8 ms·
The Digital Transformation of Cars Is Just Beginning
- deepandmeaning 6y agoWow this is fascinating. Some random thoughts popped into my head. - Would this drive up the cost of these vehicles? - Is there likely to be a fundamental change in the way that these components are sourced, a move away from just in time? - Is this mirrored in other industries?
- mymythisisthis 6y agoIt wasn't until the 1980s that a passenger side door mirror became mandatory. I think that these will be replaced with camera. A camera is cheaper than a car mirror at this point. It'll make the car slightly more aerodynamic. Eventually a car maker will produce an economy car without a rear window. Glass is expensive. People just end up using the camera system anyway. It'll do better in a roll-over test, without the rear glass.
- bregma 6y agoI live in a place with an actual winter. You know, the kind with sub-freezing temperatures and thigh-deep snow cover for a significant part of the year. It is my experience that under such conditions external cameras on cars are useless. The optics are almost always obscured by some form of the weather or road hazard. I certainly don't want my life to depend on technology that only works in fair weather, since that's when I least need it.
- WestOaklandfan 6y agoThere are breakthroughs in short wave infrared cameras that could help in that situation. In the cold I think you'll appreciate not having glass windows, although that sounds unthinkable since we still put passenger windows in airplanes...
- mymythisisthis 6y agoI've driven some smaller, compact cars, and I swear the rear window was just decorative (small, obscured by the back seats). I can picture them being eliminated in some sub-compact hatchbacks.
- csours 6y agoIt is possible to add washers to cameras - some high end models already have them.
- bregma 6y agoThat sounds remarkably like Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" solution. The answer to the problem of you life depending on complex high-maintenance parts that do not operate under normal environmental and operation conditions is not to throw increasingly more complex and high-maintenance parts at it. Safety is not only for those willing to pay extra for it. The 737 MAX 8 should not be held up as an exemplar of good practice but as a stern warning.
- artonge 6y agoCan you elaborate please ? I am not sure how can a mirror be more expensive than a camera and a screen ?
- mymythisisthis 6y agoMost of the mirrors have several servo motors, to adjust them from within the car. Good quality glass is also expensive. Cameras have come down in price. Everybody now expects a cameras added to car anyway, so manufacturers are installing cameras and mirrors. At highway speeds they add drag to the car. Car manufacturers are trying to make their MPG seem low.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MisterTea 6y ago> A camera is cheaper than a car mirror at this point. It'll make the car slightly more aerodynamic. It also requires electronics, a screen, wires and electricity to operate. A rube goldberg contraption that can fail in any number of ways. While my existing boring low tech mirrors just reflects existing photons without any aforementioned nonsense. Just why?
- IshKebab 6y agoThere are already cars that use cameras instead of mirrors. I think the electric mini does.
- vcxy 6y agoMy first car was a 1991 Civic hatchback. It was not built with a passenger door mirror.
- nixass 6y agoHope I'm staying on topic. I hate to see such a huge influx of cars with touchscreen controls on the infotainment only. This should be banned and heavily regulated, nothing good can come out of it, same as we did with the phones while driving. Tesla is major example for this, such a bad design direction.
- WestOaklandfan 6y agoTesla wasn't the first. Perhaps you could argue the driver shouldn't be distracted with non critical information while driving. Personally, I feel like the snappiness and usability of the Tesla touchscreen is a net positive for safety.
- sneak 6y agoThere are hundreds of chips in cars related to the computers that control every major system in a modern vehicle, even in a system with only knobs and buttons without a touchscreen in sight. Modern vehicles are a network of ~20 different independent computer systems. The UI (regardless of touchscreen) is only one of them.
- rjsw 6y agoA Volvo S80 had over 30 independent computers (ECUs) twenty years ago, I have reprogrammed all of them on a car.
- Pelam 6y agoI’d like to hear more about the situation with integration. Like you know if you take a look at the innards of a 80s pc (say 286) it will be chock full of discrete ICs. Caches, bus controllers. Now its just a handful of chips plus tons of firmware. I find it strange that the number of features and sensors would so directly drive the number of semis. Maybe at first, but in the end a car will be a ”SoC” (or few) like everything else. What am I missing?
- csours 6y agoI think you may be able to integrate modules, and thus reduce ICs by having general compute rather than a module for each purpose (Engine Control/Transmission Control/Body Control etc); however, the sensors have to exist in physical form at distinct locations on the vehicle, and those sensors will require chips.
- zrobotics 6y agoDistance and RFI. A desktop PC can realistically connect everything on one PCB, whereas something the size of a car needs wires to connect everything. If you want to compare a car to a computer, the better analogy would be a LAN. A car being one chip makes as little sense as trying to hook up a whole office to one server, running all the display cables and USB for peripherals to one spot. Sure, it maybe could be done, but who wants to spend the money dragging all those wires vs one run of cat6? Same thing with cars. For instance, it isn't uncommon for the automatic window roll down feature to be implemented in the door itself. It's just easier to have more localized controllers that communicate over a network (CANBUS) than it is to run physical wiring to send every signal to where it needs to go. Sure, it isn't uncommon to have very underpowered machines on people's desks that don't do much more than drive a monitor and process keyboard input, but there still needs to be some sort of machine to connect those peripherals and send info over the network. This isn't that different from a car, this is exactly how there end up being 30+ different modules in a vehicle. Think of the automatic window roll down feature in the front passenger door. Thus relies on either sensing motor current or timing. It's way easier to throw a small microcontroller in there to accomplish this than run 20-30 feet of wiring in total to send all the signals back to one master controller. Wiring is way more expensive than most people realize, the wiring harness on a car is tremendously expensive to produce. Reducing wiring complexity saves enough money that it is easy to justify the engineering and BOM cost of an additional module.
- roel_v 6y agoI spend a good 10 mins staring at the figure just before the header "Electrification of Vehicles" (I wish the author had numbered his figures properly). I still don't really understand what this chart means or says. Can anyone explain?
- neogodless 6y agoThis is the source page of the graph[0]. The obvious parts are the progression of technology being added to cars over time, and the corresponding increase in cost. Some of the connectivity wasn't explained (V2I, V2V, V2P) but I assume Vehicle to Internet, Vehicle to Vehicle... OK I looked it up, and here's a full reference[1]. [0] https://www.eetimes.com/level-5-avs-unlikely-before-2035/ https://www.eetimes.com/level-5-avs-unlikely-before-2035/ [1] https://www.auto-talks.com/technology/v2x-wiki/ https://www.auto-talks.com/technology/v2x-wiki/
- marshmallow_12 6y agoThe Great Button Purge is continuing unchecked. In the future we will ask ourselves how we could be so foolish to exchange the wonderful tactility of buttons merely to have slightly cleaner and infinitely more frustrating cockpits. Other issues with computers in your car include annoying beeping noises and every once in a while the car thinks it knows how to drive better than you. (i'm not really being fair, without ABS i'd probably be toast by now)
- bradleyjg 6y agoIf we get level 3+ self driving cars, which seems fairly inevitable at this point, the importance of a UX that can be used without stealing the driver’s focus becomes much less important.
- marshmallow_12 6y agothat's not my point. For some reason having 3 dials that can control the whole climate system in the car, and which can be precisely configured in moments isn't enough. Instead we throw the dials away, and we must use an array of buttons, menus, clicker wheels and temperature readouts instead. why car manufacturers decided to go that way, i'm not sure.
- bonoboTP 6y agoProbably something to do with promotions and career incentives. You need to design something novel and complex to demonstrate your value to the company and move ahead. Simply leaving things as they were doesn't demonstrate that you're actively creating new stuff as a project manager/engineer/designer. Also these designs tend to look good and futuristic and innovative on PowerPoint slides and tend to impress higher ups. Similar to how introducing new tech and new dependencies, complicated architectures etc. in a software project seems to be rewarded as long as you jump ship quickly enough before the mess you created blows up.
- agumonkey 6y agoIt's following smartphone culture. They're not made to phone and it takes efforts and time to call someone. Market dynamics for you. The thing is I'm sure if you try to sell buttons to customer your sales will be lower.
- coldtea 6y agoI'd day the "irrelevance of cars" as most will work from home (and many will have no work to go to) is just beginning... Actually it's already on going, with less interest in car ownership in the 21st century, the advent of Uber and similar services, and renewed interest in modern public transportation, at least from countries that progress to the future (like China, India, and so on), not from countries that cling to the past and let their infrastructure deteriorate (US but also common in Europe, where several countries are basically shells of their 19th/20th century self, infrastructure, geo-politically, and demographics wise).
- chadlavi 6y agoI'll keep my dumb car thanks