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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

#801

Post by rconti »

catigula wrote: post #777
rconti wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers consider it adversarial because it not only "takes away control" but also because it messes up their feedback loop. I'll give two examples. From a recent Toyota rental (~2024 RAV4): The lane departure system (which seems to have 2 stages?) gently corrects your steering if you get anywhere NEAR a line in the road. It's not a clearly-artificial buzzing in the wheel or a tug at your hands, it feels extremely sub…

I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver". The fallacy is that simply because a low-probability event hasn't happened to you, doesn't mean…

> I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver".

Sure; and I'm sure you likewise recognize that there's a difference between "This could never help me", "I don't need this", and "I don't want this". People don't live their lives by making game theory optimal choices at every turn. There's also a difference between a safety regime offered as a cost-extra feature on a car, a regulatory requirement on a car, and a regulatory requirement on an airliner.

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

#802

Post by gmueckl »

KSteffensen wrote: post #656
gmueckl wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am also not deeply into this stuff. But there is more going on in a car than what you list.

One probably surprising thing is that an LCD dashboard is usually driven by multiple rendering stacks. One is for the complex graphics and eye candy. The other one is responsible for brake and engine warning lights etc. and is considered safety critical. The second one is very basic and often partitioned off by a hypervisor.

A lot of these controllers are running more than just control loops. They are also actively monitoring their system for failures. The number of possible failure conditions and responses is quite large. I had instances where e.g. the engine warning light came on because the ECU detected that the brake light switch was faulty. In another instance, I had powered steering turn itself off during a drive because it had developed a fault. These kinds of behaviors are the results of dedicated algorithms that are watching just about every component of safety critical systems that can possibly be monitored.

All of these software systems are provided by different vendors who develop the aplication software based on either their own stack or operating systems and middleware provided by other upstream suppliers. It don't think it's uncommon for a car to contain multiple copies of 3 or 4 different RTOS stacks. Nobody at the car manufacturers is enforcing uniformity in the software stacks that the suppliers deliver. The manufacturers tend to want finished, self-contained hardware units that they can plug in, configure and turn on.

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

#803

Post by xarope »

KSteffensen wrote: post #553
HelloNurse wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honking is a harmless replacement for solving disputes with handguns. You probably drove in low-stress environments.

There is a low-stress driving environment in Italy? Where's that? Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.

oops, that might have been me. I kid. I only do that when completely lost trying to get out of an autogrill parking lot (!).

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

#804

Post by cyberax »

owenversteeg wrote: post #796
cyberax wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MSD (minimum set of data) is defined in: "CEN 15722 ESafety - ECall - Minimum Data Set". The original standard version defined only one location datapoint, the more recent version defines two additional _optional_ points ("recentVehicleLocationN1", "recentVehicleLocationN2"). It also allows specifying the number of passengers. The mandatory datapoints include the location and direction of the vehicle, but they ca…

Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location. The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants. The common OEM implementation these days is that the physical device that does eCall does several things, including eCall, over the same cellular radio. There's nothing stopping the OEM…

> Sorry, your comment is incorrect again. The most recent version of CEN 15722 requires the two most recent locations before the incident location.

I have the standard open, and I don't see it.

> The modem does not have to passively track the mobile networks; it can do what it wants.

Sure. So just choose an automaker that doesn't provide data subscription services and/or don't pay for them. The eCall requirement in itself doesn't require tracking.

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

#805

Post by willywanker »

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?

Ah yes, brilliant reasoning. "You carry one device that can be tracked as long as you're carrying it so what's the problem with having tracking baked into your vehicle?"

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

#806

Post by 71bw »

aetherspawn wrote: post #785
71bw wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

Willing to invest $5 if you're down... :-)

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

#807

Post by mdavid626 »

frollogaston wrote: post #792
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 worst one is automatic brights. Some cars don't even have a button to disable it, and it's only like 75% reliable at detecting an oncoming car as to not blind the other driver.

Interestingly, for me this worked very well. On my BMW M235i it was flawless. It had normal beams, and one could turn on the auto beams. One button to switch it on/off. I really liked it, as it was easy to activate, did its job, and when in doubt, I could deactivate it easily (button).

On my VW Golf GTD (mk7) it works also pretty good, only the activation/deactivation is strange. It uses the same switch, which is used to switch on the beams. Depending on the current state, it activates the beams, auto beam or turns it off. After more than a year of ownership, I still don’t know how to use it. Sometimes when I need to turn it off, it doesn’t turn off, but does something I don’t want it to do.

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

#808

Post by mdavid626 »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #548
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...

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…

I believe you, that these systems work. However, I watched too many videos about cars on which it doesn’t. Many of them were expensive cars. Phantom breaking is really scary to me. I’d rather have full control of the car, than letting some system randomly emergency brake the car for no reason. ABS and ESP one can anticipate. ESP usually can even be turned off.

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

#809

Post by aetherspawn »

71bw wrote: post #806
aetherspawn wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

Willing to invest $5 if you're down... :-)

Thank you for the interest, I wish VCs shared your enthusiasm haha!

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

#810

Post by DoingIsLearning »

mdavid626 wrote: post #808
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe you, that these systems work. However, I watched too many videos about cars on which it doesn’t. Many of them were expensive cars. Phantom breaking is really scary to me. I’d rather have full control of the car, than letting some system randomly emergency brake the car for no reason. ABS and ESP one can anticipate. ESP usually can even be turned off.

I am not working directly on this but as far as I understand phantom breaking was mostly a calibration issue with earlier versions of front radar AEB.
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