4 ms·

I’m not trying to convince you, but the a-ha moment for me was when I was watching George talk about reverse-engineering the firmware for part of the cruise con

I’m not trying to convince you, but the a-ha moment for me was when I was watching George talk about reverse-engineering the firmware for part of the cruise control in his car, and after decompiling it, he found that there was no functionality for the manufacturer to verify that the firmware had been written properly when flashed by the manufacturer. So just because a big, expensive car company made something, doesn’t mean there is any redundancy or cross-checking. By the way, the only cars you can install OpenPilot onto are cars that already have lane keeping assist (i.e. a camera that watches the lines) and adaptive cruise control (i.e. a millimeter wave radar that makes sure you don’t get too close to the car in front of you). So OpenPilot is just a vastly improved version of the software that those guys who didn’t write a firmware checksum routine wrote.

taneq 7y ago
Oh, I'm not saying car companies are perfect and I'm well aware that the way the sausage gets made is nowhere as rigorous as we'd like (just take the Toyota unintended acceleration debacle!) I'm just saying I wouldn't add on top of that something that's essentially a phone app. If nothing else, injecting stuff into your car's critical data bus seems like a bad idea. What if that less-than-carefully-written firmware you're talking about gets tripped up by a malformed CAN packet (which it would otherwise never have encountered) and fails in some fatal way?
- jerkstate 7y ago
  On the other hand, maybe I lowered the chance of that happening by removing my stock LKAS system. I believe your implicit argument is that the manufacturer and the subcontractors and integrators who made the stock vehicle have a lower defect rate than the OpenPilot engineers, which I’m not sure if there’s any data to support.
  - ma2rten 7y ago
    A lot more people drive the stock version than the OpenPilot one. All else being equal, it's more likely that OpenPilot has a serious bug than the stock system.
- mavhc 7y ago
  While it was revealed at the Toyota software was terrible, was it actually shown to be the cause of the acceleration problems? Mostly it was the floor mats and people hitting the wrong pedal.
  - taneq 7y ago
    I don't know if they ever proved beyond possible doubt that any particular incident was caused by a software bug, but they did show that there were myriad ways in which the software in question could cause the acceleration problems. (In particular the process which handled reading the accelerator pedal position could crash and leave the throttle value fixed without tripping the watchdog timer, which iirc was doubly bad because in push-to-start vehicles there was no key to turn off.) Source: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... More: https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and-unintended-acceleration/ https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toy...

taneq 7y ago

Oh, I'm not saying car companies are perfect and I'm well aware that the way the sausage gets made is nowhere as rigorous as we'd like (just take the Toyota unintended acceleration debacle!) I'm just saying I wouldn't add on top of that something that's essentially a phone app. If nothing else, injecting stuff into your car's critical data bus seems like a bad idea. What if that less-than-carefully-written firmware you're talking about gets tripped up by a malformed CAN packet (which it would otherwise never have encountered) and fails in some fatal way?

jerkstate 7y ago
On the other hand, maybe I lowered the chance of that happening by removing my stock LKAS system. I believe your implicit argument is that the manufacturer and the subcontractors and integrators who made the stock vehicle have a lower defect rate than the OpenPilot engineers, which I’m not sure if there’s any data to support.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  A lot more people drive the stock version than the OpenPilot one. All else being equal, it's more likely that OpenPilot has a serious bug than the stock system.
mavhc 7y ago
While it was revealed at the Toyota software was terrible, was it actually shown to be the cause of the acceleration problems? Mostly it was the floor mats and people hitting the wrong pedal.
- taneq 7y ago
  I don't know if they ever proved beyond possible doubt that any particular incident was caused by a software bug, but they did show that there were myriad ways in which the software in question could cause the acceleration problems. (In particular the process which handled reading the accelerator pedal position could crash and leave the throttle value fixed without tripping the watchdog timer, which iirc was doubly bad because in push-to-start vehicles there was no key to turn off.) Source: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... More: https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toyota-and-unintended-acceleration/ https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toy...