergency maneuvers when other cars try to merge into me.

The beeping is constant, and alert fatigue has set in. There’s even an undocumented alert icon that looks like “car is about to explode”. We don’t know what it means.

Even if they fix the safety issues, we plan to sell it for that reason.

Note that all of this idiocy is possible because they wired together the transmission, throttle, brake and vision systems more deeply than “we need emergency override”.

Anyway, mark my words: The accident rates on this model will be high.

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

#716

Post by hedora »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #689
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 future we want: The Ford Econoline rebooted with diesel-electric hybrid and full EV powertrain options, kei truck style flatbed with foldable sidewalls and tailgate, built on an actual frame so custom bed options are now possible, fully analog controls, no connectivity or center console display of any kind.

I want the center console, but not hooked to the rest of the car. Instead, it’d have a standard screen, and a jog wheel that’s compatible with third party computers.

I’d settle for a bluetooth (call and music) capable fm radio though.

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

#717

Post by neogodless »

hedora wrote: post #207
SoftTalker wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people still don’t want or can’t really afford EVs given their limitations. I’d say it’s the majority where I live. I directly know only one person who has a full EV (not a hybrid). I don’t think the Japanese automakers have squandered anything, yet.

We paid maybe a $10K premium for a used EV truck. It gets 2mi/kWh. Most parts of the country are paying ~ $0.125 per kWh, so that’s &0.06 of a dollar in electricity per mile. A comparable truck gets 18mpg mixed. At $3/gallon, that’s $0.16 per mile. So, the price premium pays back after 100K miles. That’s comparable to milage driven during a long car loan. I ignored oil changes, tax breaks on used cars, and picked the…

Including supply and generation, we pay $0.148 / kWh, and yeah, I average $0.06 charging my EV at home on a slow, inefficient 120V / 15A. (Some day I'll upgrade, maybe.) I've never charged anywhere else (except for free at the used car dealer where I bought it.)

We make a ~180 mile trip roughly once / month and could charge on site as we always stay ~2 nights, though probably slow 120V / 15A charge (aka Level 1). My current car would probably be pushing it, range-wise, but I definitely think for the vast majority of our usage, we could be using only EVs if we got one with a 300+ mile range (based on 100% battery usage.) From what I've read some EVs (like mine) struggle a bit below 15% and start to run in "limp" mode.

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

#718

Post by amarant »

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…

Sounds like a potential business opportunity! I don't know much about cars, how much is standardized in car electronics? Would it be possible to build a infotainment module that you could sell to several car manufacturers with only minimal modifications?

I think I've heard of something called an ICANN(?) bus that is used to communicate stuff in cars and is fairly standardised, maybe?

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

#719

Post by hedora »

vv_ wrote: post #678
misja111 wrote: post #668

> Consumers have had it with clunky, slow automotive technology, and the modern car is so computerized that a seamless electronic interface is an absolute necessity. Say what? Give me a clunky manual interface with buttons and knobs any time over an electronic interface for which I have to look away from the road.

You're part of a small minority of people that want to had old and outdated _infotainment_ systems. The only exception to this is that people want to have climate control knobs and buttons for some features (e.g. heated seats, driving-mode, etc). However, this is not what the article is discussing.

The article is discussing moving safety critical functions like door handles and drivetrain into a centralized computer. This has been a disaster so far, and consumers hate it.

They cite tesla as an example of a “good” approach, and don’t understand that (in addition to Elon) a large percentage of the market won’t consider a car where the computer decides which way the vents point, and if you are allowed to open the doors after an accident.

It does mention that people hate touch screens, and probably will not like these new cars. Other than cost savings, and “the infotainment computer is slow” there zero discussion of how these new systems improve the car or the user experience. “Slow infotainment” should be fixable by throwing a better cpu/ram in.

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

#720

Post by wlesieutre »

reanimated wrote: post #568
wlesieutre wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Halfway through reading this comment I was thinking “Yup that’s why I like my Mazda3.” Fingers crossed that they can keep it up with an EV transition. In the MX-30 they did an HVAC touchscreen, but perhaps the years long gap between that and their next EV will be an opportunity to reflect on how stupid that was. (Ignoring Chinese joint ventures that just use someone else’s platform)

I would love to have both. The scroll wheel is convenient when I’m driving, but the touchscreen would make entering a new address much easier, as it’s very annoying to do now by scrolling, and voice dictation doesn’t work well in my language.

I do agree with that, and the newer Mazdas let the screen act as a touch screen when stationary for just that reason.

When I have trouble with voice input I just use my phone to enter the directions instead of doing it in CarPlay. Typing by scrolling through the alphabet with the wheel is not good.

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