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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

#781

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

doodlebugging wrote: post #349
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…

> They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please. When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000 That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits. EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now t…

Not just the owners, but the other engineers.

I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.

I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."

In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.

Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.

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

#782

Post by jq-r »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #736
Hikikomori wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try driving in Naples.

Naples is the first place I got honked at for not cutting the person off. I was at a stop sign, making a left turn onto a main road that had a steady stream of traffic. Apparently, I was supposed to wait a few seconds and then just creep out, cutting cars off on the way, which is what I believe the driver on the main road meant when he beeped at me and gesticulated wildly while I was sitting still at the stop sign.

That city was the first place where I saw a guy traffic splitting with a car. It was an ancient topolino, but my jaw dropped as he was snaking through traffic like on a moped.

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

#783

Post by jq-r »

stevoski wrote: post #611
gerdesj wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excessive horning (made up word) is not just a Vietnamese thing. Italy is probably Europe's worst offender, with Greece a close contender. I'm not so familiar with Asia, but I get the impression that the entirety of Indian and most of Chinese drivers feel the need to lean on the horn with gay abandon (fnarr). In Britain the horn is generally reserved for "fuck that was close: I think you are a bit of a tosser" or "yo…

Lebanon. Especially Beirut. The honking. Every taxi driver that passed me if I was walking down the street. Honking. Honking. So much noise. All the time. Six months I was there. Six months of honking honking honking.

Unfortunately like every city in Egypt. They have a hand permanently on a horn button.

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

#784

Post by mikepurvis »

seszett wrote: post #442
mikepurvis wrote: post #353

Earlier 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…

Why did you think you'd "never again" use anything like Android Auto? My own car is too old for Android Auto, but I sometimes drive a car that's from 2017 or so, and Android Auto works just fine on it, it's a pleasure to use (with the caveat that the phone has to be plugged in the USB port, wireless came later). So to me it seems like it always worked well.

Overall I’m a fan of the projection model, and I definitely see the benefit in longevity as well as the ability for older vehicles to get a retrofit head unit that adds in the projection interface.

My reflection was only that I was surprised at how well the built in apps worked when I tried them… but I definitely take it on board that it’s unlikely to still work this well 5, 10, or 15 years from now, so it’s important that the car still has projection available as a fallback.

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

#785

Post by aetherspawn »

71bw wrote: post #671
aetherspawn wrote: post #616

Software isn’t super hard I suppose, but you still need a dozen “rockstar devs” and $1mil in licensed software to push out a car, so yeah probably it’s a minimum $5-10m exercise for basic software that can just drive around. And if you start talking about razzle dazzle infotainment smart phone experiences, well that’s where you get the $1b price tag from. My startup is actually aiming to disrupt the low end of this w…

Interesting, mind sharing a bit more about the startup?

We use a production VCU hardware with custom software. It currently supports most of the VCU functions you would find in a production vehicle, including in-built CCS2 and NACS charging on the single controller (wires directly to socket).

We’ve put customised versions of our product in a few commercial vehicles, mainly retrofits. Our backstory is that we’ve been consulting in custom E2E vehicle controls for a long time and now we’re productising for better scalability of our expert team (capturing expertise in product so we can eventually take a step back).

Currently doing an angel/seed round: looking to raise US$ 250K. Very close to profitability due to low burn rate and having a lot of existing IP, so not planning to do any subsequent round like Series A. We think it could grow into a $50m company with low headcount in the style of Airbnb. Based in Australia.

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

#786

Post by 0xFNaaNg »

fragmede wrote: post #728
0xFNaaNg wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Given that the driving characteristics of most of the cars on the road don't match a BMW, what're the real "real important car things"? The revealed preference seems to be that the things you listed aren't actually that important. Long term cost is. Maintenance cost is. Not having to bring your car to the dealership for service is. Having the car have a long lifetime is. Handling well is nice; sporty drivetrain is ni…

> what're the real "real important car things"?

A good design from engineering standpoint. You feel it just instantly when you use the product. Interior is nice and will accommodate just about every possible driver comfortably with every control reachable. Suspension just works frkn great no matter how it was tuned (sporty or comfortable) and no matter how simple the design is. Same for drivetrain, you will acelerate/decelerate precisely how much you'd expect. And it's not a luxury it's a norm, even cheapest german or french cars have all this things sorted out. I'm speaking for the EU market though)

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

#787

Post by sarchertech »

rangestransform wrote: post #753
Zanfa wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problems like this always come down to salary. I love embedded (hardware in general, really) and would absolutely love to do it, but during my entire career, the salaries for embedded have been so much lower than you get for slinging JS/web shit. And now with 15 years in, the gap is even worse. At this point, when I wanted to get back into hardware, it made more financial sense to outfit my home office with all the m…

it is possible to get an embedded-adjacent job that pays well over 500k (my friend was bit banging FPGAs), it'll just be at an HFT instead of a car company

It’s definitely possible. There are probably a few embedded engineers making over $1M. But those are all outliers. It’s a whole lot easier to make $500k in web dev.

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

#788

Post by rangestransform »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #24
Jiocus wrote: post #10

The author mentions "military grade firewall", as a must have in a vehicle. Genuine question; What's a military grade firewall?

A stupid requirement. Consider this. Almost every car on the road today has an unsecured bus going back to like the 1980s. However you need to actually access the car to do something malicious so the threat vector is zero; since if you have access to the car you can also just cut brakes or put in a pipe bomb. The only reason why this paradigm changes in the EV era is because the insistence on having EVs phone home. N…

> The car could be airgapped with the dealer network used to flash software updates like they do with most other cars before EV era.

I would rather have OTA updates than enable parasitic middlemen to siphon money out of me

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

#789

Post by kortilla »

XorNot wrote: post #173
mousethatroared wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is. We're just told differently until a leaker proves differently. Twenty years too late to do anything about it

And naturally of course you don't carry a cellphone with you while you drive...you know, that device with accelerometers, GPS and an LTE chip that you leave powered on all the time on your person?

I don’t. What’s your point

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

#790

Post by frollogaston »

ericmay wrote: post #155
phyzix5761 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical buttons are a huge need. Its so distracting navigating through screens to change the temperature while driving.

That’s interesting - what vehicles require you to do that? I know the usual suspect is the Tesla, which I have, but I never have to navigate through menus to change the temperature while driving. As an aside a lot of people like to levy criticism on the infotainment screens which I think is very well deserved, but then people text and drive, watch YouTube videos, and do all sorts of crazy things too. Instead of levyi…

If I had to use a touch screen to change the temp on my car, I'd probably leave in the garage.
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