31 ms·

Software is eating the car

• seltzered_ 5y ago
  bad link, should be: https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/advanced-cars/software-eating-car https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/adv...
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code has always bloated. Damn. I just want a car with as FEW knobs/buttons/levers as necessary. Literally: make it as simple as possible. Like an golf cart! Is anyone else out there with me? I feel like Walter from The Big Lebowski regarding this: has everyone just gone crazy?
  • paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Cars like Microsoft Word have a broad feature set because needs are broad. For those of us who want reliable, inexpensive, self service-able transportation there are fewer choices. My guess is because the majority are entranced by sexier things: smart features, driver assist, and safety features of dubious quality.
    • germinalphrase 5y ago
      For what it’s worth, my base model Honda ticks those boxes.
    • mulmen 5y ago
      What safety features are of dubious quality? Do you have some examples?
      • paulryanrogers 5y ago
        I was thinking of Tesla's not full "full self driving" and things like auto park.
      • Pokepokalypse 5y ago
        THREE, Takata airbag recalls on a single vehicle.
  • vannevar 5y ago
    Glad to hear I'm not the only one who wants a dumb car. Unfortunately, the idea of electric cars has become bound up with the notion of software-driven cars. I want an electric car with analog controls, no touch screens or over-the-air updates, and minimal software. A car that I feel like I own, rather than one I'm getting a click-through license to use.
    • zippergz 5y ago
      1000% agree. I do not want a car that is a smartphone on wheels and I have no idea why so many people find this attractive.
      • arpyzo 5y ago
        I own a 2014 Subaru Impreza and my brother in-law a 2017. I've driven both extensively. Sometime during those years, Subaru switched from knobs and levers to a touchscreen and the controls are so much worse! 1. The controls on the 2014 are obvious, easy to find, and my choices are readily apparent. In the 2017 I have to search for them and often guess their meanings. If I'm actively driving, I just give up because it's too distracting. 2. The controls are not as responsive. Sometimes there's a lag. Sometimes they don't respond at all. 3. There are bugs with the digital controls that simply don't exist in the analog versions. As an example in the 2017 the radio turns on every time the car gets started regardless of if it was on when the car was turned off.
        • patpending 5y ago
          I have a similar problem with my 2017 Pacifica that replaced my 2005 Voyager. Using the touch screen to control the heat and air-conditioning is extremely slow in the Pacifica, and you can't do it without looking at the screen which can't be used with gloves. There are physical buttons and knobs for a few of the controls, but it seems that they're just talking to the same software as the touch-screen, so they're just as slow to respond. Adjusting the heat without looking at the touch-screen is pretty much impossible. IMO the touch screen should not be used to control any aspect of the car's operation. It should only be for phone, navigation, backup camera, and entertainment.
  • carlosf 5y ago
    I used to have a car before moving closer to a metro area and going full Uber. It was a cheap Renault. Malfunctioned twice in ten years. Repair was trivial both times. Sometimes I think about having a car again, but the sort of stuff you described makes me super nervous.
    • nogridbag 5y ago
      I used to live in NYC and bought a disposable car. It was a used rental car that was rear ended, but otherwise brand new with less than 1000 miles on it. I owned it for 5 years with zero issues and I just traded it in for almost the same price I paid for it.
  • frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Check out Bollinger electric trucks. No screens at all; even the battery gauge is analogue.
    • mortenjorck 5y ago
      I was quite impressed with how bare-bones the B1 looks, and figured it must be priced competitively. I was less impressed to see it starts at three times the base price of the Cybertruck.
    • i80and 5y ago
      Bollinger is extremely cool and I watched them with great interest for a while, but their initial estimates of ~$60k turned into $125,000 along with the short highway range puts it solidly into the "wealthy person's weekend toy" category.
      • colordrops 5y ago
        The range is the death of these vehicles. Otherwise they look great.
  • BigTuna 5y ago
    I don't mind complexity but what I can't stand is having to access that complexity through touchscreens. Without the tactile feedback of a knob or button I have to take my attention off the road to see where I need to press on the screen. That's a major step backwards in auto safety, IMO. And don't get me started on the lazy manufacturer design trend of bolting a tablet to the dashboard and calling it a day.
    • MengerSponge 5y ago
      Mazda doesn't get nearly enough respect for their work identifying and correcting this issue. https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... Touchscreens/touch panels are shiny, futuristic, dangerous, dumb, and cheap. Manufacturers use them because they lower BOM costs, at the expense of usability and safety. Vote with your wallet folks.
      • galangalalgol 5y ago
        Mazda would make a great EV, but that is sadly not on their roadmap for the foreseeable future. I have been told this is probably an influence from Toyota's large share ownership, not wanting competition in that space.
        • fighterpilot 5y ago
          That's not smart by Toyota (unless they own a very small stake), is it? Mazda competing with Toyota is indeed bad for Toyota but it's also bad for all the other auto manufacturers too. The benefit of that competition goes exclusively to Toyota (among other shareholders) but the cost is shared among all automakers roughly in proportion to their EV market share.
          • InitialBP 5y ago
            Mazda has been focused on continuing to improve internal combustion engines over the past couple of decades. Specifically, the "Skyactiv" technology they developed was built to help improve efficiency and emissions of modern ICE engines. It's likely Toyota wanted to have some group/company (like Mazda) continue working on improving ICE engines while also investing in EVs. I think ICE vehicles will continue to have a market, especially in very remote areas of the world where power grids are non-existent or not very reliable.
  • bobajeff 5y ago
    Yeah, I like the tech behind Tesla but am turned off by. 1) The large, distracting screen in the front of the car. 2) The subscription model of the car's firmware. If electric cars ever become widespread I hope I can find a used one engineered without that stuff. Otherwise I may have to stop buying cars.
    • Koshkin 5y ago
      > If electric cars ever become widespread I have a strong suspicion that soon enough after that we will be able to build electric cars from kits, cheap and with no frills. We are on a cusp of a new technological revolution.
      • itsoktocry 5y ago
        >soon enough after that we will be able to build electric cars from kits I'm skeptical. An internal combustion engine is a complicated, engineering marvel. But a complete engine, as a unit, isn't difficult to remove/insert. It's big, heavy and awkward, sure (so are electric motors and batteries), but an experienced person can do an engine swap in a couple of hours. And yet there aren't many people building ICE cars from kits. Why not? Because the drivetrain is only one part of what makes a good car good.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • userbinator 5y ago
          And yet there aren't many people building ICE cars from kits. Why not? Quite frankly, speaking as someone who is a bit of an automotive enthusiast, you'll probably find even less EVs, because EVs are sterile and boring. They can definitely be fast, but I suspect the average auto enthusiast is not only interested in speed. The sounds and smells of an ICE are far more appealing to the type of people who tend to build custom cars.
        • kingsuper20 5y ago
          I think it would be a cool idea on a vintage car, but is still too expensive.
  • LinuxBender 5y ago
    I'm with you. I will not buy a vehicle of any kind that is sending telemetry or tracking without my express written consent. This includes ICE cars made after 2018 that may have ODB3 and send GPS, emission, speed and other data to 3rd parties. I accept that I will be paying a premium to keep older vehicles running. I am about to donate my old truck to a charity and will get a less old truck after I leave California.
    • e40 5y ago
      > This includes ICE cars made after 2018 that have ODB3 and send GPS, emission, speed and other data to 3rd parties. I googled for this and could find no info. Please give a reference for this claim.
      • LinuxBender 5y ago
        In fact all the links to forums discussing this appear to have been wiped from Google and Bing. Perhaps this topic is off limits for now. I can still find the older articles talking about privacy concerns, but the forums where people were explaining how to disable it have vanished.
      • mardifoufs 5y ago
        > > This includes ICE cars made after 2018 that have ODB3 and send GPS, emission, speed and other data to 3rd parties. > I googled for this and could find no info. Please give a reference for this claim. I can't even seem to find any reference to odb 3 existing at all in the first place. So yeah any link would be very much appreciated
        • xxpor 5y ago
          I'd assume they meant OBD3 http://straighttalkautomotive.com/articles/have-you-heard-of-%20obd-iii.html http://straighttalkautomotive.com/articles/have-you-heard-of... It's mostly about surfacing the codes via a screen in the car instead of having a generic check engine light and needing an external scanner. As far as I can tell, it was never mandated. Most posts about it are from ~2011.
  • cylon13 5y ago
    I agree with you about wanting a car without pointless stuff bolted on. When it comes to the things required to actually move the car, there's an interesting inverse relationship between visible levers and internal complexity though. Each lever removed is moving complexity from your brain to some physical system. Like an automatic transmission removes the gear shift and adds the more complex automatic transmission. In the limit, one can imagine the "simplest" interface of a virtually empty self-driving pod, which of course is actually an extremely complex system.
  • politelemon 5y ago
    Hey I'm with you. Not just in cars but for gadgets around the home. Coffee makers, microwaves, fridges, thermostats. Please give me as few moving parts as possible, the consequences of decisions made outside my control are a huge unknown with potentially large impacts.
  • giantrobot 5y ago
    I'm definitely in the same boat wrt complexity. My pickup has just enough extra electronics to be a quality of life improvement over a model that lacked those features. It doesn't try to drive for me and second guess my actions in unexpected ways. It doesn't give me unfathomable warning beeps that only serve as a distraction trying to figure out what's causing the beep. At the same time it's important to recognize there's a difference between software bloat and growth. Security fixes often cause code to grow (checks, verifications, etc). That growth isn't bloat. The previous version of the software was exploitable because it lacked the checks that were added. Adding drivers or better handling edge cases in drivers grows code but isn't bloat. Even "bloat" that's only added on-disk size (a secret Tetris game in some code) that doesn't affect normal code flow isn't the same as bloat as adding some advertising telemetry in the middle of a critical code path. Not all code growth is bloat and not all bloat is equal.
  • andrewia 5y ago
    If you want the simplest car possible, you can look at models designed to sell in volume worldwide. I'm talking the Hyundai Venue crossover, Hyundai Accent subcompact sedan, Honda Fit/Jazz hatchback (recently discontinued for the US), Ford EcoSport crossover, etc. They are designed to be serviced in poor conditions. They will tolerate removal of electronics like the infotainment because some countries' base models have simpler configurations. In the case of the Honda Fit, the climate control dials physically move the ducts! And repair documentation and parts will be plentiful because there's a large market for parts suppliers to compete. Also look at body-on-frame fleet vehicles like a base Ford Ranger or F-150, but be ready to forgo stuff like cruise control. There are EV equivalents too, like the Chevy Bolt and Hyundai Kona EV that offer range in the 200s of miles with make driver assists as an optional upgrade. Even with complicated powertrain electronics, EVs are still more reliable than ICE cars because any iffy software is made up for by lack of mechanical parts. The repair procedure is the same as mechnical parts - just swap the faulty part out for a working one, and the "upstream" supplier will probably take the broken module to reflash software or frankenstein together half-working PCBs to make another refurbished module to sell. If you're worried about remote compromise, it's pretty easy to avoid IMO. Open the dashboard and yank the cellular antenna, and never pair the infotainment to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (or just yank the 2.4 GHz antenna). Those are basically the only avenues for wireless attacks into a vehicle unless you count the TPMS and key fob radios, which seem too simple and low-bandwidth to offer an attack surface. And if an attacker can access your car's physical ports, they could already attack you in other ways like by weakening the brake lines. Other new electronics, like MOSFETS instead of relays in the BCM, have actually made the car more reliable so they should be fine. Other newly standard features like blind spot monitoring are (1) solid state, so they won't fail often and (2) tolerate failure or complete removal.
    • numpad0 5y ago
      It’s so wrong that tech inclined wants cheapest models for the reason that those are objectively better. The entire car industry is going to go iPhone all over again.
      • jfengel 5y ago
  • olivermarks 5y ago
    https://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40 https://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40 - convert a sturdy long lasting pre connectivity/phone home car as asap while you still can!
  • Dumblydorr 5y ago
    I wouldn't want anything resembling a golf cart, but in principle yes! Tesla has an OK idea of minimal dashboard, but then a less OK idea of tons of features on the screen. I don't know if automaticity or app based control or minimized function is the answer, but less is more to my eyes.
  • cosmodisk 5y ago
    As in one the Top Gear episodes, where the user manual for S class Mercedes is thicker than a book on English History...
  • dusted 5y ago
    Hear, hear! As a software developer, I'll take a car without a computer, or with as little computing as possible any day! I do understand that fuel injection and abs are great stuff, but those could be ultra low cost asics, and, frankly, computing need not apply anywhere else.
  • jrwoodruff 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure the TJ-era wranglers (1997-2006), and the Cherokee of the same period hit a sweet spot. Dead simple, no frills, durable as hell, utilitarian but not uncomfortable. Everything after that is continual bloat - bigger overall size, more luxury options, more technology in general. But that's what people want - luxury, comfort, safety... I get it, but I love the experience of my TJ.
    • cbHXBY1D 5y ago
      I love my '99 Cherokee (XJ) for this reason. Hopefully it never dies. Doug DeMuro explains why people love the XJ for its simplicity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3STMfI_PS4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3STMfI_PS4Q
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    I'd like if the entire car "computer" was socketed and could easily be tinkered with, upgraded, or left empty.
  • temporallobe 5y ago
    Car guy here. Yeah, I’m with you. My favorite car was a ‘96 Tercel with mechanical steering and a 4-speed manual. It even had manual roll-up windows. It had less than 100 HP, but it was simple as hell to operate, very fun to drive, cheap to maintain, and extremely reliable up until I sold it with nearly 400k miles on the odo. I put an aftermarket stereo and speakers in it and I was set. Only reason I sold it was because my wife hated it and a friend needed a cheap reliable car for his idiot son who proceeded to neglect and destroy it quickly after taking possession. Modern cars are absolutely terrible in the UX department, but they are a hell of a lot safer, so there’s that.
    • jrwoodruff 5y ago
      Those mid 90s Japanese sedans were awesome. Relatively compact overall, zippy little 4 cylinders engines and manual transmissions. I had an Accord from that era, and loved driving my dads nerdy-as-hell Nissan Sentra. That car was shockingly fun to drive.
      • GeorgeTirebiter 5y ago
        I still drive my '94 Lexus. California is kind in that way.
      • throaway46546 5y ago
        92 Civic owner here. Love my car.
      • beckingz 5y ago
        Mid 90s Accords were incredibly long lasting.
      • dzhiurgis 5y ago
        Just sold my 1990 Bluebird. Didn't pass warrant of fitness, but otherwise drove amazingly well.
      • tim333 5y ago
        1990 mx5 still going! It's a good car though a little rust. The only thing I miss from more modern cars is the engines are a bit more efficient in modern ones - more power less fuel. Re electronics the sound system and sat nav (iphone) are boxes you tack on and don't have to be part of the car.
  • _benj 5y ago
    I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope just because we have two more industries that have gone the same transitions, aeronautical and aerospace. Back in the day airplanes where just knobs and levers, and we didn't have the reliability that safety that we have today. With aerospace, I mean, software engineering as a discipline started with aerospace! If we write "starup code" (i.e. CRUD web app) for cars we'd still be in huge trouble, but if the automotive industry can adopt the redundant systems, enforce VERY high levels of software testing, and other practices for those other industries I think we could see some interesting things coming from the industry
    • numpad0 5y ago
      I don’t want to imagine how Program Alarm 1202 looks like on a SpaceX Starship running Chromium instances on Intel Atom, the latter half of which is how they’re planning to do it.
      • jaywalk 5y ago
        The stuff running inside Chromium on Intel Atom processors is not mission critical.
    • jsight 5y ago
      > I have a more optimist view about the industry being able to cope TBH, I have similarly optimistic views, but for completely different reasons. The truth is, the worldview has changed completely in the past 100 years. In the old days, if you failed at operating a saw, you hurt yourself badly. Now we slowly are starting to expect sawstop and other solutions to reduce injury. The same thing is happening in cars. We no longer expect perfection of the human as we augment them in various ways to both reduce the frequency and severity of collision. Its the early days yet, and its very much the "startup code" mindset with cars having way more bugs than its ever but also producing safer outcomes. Car software is getting worse, but we're better off for it.
    • scarier 5y ago
      I'm sure you didn't mean it quite so bluntly, but characterizing the history of aviation safety as a triumph of computer control systems over analog ones misses the mark by a pretty wide margin--even if we're just talking about the advances that only computers have provided. Probably the only way a modern car is technologically less sophisticated than a passenger aircraft is its inability to substantially steer itself (and this problem is orders of magnitude more difficult for cars than planes). A lot of the systems we take for granted in our cars (ECU, ABS/stability control, adaptive cruise control, steer-by-wire, OBD) were pioneered in the aviation industry, and both industries' safety records have been massively improved by the ability to do digital design/analysis (CAD, FEA, CFD, etc). Then once you start talking about advances in computer-aided manufacturing and QC/QA processes, training, failure analysis, human-machine interaction... One of my perennial frustrations with current tech is the idea that putting a computer in the control loop necessarily makes things safer.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    So what are the odds of some car pieces moving towards dark mirror episode where a car had a modular solar panel charger? I know what the tendency is now ( lock everything up and sell any telemetry ), but could that happen?
  • Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    some of us do not trust automatic transmissions.
  • ghostpepper 5y ago
    As an embedded software person who is also into cars, I am definitely going to be looking for something older for my next car. I have the luxury of not needing to drive it every day, but I like the idea of something I have at least a hope of repairing myself when it breaks.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • tima101 5y ago
    "Has the whole world gone CRAZY?"
    • watt 5y ago
      There's some amount of entitlement in that exclamation, though. The world, I feel, does not actually owe you to make any sense, or move in any predictable, safe pattern. The world will shift, and leave you behind. Feeling resentful about that is just unproductive. (To take a slightly trolling tone, can you imagine how a lot of racists (BLM) must feel? Or religious fundamentalists, homophobes feel (gay marriage). The world does not owe them anything.)
  • gilbetron 5y ago
    One of our cars is a 2004 Toyota Tacoma with everything analog except the radio, and I vastly prefer it. If it just had a usb plug so I could play music from my phone, it would be ideal. Oh, and oddly, the radio doesn't have a clock. Bizarre. It I can 100% everything better than our 2016 Subaru Outback with it's annoying touch screen console. Plus my nieces and nephews are amused by the actual manual window openers.
    • toyyodas82727 5y ago
      Try popping in an aftermarket radio/stereo - you can get a nice Pioneer with a USB fast-charge port and Bluetooth/etc for ~$100-150.
    • kajecounterhack 5y ago
      FWIW Subaru kinda just has crappy digital components. Corresponding touch screen console from recent year Toyotas are pretty good, especially with CarPlay / Android Auto.
      • drivers99 5y ago
        In my recent Subaru Impreza, CarPlay works just fine, however when I start the engine and put it in reverse, it will mostly ignore the volume control until you finish backing up and then a few second after you shift into drive/forward, it will then process the volume up/down messages it received in the meantime. It's like it dedicates all processing to booting up the screen and then in displaying the rear-view/backup camera. Also, it defaults to playing the radio (even if you had it OFF before, I think), so if you had the volume up for a quiet podcast or something it will blast the radio which is quite annoying, especially if you're in the middle of a phone call or something. I want a physical potentiometer which directly controls the amplifier to the speakers, like in any normal old radio. (This is also one of the exhibits in my mental list of reasons that people should write all the software they run on their devices. Or at least be able to.)
        • saltcured 5y ago
          I don't think it's bogged down processing. It is explicitly muting the audio as part of the reversing protocol to avoid distractions, and possibly to let you hear other sounds such as from a parking assistance system.
  • sharkweek 5y ago
    I would prefer a car that is almost entirely mechanical because mechanics make way more sense to me than software. The old crusty mechanic I take my 20+ year old 4Runner to for service complains about this a lot. Cars don’t make nearly as much sense to him as they used to. Just to be clear, I appreciate improved safety that technology brings to cars, and I know I can’t have it both ways.
    • bob1029 5y ago
      The biggest thing for me is user input latency. It doesnt matter if its a computer, a microwave, or a car. I want to feel like the machine is not a lazy piece of shit and actually wants to help me. I know it sounds like a pedantic annoyance, but that little bit of step-wise discrete behavior I get out of my electronic throttle body right at the threshold of activation is one of the most infuriating things about owning an otherwise "sporty" car. It's not defective either. This is the cost of doing business with a totally-unnecessary software control loop. I find that mechanical linkages usually have zero fucking latency, infinite resolution, and are much preferable to my monkey brain. Fly-by-wire is a huge mistake.
      • ggreer 5y ago
        Are you sure that's not something else like inertia in various mechanical parts or engine tuning? Maybe it sacrifices responsiveness at low RPM for better emissions or better performance at high revs. There's certainly no need for the software side of things to be laggy or discrete. Also have you tried an electric car? You might be impressed. EVs may have more software, but they don't have nearly as many physical constraints on responsiveness. They don't have to wait for an engine to suck in more air. They don't have to overcome the inertia of pistons and rods and flywheels and clutch discs and long driveshafts. It's just instant torque. Compared to my Model 3, every internal combustion vehicle feels like it has turbo lag.
    • smolder 5y ago
      You can't have high tech safety features without high tech, but you can limit the complexity of electronics, software, and in-car networking to a bare minimum, which is arguably not even being attempted, at least in some markets.
  • jrsj 5y ago
    No you’re not crazy at all; my preference for a vehicle would be analog everything with as few electronic components as possible. Even if it were an EV.
    • muxator 5y ago
      Digital components may well be more reliable than corresponding analog ones. They can also be purely hw, with no sw or just a simple firmware. There is a middle ground between analog circuits and a general purpose programmable computer with windows 10 on it. :)
  • 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    "Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container." - Nathan Myhrvold
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • geocrasher 5y ago
    This is the very reason I drive a 1988 Suburban. The mileage isn't good, but it's not worse than most modern SUV's.
  • notjes 5y ago
    Having a cheap, dumb car that you can repair yourself would destroy like 100m jobs.
  • amelius 5y ago
    > I just want a car with as FEW knobs/buttons/levers as necessary. With more software you can have a car with just one button. You press it and say the name of the place you want to go to.
  • Swizec 5y ago
    You should get a Catheram, exactly the kind of car you’re talking about.
  • wyager 5y ago
    Cars are legally required to have infotainment systems (for the backup camera) by NHTSA safety regulations. We’re fucked.
    • SilverRed 5y ago
      This is GOOD. Drivers run over children so frequently that they need this system. We should not be putting drivers in a machine they can not safely operate.
    • jeegsy 5y ago
      My '12 Tundra had the backup screen in the rearview mirror. A huge innovation to me at the time. Everything else was knobs and buttons on the dash like yesteryear. That truck was awesome. A shame I had to give it up!
  • rm445 5y ago
    Well that's two different things. Intrinsic versus extrinsic complexity. The user experience may get simpler again, but the technology inside is likely to get more complex. Electrification might mean simpler mechanisms and fewer moving parts, but the software will get ever more complicated. Now in a way it's usually a good thing, if all the complexity of something is hidden and users can treat it as though it's simple. But we'd probably all agree that extra complexity in software that can kill us if it goes wrong is worrying. The only way we know to write safe software is to make it as simple as possible, and write it slowly and expensively. SIL-rated software has already reached the automotive sector. But it seems like the sheer demand to make cars more complex (especially for self-driving) will outrun our ability to make them safe.
  • madengr 5y ago
    Here here. I was looking just yesterday to see if a John Deere Gator (or equivalent) is street legal. The answer is yes, with a few parts. https://www.sidebysidestuff.com/john-deere-gator-utility-street-legal-dot-approval-stuff.html https://www.sidebysidestuff.com/john-deere-gator-utility-str... I want my 87’ Toyota pickup back with it’s solid state ignition and carburetor. It’s been down hill since then.
  • dzhiurgis 5y ago
    I guess Renault Zoe or Wuling Hong Guang Mini EV mostly ticks your boxes
  • cmurf 5y ago
    It's what every industry does. It thinks it's creating value by having more features, when in reality it's just creating more jobs. More middle people who each want a cut.
  • holoduke 5y ago
    Buy a 15 year old car. Our family car is a 2003 Infiniti fx35. Got everything we need. Bluetooth aftermarket adapter from AliExpress and i feel modern as any other car.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • foobiekr 5y ago
    Being as good as the desktop experience would be amazing. Realistically it will be much, much worse than the desktop experience because the auto companies are far, far worse at software than even 1990s Microsoft. You are talking about an industry where OTA updates are considered a major and challenging technology and multiple instances of bricking have occurred.
    • bbarnett 5y ago
      True but no one can secure anything. Therefore, the last thing I want is a network enabled car. I have my phone for that.
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    regarding simple cars. I think it's a damn shame that the opportunity for truly simple cars isn't occurring with the advent of mass market EVs. I suppose that ever-increasing safety concerns will push for cars that are more complex.
  • betwixthewires 5y ago
    I drive an old car partly for this reason. I've never had a car younger than 10 years old. My previous reasoning when I was younger was that I don't want to deal with the inspection requirements that come with OBD2 cars. Now I'm not so much worried about that with all the extra nonsense they're putting into them. My favorite car ever was older than I was, I loved it, an old ramcharger with power windows. My current one has some "modern" archaic crap in it that was all the rage when it was built, it's GM so it has the OnStar buttons in the rear view mirror that are useless, along with complementary antenna on the roof. It's stock stereo controlled the alarm, it has all sorts of compartments that are nowadays mostly useless and IMO just an excuse to cram something in every spot. A lot of the "features" are just dead fads. The seats have lumbar shit in them and warm up. The warmer is useful in the winter I guess. Still with the bloat it is significantly better than the Frankensteins that commercials have convinced people they need nowadays. My next car is either going to be a ~1995 4runner or a ~1994 diesel f-350 that I build myself. I do miss the corner windows.
  • midhhhthrow 5y ago
    I’m so glad you posted this. I thought I was the only one
  • pgreenwood 5y ago
    I'm reminded of the joke "If Microsoft Made Cars" from the 90s. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pnw/microsoftjoke.htm And 25 years later here we are... ' For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics: 1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day. 2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car. 3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this. 4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine. 5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads. 6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light. 7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying. 8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna. 9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car. 10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off." '
    • elihu 5y ago
      ...and the hood would be welded shut at the factory.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      Ha, I remember this! Also, I have a strange feeling that this may end up reality instead of parody.
  • rhizome 5y ago
    As someone pointed out the other day on a somewhat unrelated topic, luxury cars don't have touchscreens or Tesla TVs. They are bad for driving. Dangerous, even.
  • FpUser 5y ago
    >"I just want a car with as FEW knobs/buttons/levers as necessary." I also want "dumb" car. Not completely dumb but say the equivalent of ones released before 2010.
  • hellbannedguy 5y ago
    My dad bought one new car in the 90's. It was a Dodge Dakota. He demanded a free Service manual from the salesman. Conversation with my dad in my car after the sale. Son---I demanded a Service manual because that truck has a computer, and I don't like computers. Always ask for a Service manual. (The salesman would probally laugh if you requested a Service manual today.) Son---I'll put in my own stereo. That overpriced factory cd player is a waste of money. Son---power windows are just something that will break at the wrong time. If I ever get to the age I can't physically roll down a window; shot me. Different time?
  • nanis 5y ago
    > Damn. I just want a car with as FEW knobs/buttons/levers as necessary. In 2005, there was a huge publicity campaign to make cameras mandatory in cars on the basis motivated by some parents driving over their toddlers playing in the driveway. Of course, there are many rather more straightforward solutions to that problem. Given the fact that such parents must be in a rather select group, I doubted having cameras would prevent other sources of injury to their children even if they prevented parents from moving them down. Now, auto manufacturers had to put a camera in every car[1]. Yes, the requirement took effect in 2018, but the manufacturers knew it was coming. So, you have a screen in the car. In addition, there is the temptation to monitor and collect information. You can sell that to insurers as "anonymized" data. Etc etc. You can enhance the tracking dimensions a lot if you can also get to track all the other stuff people do. Offer them the honey of pairing their phones with the entertainment system, and, boom. > 221 people were killed by non-traffic (not on public roads) backover crashes in 2007, and 14,000 people were injured.[1] Given that the value of a statistical life is about $10 million, if the backup camera eliminates all such deaths and injuries, its benefit is about $5 billion. Conveniently, we do not know how many fatalities and injuries have been caused by trying to change stations or select tracks on a touch screen. So, on the cost side, we are stuck with the cost of all the equipment, software development, bug tracking, and, above it all, the annoyance of having to live with all this additional equipment one cannot avoid for the foreseeable future. Here are sample stories: * https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/over-in-an-instant/article/How-can-this-happen-4833168.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/over-in-an-instant/art... * https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/12/nyregion/2yearold-run-over-by-fathers-suv-is-back-from-the-brink-of-death.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/12/nyregion/2yearold-run-ove... * https://www.kidsandcars.org/how-kids-get-hurt/backovers/ https://www.kidsandcars.org/how-kids-get-hurt/backovers/ * ... Ah, the Houston Chronicle stories has this nugget: > A cost-benefit analysis, required as part of the rule-making process, put the cost of each life saved at up to $19.7 million. It's all for the children. How there you object? [1]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/20612/rearview-cameras-are-now-required-on-all-new-cars-sold-in-the-u-s https://www.thedrive.com/news/20612/rearview-cameras-are-now...
  • drbawb 5y ago
    I'm with you on this one. I think perhaps my favorite car interface to date is my '01 Camry. Let's look at the HVAC system: Three knobs: temperature, speed, vent selection. Three buttons: a/c, recirc, rear defroster. That's it. The entire system. It's a 20 year old design at this point. I have never once thought that I, a mere mortal, could improve on the design in any meaningful way. The buttons and knobs are big enough that I can work them w/ my huge gloves on, I do not need special gloves that work w/ a touchscreen, the buttons are not context sensitive, and I can hit all the controls in the dark without even looking. Another point, which I've now learned I had taken for granted, is that no software update will ever mess w/ my muscle memory. Those switches cannot be programmed to do anything else in software, as they're physically wired to the functions they control. The beauty of the system above is that the physical controls are the state machine. I can literally feel the state the HVAC system is in. Nowadays that state machine is all in software, and I have to hunt through menus, look at a display, sometimes multiple displays, just to figure out what state I left the system in. That's just unacceptable.
    • saltcured 5y ago
      I once drove a Volvo from the late 1970s with almost the same interface except one better: the air conditioning was a knob rather than a button, so I could select how "hard" the compressor functioned independently of the thermostat slider for the heater core and the slider for air routing. It meant I could dial in how much dehumidification I wanted while running heat in the winter and using recirculate to keep out some of the nasty truck exhaust and dust from sanded mountain roads.
  • markbnj 5y ago
    Two months ago I sold a dead-simple Toyota truck I'd driven for 14 years and bought a new, loaded Honda. The difference in the complexity is of course astonishing. The yota didn't even have usb. You could climb into the engine compartment and sit there. The Honda has pretty much everything a modern car can have, and you can't even see empty space in the engine compartment. I _could_ get on your "just give me simple" bandwagon. A part of me was proud of the low-tech, rusty durability of the Toyota, I admit it. Still, I'll also admit I like most of what the Honda can do. I like the phone integration and that I can toss it down on a pad and it will charge while I drive. I like that the wipers, headlights and high beams all activate when needed without input from me. I like that it remembers my seat and mirror settings and restores them when I enter the car. I like keyless entry and remote start. I like the backup camera. I like adaptive cruise control, collision mitigation braking, and lane keeping assist. I like torque vectoring all wheel drive. Heated and ventilated seats are awesome. Of course, if I were to try to keep this car for 14 years I might regret it, I don't know. Honda makes good cars but there's a boatload of stuff to break, lol. I think I might be better advised to trade it in at five years or so, but I do like the tricks it can do.
    • toast0 5y ago
      > high beams all activate when needed without input from me. Not a hard trick since high beams are almost never needed. Only to tell people it's their turn to go at the 4-way. They're only marginally more useful than fog lights.
      • tim333 5y ago
        Depends where you live. In the city yeah. On country roads with no street lights though they are good.
      • markbnj 5y ago
        I'm not sure that the difficulty of performing a trick is related to its utility, and it doesn't really make sense to compare the usefulness of high beams and foglamps since they are indicated in completely different situations. Foglamps are mounted low and are usually yellow and meant to illuminate the road surface in heavy fog. High beams are counterproductive in fog.
  • skocznymroczny 5y ago
    Depends on your definition of a simple car. Manual transmission is simple and requires little to no software, but it's not simple for the end-user. Automatic transmission is simple for the end-user but involves a lot of software behind to make it work smoothly.
  • textman 5y ago
    <has everyone just gone crazy? > Absolutely: Ford logged 100k preorders for the F150 Lightning https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-f150-lightning-electric-preorders-100000-2021-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-f150-lightning-electric... This truck is so software bloated.
  • kazinator 5y ago
    In a parking spot, I never turn the steering wheel without the car moving forward or backwards. It's bad for the tires. But what drove the lesson home for me (pardon the pun) is when I drove a rental car with no power steering, sometime in 1990 in Europe. If the car is not moving, and you try to turn the wheels with no power steering, you feel massive resistance from the road-rubber interface. When you let the car move this way or that, even just a little bit, that resistance dramatically eases. To hell with power steering; what's it good for? Power steering and brakes are dangerous because they are powered from the engine. In an emergency situation, exactly when you need the controls to respond in the expected way, your engine may die. Suddenly, you have no braking power, and the steering is all weird.
    • kazinator 5y ago
      > Suddenly, you have no braking power, and the steering is all weird. One day in in the early 1990's sometime, I was driving a car that started to aquaplane on a patch of wet road. Suddenly the car felt like a boat, and shimmied a bit and spun around. It caught some traction coming out of the wet patch, and at that point I could have stopped it faster, had the power brakes not failed respond in the normal way because the engine cut. So I ended up striking the concrete divider with the rear corner of the car. I was not moving fast at that point; I didn't hit it very hard, but enough to cause damage and that could have been avoided had the brakes worked. The engine might have cut because of lock up due to braking without traction. This was an automatic transmission, so that's another piece of idiocy to blame. In a manual, you wouldn't brake with the intent to stop without also hitting the clutch to disengage the engine; there is a good chance the engine and power brakes would not have cut out if that had happened in a manual. (Electric cars should also fix all this.) It could have been a pile up; this was in fairly busy, fast moving traffic with cars all around. Everyone behind managed to avoid me, luckily, and, equally luckily, the cars in front who were likely oblivious to the situation did not come to an unrelated halt, which would have seen me careen into them.
• ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  It seems that 'hardware' is eating the car, too. I want to just buy a small, slow, simple EV for picking up groceries and other city errands, for $5k-$10k. It seems like the only companies making that are the Chinese, and usually only selling them in China. Heck, it doesn't even need an Infotainment system - just bluetooth for audio and calls, USB-A charger port and phone cradle.
  • notJim 5y ago
    A used Chevy Spark EV may be exactly what you need: https://www.edmunds.com/used-chevrolet-spark-ev/ https://www.edmunds.com/used-chevrolet-spark-ev/. If you can boost budget a bit, you can probably a used Leaf or similar.
  • dn3500 5y ago
    Yes, something between a $500 bicycle and a $20,000 car. The barriers may be as much regulatory as anything else. In the US all cars must meet highway safety standards even if they will never be driven on the highway. I think it's even illegal to sell a car with a top speed of 35 mph. There are some places, mostly retirement communities, where a lot of people get around by golf cart. They do the job and are a lot of fun.
    • iagovar 5y ago
      Dacia has a new car in that bracket, but the range is a bit limited. If you live in the US, Dacia is basically a Romanian company under Renaults ownership (which is a famous french brand) whith focus on cheap cars with proven tech. The use proven engines, parts from Renoult cars, etc. A pretty good philosophy IMO but until now they had horrible designs, now they are improving, in the sense of adressing more general-public apetences, which means generic-looking SUVs.
    • NoSorryCannot 5y ago
      There is Arcimoto, an operation based in Oregon. I think in some places their vehicles are grouped with motorcycles or something along those lines. I've seen them zipping around San Diego and other places.
• mthomasmw 5y ago
  Serious question - what alternatives are left for those of us who want a dumb car? I've spent the last three months finding out I can't get solar panels installed without a high-fidelity power-monitor tap connected to the provider's cloud, logging every appliance I use and what it's doing. Same deal with cars - they are on the internet and they generate evidence used to convict, and geofencing is coming. Other than stockpiling cars from 2010 - will we have alternatives? https://www.fox13news.com/news/evidence-showing-drivers-speed-before-bayshore-crash-that-killed-mother-baby-to-be-allowed-in-court https://www.fox13news.com/news/evidence-showing-drivers-spee...
  • quacked 5y ago
    I don't think there are any. If you got to the point where you somehow managed to source the labor, materials, and space to manufacture "dumb technology", you'd be sued into oblivion by competitors who wouldn't want you to eat into their profit margins. I think the market is huge. Imagine a company that suddenly started selling all-metal consumer appliances with minimal functionality, controlled by old-fashioned switches, buttons, and knobs, designed to be repaired. They'd be insanely popular. Of course, that lack of subscription-model pricing and the high labor costs of worthwhile designers and manufacturers would also destroy the company, but my god, a boy can dream.
    • mthomasmw 5y ago
      Vitamix
      • quacked 5y ago
        Looks great. It reminds me of my microwave, which has two dials on it and is better than every other microwave I've ever owned.
        • yurishimo 5y ago
          Now go look up the Thermomix. Apparently pretty popular in AUS/NZ but very niche in the States and Europe(?). Cool idea, but I can't imagine they have a long life if being used with any sort of regularity.
• jonshariat 5y ago
  Link isn't working but Selzered's link does. What is interesting is that graph half way down: in 2010 the software cost of the car was 35% and they project by 2030 it will make up 50% the cost of the car. As a consumer, I don't want anything but Apply Play or Android Auto in my car with a display. Why not cut costs and go a different direction? Am I really in the minority of consumers?
  • mlac 5y ago
    I 100% agree with this. I want climate control knobs and buttons, a basic AM/FM radio, and a CarPlay/android auto screen. Everything else is noise, and as Toyota would put it, MUDA (Waste / non-value added). In my view, there is no reason for an auto manufacturer to invest heavily in their infotainment systems anymore - it just isn't a competitive advantage for most cars. Almost all users who buy the upgraded trims will have a smart phone.
  • fmntf 5y ago
    I work in the automotive. I think that this is the trend. At the begin, smartphone projection was just calls, music and navigation. Now such systems are interested in signals coming from the car.. guess why!
• fridif 5y ago
  Time to buy up all the engines that dont need ECUs
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    Or just make your own ECU, in which case you can use most any engine. But if you really want to go back to carbs, may god have mercy on your soul...
  • LeoPanthera 5y ago
    And what, the return of the Choke valve? If you've ever driven a car with a choke you won't be so quick to go that far back.
  • numpad0 5y ago
    EV powertrain is not impossible to build yourself, it’s hard but not fabricating own IC at home hard
  • waiseristy 5y ago
    So we're okay with pollution now?
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Best of all, it is all written in C and C++, with all the security it entails.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    oh its funny.. of all the rust trend storm I cannot recall one mention of automotive industry usage (not that I imply it's not used.. I just don't remember hearing about that).. this is a place where I'd really love safer languages. btw any embedded car ADA shops ?
    • waiseristy 5y ago
      There's unfortunately no hardware or standards support for Rust, nor will there be any time soon. Silicon vendors don't provide Rust compatible toolchains, and the standards everyone is locked into is C/C++ only
      • pjmlp 5y ago
        There are also Ada, Basic, Pascal compilers, but definitly not on the car industry, and in what concerns Java it is only used by some infotaiment systems.
      • vassast 5y ago
        Apparently volovcars is using Rust for development: https://jobbsafari.se/jobbannons/embedded-developer-for-core-computer/AF-24569056 https://jobbsafari.se/jobbannons/embedded-developer-for-core...
    • steveklabnik 5y ago
      There are some rumblings of Rust in automotive, but nothing I can publicly point you to definitively.
      • ngrilly 5y ago
        Ferrocene, a Rust toolchain for functional safety, is explicitly targeting ISO 26262, which is an automotive standard. https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/ https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/
• andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Maybe not a "dumb" car, but yes, I would like to see more good analog options if the digital alternative is getting screens in cars that look utterly embarrassing compared to yesteryear's netbook-sized screen fad. If you're going to put tech in my car, you better go all the way. I'm talking a huge screen, fast multicore processor or redundant systems, touchscreen to UI update response times under 5ms. None of this nonsense where you're getting some baby embedded system and the screen updates over 30-50! ms. Shame on these manufacturers. In 50 milliseconds at 65 miles per hour, I think you've moved like over 4 feet. That's ridiculous. Say you've got an interaction that takes 150ms. At highway speeds you've moved the entire length of a car. This stuff is simply unacceptable. I mean to the point where I want regulations on how slow your crap software can be. If I'm moving 4,000 lbs down the road, I don't want to be distracted. I want the exact same responsiveness as an analog physical switch or knob.
  • fighterpilot 5y ago
    Is there an established word for the chronic build up in annoyance of waiting a few hundred ms each time you click something on a smart phone or computer?
    • andrewmcwatters 5y ago
      Yeah. It drives me nuts that in tech we pay more attention to processing power over things like response times and latency. Who cares if you have hardware that’s 15% more powerful than last year if nothing has moved meaningfully in my actual experience.
      • fighterpilot 5y ago
        It's why I prefer desktop/local software whenever it's available and whenever it's something I need to be using often. Cloud software is usually noticeably slower. Latency should be a UX priority.
        • xxpor 5y ago
• josefresco 5y ago
  What if cars were like TVs? Some would be smart with integrated software, and some would be dumb and require a "stick" to make it smart. I'd certainly be tempted to buy the dumb version and have the flexibility to try different software experiences.
  • throaway46546 5y ago
    It's getting hard to find dumb TVs anymore.
    • meowster 5y ago
      FYI anyone who is looking: Sceptre makes dumb 4K TVs up to 75" (sold at Walmart).
• Shadonototro 5y ago
  the problem will be bad developers who write bad code that results in need of more powerful and powerhungry chips wich results in chip shortage the curse of the tech-age is capitalism needing cheap labor, wich results in stupid choices being made we seen this during the Web 2.0 era, bad/cheap programmers made everything slow, sluggish and resource hungry, bad code, always bad code it still continues today
  • waiseristy 5y ago
    This is true to some extent, but the biggest burden on automotive computer performance is actually safety compliance. Most modern automotive ECU's have an entire core dedicated to cross-checking the validity of the other cores execution. Protection against an extremely hostile EM environment ends up resulting in very low clock rates (150-300MHZ). And software safety mechanisms mean, at some times, 50% of core allocation could be consumed by safety related code.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• rektide 5y ago
  I have this weird feeling that we ought to displace the problem somewhat. I feel like the ubiquotous & pervasive computing people were onto something. And in some ways, we're already seeing a very narrow brand of this future arrive: Apple and Google both have systems to allow the phone to control & manipulate some of the car's infotainment systems. Extending that idea further, & removing most of the native infotainment from the car, turning it into a bunch of dumb, wirelessly controlled displays & buttons, that an external system can use, would be interesting. Certainly there's still a large maintenance burden. And now we're talking about allowing external consumers of the car's services. There is some precedent for this. Webinos was a very intersting ubiquotous computing platform, and one that BMW/Jaguar/Land Rover did a bunch of work on[1]. It definitely still kept the car's infotainment system, but it also exposed many of the car's systems & services externally, over a normalized, secure, webinos control system, such that you could manipulate the car's systems, or in one demo, look at the radar system, from remote devices. I kind of picture the radicalized form of this as, your car has some hdmi ports in it, and you plug in a Roku or Chromecast or whatever to power the screens, or have your phone wirelessly send a video stream. The manufacturer would still need to have an out-of-box experience, but in 10 years or whatever, the manufacturer might not have to still support it like they do a built in one: they still have to maintain some API surface, but that, hopefully, can be a simpler, more controlled, known interface, with less maintanence burden, & less fancy application processors. I don't really think what I suggest saves all that much trouble. It introduces more trouble too. But starting to decouple computers, starting to untangle the weave, but it does seem like a long term more sustainable course of action. Whatever modern computer we carry with us is what we trust, and leaving it to provide an up to date experience across all varieties of screens, inputs, peripherals we encounter has always been, to me, what the ubicomp revolution was about. [1] http://www.autoconception.com/bmw-group-research-and-technology-developing-open-source-platform-for-using-mobile-web-applications-across-multiple-devices/ http://www.autoconception.com/bmw-group-research-and-technol...
• _benj 5y ago
  This makes me think of aeronautical industry. It is possible to get a J-3 Cub with just a stick that pulls on the control surfaces or it is possible to get a Cessna private jet with thousands (if not millions) of lines of code in it. They are just different. My fear is that we'd get to a point in which dumb cars will be something that is no longer a mainstream option. Maybe then we'll need to have our own EAA but with cars.
• tima101 5y ago
  I've been shopping for new tractor and found out that some newer tractors have software-controlled regeneration process. Then I watched on Youtube how buggy software in those tractors randomly kicks in regen process and does not allow owner to use tractor. I ended up buying lower HP tractor that has no chip and no regen process.
• waiseristy 5y ago
  I'm amazed that in this entire article Autosar wasn't mentioned once. The giant 2 ton elephant in the room here is automotives reliance on god-awful "kitchen sink" style standards. Try reading through the various Autosar docs and ask yourself if you expect robust bug-free code to be written to comply with it. There needs to be a complete cleaning-of-house in automotive software. I2C, Flexray, Ethernet, CAN/CANFD & OBD, LIN, what are we even doing? ARXML, FIBEX, DBC, fuckin kill me. "Unmanaged complexity" a.k.a "we've never thrown away a single technology or standard even once"
  • obidan 5y ago
    I worked in the automotive industry and I can totally confirm. The worse thing is, there are now AUTOSAR experts and AUTOSAR tools and AUTOSAR Tool Experts and within that tool there’s a ARXML generator that’s generated with another tool … There’s no way this can ever become safe, robust, software. The worse part is, there’s so many careers that depend on this obscure skillset that I am unsure a change can come from existing companies.
    • waiseristy 5y ago
      Dont even get me started on the tooling. Vectors, Elektrobits, Dassaults, Conti's, tools are probably one of the biggest drains on collective computation power outside of crypto and ML. Not to mention working in this space is fucking soul consuming. I was considered an "AUTOSAR expert" for a time, and that essentially meant having enough programming and systems knowledge to work on the entire stack. But never writing a single line of code, only clicking buttons in these god damn tools and watching them crash constantly, loosing hours upon hours of work
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  > will add hundreds of millions of lines of code to cars. Er, no, it will add wheels to tablets.
• iso1210 5y ago
  I have to admit I was unnerved the first time I got in a car with an electronic hand brake - certainly something I would not want if I were buying a car. Especially as there was a "Microsoft" logo next to it (presumably for the terrible in car entertainment system which was touch screen only) The encroaching of software into cars does remind me of the old joke though. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated "if GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued the following press release - If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics - 1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day. 2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car. 3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this. 4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine. 5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought "car NT", but then you would have to buy more seats. 6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would only run on five percent of the roads. 7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light. 8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna. 9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car. 10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
  • dalbasal 5y ago
    5 & 10 are already here... the rest aren't far.
  • beckingz 5y ago
    That last one is true for most cars now...
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Nothing worse than automotive software. Buggy, slow, terrible user interfaces, outright dangerous and in many ways much worse than the systems they replace or augment. The automotive industry has a long long way to come - assuming it will happen at all - before they can be said to be responsible software vendors. Case in point: my - former - C class Mercedes that made two pretty good attempts to kill me by slamming on the brakes in a situation where that was totally unexpected and caused a perfectly safe situation to turn into a critical one. If not for playing ping pong for many years I highly doubt I would be writing this. After the first instance I had the whole car checked out to see if there was any fault in the system, the answer was that it was all working perfectly (that time the car had braked whilst on a very narrow bridge sending the car into a skid which I managed to correct before going over the side). Three weeks later it did it again, this time apparently because an advertising sign in a turn generated such a strong radar return that the car thought I was about to have a frontal collision. Again, out of nowhere an emergency stop. I sold the car and got one where the most complex piece of software is the aftermarket radio, it has ABS and an ignition control computer but nothing in the way of 'advanced safety features'. My vehicle actively trying to kill me is something I can do without. So: as far as I'm concerned much less software on board of cars, open source it all if possible and roll it out much slower so we can get the bugs out.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    lol that is crazy. Just leave the control to the person behind the wheel, but somehow that's too stretched of an idea. I hope the F150 E truck will not have those 'automatic' features. but then again, I kind of wanted lane keeping and follow so maybe that's just the necessary evil. Maybe 'modes' where it gives all controls to me when I wanted it?
    • finolex1 5y ago
      Counterpoint: My Subaru has averted at least 2 collisions till date by applying an emergency brake (admittedly not in any life threatening situation, though it did save me a considerable amount in potential repairs). Though yes I agree, the option to turn off features is certainly helpful.
• peter303 5y ago
  Peter Hubers tome The Bottomless Well considers software as the apex of the energy pyramid. Each level of the pyramid- animal, wood, coal, gas, electricity, nuclear, software- (I may have recollected the order not entirely correct) is more usable and powerful than the one below it. You can see this pyramid in the evolution of the automobile: mostly petro-mechanical, then a growing fraction electrical, then an increasing fraction software. I was not fully convinced by the book is that computing is a type of refined energy, but can agree with some of arguments for it. Other computer utilization like mass data centers and crypto currency support computing as the new wave of industrialization. As an aside: Hubers thesis is the world will never run out of energy because we are constantly improving it, for example with or as software. Furthermore the amount of work per capita has grown with the quality of energy, and shall continue to increase in future.
• jrsj 5y ago
  This is the opposite of what I want, guess I should buy a low mileage used Tacoma and hope it lasts for the rest of my life
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  CAAS - Car As A Service.
  • eaa 5y ago
    Can we have freemium CAAS? )
• jedberg 5y ago
  The problem with this is that auto companies are not software companies. They may have good engineers there, but they are hamstrung with a culture that considers software as an add on cost center at best. Perfect example: I have no way to report software bugs to Honda. I've found a few and collected detailed reproduction data. The best I can do is give it to a sales rep in the service department and hope they send it "up to corporate". Compare that to Telsa, which has bug reporting built right into the software in the car, as well as bug bounty program. And then there are updates. Honda found a bug where the speedometer would just crash and not show your speed anymore. This is was pretty bad, but I had no idea about it until I went into the dealership. There was apparently a recall but I would have had to find that myself, I didn't get a notice. Honda has no built in facility to notify people of software updates and recalls. And then once I found out, the only way to fix it is for a dealership to apply the update. There is no over the air update and no way for me to apply it myself. Car companies need to learn how to be software first, or things will get very dangerous.
  • ketralnis 5y ago
    On the other hand, having seen the software industry I don't really want its values applied to cars. Games used to be shipped on chips to customers with the assumption that they could never be updated, but now the expectation that that's possible results in multi GB release day patches. Games used to be shipped to consoles without network access but if Blizzard goes out of business tomorrow, Starcraft II will just fail to boot because the software you get isn't enough to run the game. Games used to make most of their money by selling you a fun game that you wanted to play, but now they make most of their money from DLC's or selling in-game currency. I don't want my car to move fast and break things. I don't want my car to fail to drive me to the hospital because it has updates to install. I don't want my car to drop features it had when I paid for it because some PM's bonus depends on me using their monetised features instead. I don't want my car to be measured by "works on my machine"-level QA. I don't want my car reporting telemetry. I don't want my car's UI to become unuseable over time because the developers shipping constant updates to it are working on the newer hardware instead of the hardware I have. I don't want parts of my car to stop working because an app developer doesn't support my car anymore. (I've lost access to many an iOS game because of this without changing any hardware myself.) I don't want my car to stop working because it doesn't support TLS 4.0 or 6g and the licence server requires it. I don't want my car to stop working because it can't find the licence server because Volvo went out of business, or even just decided they didn't want to support me anymore. I don't want my car to fail to unlock because of a network blip. I don't want my car to suggest I go to McDonald's instead because of an advertising deal. That's what embracing the software industry's norms will get you. Awful QA, shortsighted dependencies, terrible incentives, and the ability to monetise you.
• kmote00 5y ago
  Someday in your future, you will jump in your car for an emergency drive, and the screen will say, "Updating. Please wait..."
  • eaa 5y ago
    And then trying to apply downloaded update and rebooting... in a loop. Or segfaulting. SW should make everything easier and more flexible, right? ;)
• aidenn0 5y ago
  What worries me the most is the usage of flash storage backing huge swaths of the functionality in the car. I suspect 10 years from now we will have cars where everything between the dashboard and glove-box does not work because the flash has worn out.
  • cyrks 5y ago
    already happening in tesla cars
  • waiseristy 5y ago
    Luckily the only dynamic part of most of these ECU's are their diagnostics and logging mechanisms, nowhere near "huge swaths of functionality". Every other bit of flash is written once at the factory and is never touched again. Now that we are seeing widespread adoption of OTA, it'll increase the amount of writes to program flash maybe 100 times over the life of the vehicle, but still within reasonable bounds. The issue is if OEM's ignore this limitation and tie mission critical portions of their systems to the memory partitions their diagnostic and logging mechanisms use (e.g Tesla). In reality if we are deploying OTA capabilities to these vehicles, there is absolutely no reason to be hammering your flash with logs, just upload them to the borg cube and be done with it.
    • aidenn0 5y ago
      Many cars use eMMC to back the infotainment system. Recent non-tesla rentals I've driven have definitely had functionality that could only be accessed through the touch-screen. e.g. a Chrysler my mom rented a couple weeks ago had just temperature and fan control on knobs; everything else for climate was touch-screen only. What happens when the eMMC gives up the ghost in this car? I don't know, but I suspect you won't be able to e.g. manually put the defogger on...
      • waiseristy 5y ago
        Good point, you are totally right. I don't drive a car which uses the infotainment system for mission-critical functionality. I've actually run it without the infotainment system in the car at all. Tesla's would effectively be bricked without the head unit functioning. Ford and the rest of the reputable OEMs know a thing or two about flash degradation though. It was actually a huge sticking point in one of my infotainment projects with them. So I don't expect all the OEMs to make the same bone-headed mistakes Tesla has
• incanus77 5y ago
  I drive a 1985 VW Vanagon. While there have been many, many times that I have wished for some comprehensive diagnostics, and am considering an engine swap at some point, when I drive and there is literally zero distraction from electronics or touch screens, it’s wonderful. I did add a CarPlay-enabled deck for directions and road trip music, but otherwise everything is manual.
• elihu 5y ago
  I remember back in the early days of Linux how we'd say that using a proprietary OS is like owning a car with the hood welded shut. It seemed so obviously ridiculous. Yet, that's basically where we're headed now. In some ways that's a good thing: EVs require much less physical maintenance. (At least, their drivetrains need less maintenance. Whether the rest of the car does depends on the manufacturer.) But on the other hand, depending on how heavily locked-down the car is, it'll be hard to do third-party modifications and older vehicles are going to be at high risk of having security vulnerabilities as soon as software maintenance for old vehicles stops being a priority for the manufacturer.
• prova_modena 5y ago
  As someone in the industry of supplying parts to keep older cars running, I view the increase of automotive software and electronic complexity as ensuring a future crisis of maintainability. Availability of parts and service information has always been an issue for aftermarket repair/modification of vehicles. However, as long as there are enough vehicles and committed owners around to create a small market for repair parts and services, independent companies have grown to provide what the original manufacturer will not. This even applies for very niche vehicles where some devoted old fellow runs essentially a hobby business keeps the flame alive. Even relatively recent vehicles with considerable electronic sophistication can be supported this way. I have worked with specialist companies that will modify, repair and re-engineer some of the more complex control units and electronic subsystems used on 2000s and 2010s vehicles (i.e. suspension control ECUs, digital dashboards etc). However, the trend described in this article has the potential to upend the status quo described above, simply due to the escalating complexity involved. It's sort of a tradition that auto enthusiasts and aftermarket industry initially distrust new tech in automobiles- fuel injection, ABS, traction control systems, emissions controls such as EGR etc all got that reception initially. Expertise with all those systems was eventually absorbed throughout the industry and resistance decreased as the benefits were better understood. However, as complexity increases there is a gradual increase in costs (engineering, training, manufacturing, install/service labor) to deal with all these sophisticated systems. Without other unforeseeable changes, there are almost certainly various inflection points where increases in complexity will result aftermarket support collapsing for particular models (or specific subsystems). This is something that already happens, but mostly for relatively rare models as until recently automotive complexity increases were constrained by the slower pace of ICE and chassis development. As these costs rise, fewer and fewer models of cars will have a healthy enough aftermarket to support investment by independent companies to analyze, repair and replace these complex systems. For sure, it will result in more models of cars becoming unmaintainable and fewer cars staying in operation beyond their warranty expiration dates. However, also I think this will result in a market space opening up not for repairs and replacements, but for various kinds of bypasses and defeat devices ("deletes" in industry terms) that will either remove complex subsystems entirely or allow replacement with more generic components. This is already occurring in some sectors of the automotive industry, particularly around diesel truck emissions control systems, where EPA has pursued aggressive enforcement actions against companies selling delete kits[1]. However I think where it will get really interesting is when we start getting widespread delete kits that aren't primarily mechanical in nature, but attempt to lock out or spoof entire software/electronic subsystems. [1] https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/performance-diesel-inc-clean-air-act-settlement-information-sheet https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/performance-diesel-inc-clean...
• mauvehaus 5y ago
  Future headline: "Cars now as reliable as computers. Bicycle sales boom"
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  I don't mind having gadgets on my car, but please just allow me to have a "bare metal" mode when things will inevitably go wrong.
• phkahler 5y ago
  In an electric car the motor control software can be quite tiny compared to traditional engine control. A lot of them are also direct drive, so no transmission controller. Now battery charging is a bitch. The standard communication between a Level 2 charger and a vehicle is IMHO designed by committee. It uses power-line communication even though it's not over the high voltage/current wires in the cable. That means special chips, firmware, and TCP/IP. Sounds like a startup solution rather than just plain automotive CAN connection. Anyway, most of the software isn't worse than an ICE car. Also, most of it will still be running on micro controllers, not fancy Linux systems. Detroit still knows how to do embedded but they're starting to get corrupted with ideas from all this autonomous stuff.
• reader_mode 5y ago
  I got the feeling that car companies treat SW like a cost center, asses in seats kind of mentality. They don't pay well, you work on uninteresting stuff and corporate ladder is likely a dead end. So I doubt they (traditional car companies) are going to get better at software any time soon.
  • justicezyx 5y ago
    I talked to quite a few car manufacturer in China: Shanghai auto Changan auto First Auto As part of my research into automotive software and exploring opportunity for disruption. They were all on the hype train of "software defined cars". Definitely not just a cost center. Of course they are still figuring out how to do software, and learning from people in the internet industry.
    • reader_mode 5y ago
      I was thinking more about traditional EU manufacturers, from my experience (interviewing for a few positions way back when) I got that vibe. Salaries match that assessment. You can see how much they believe software is important by how much they are willing to spend on attracting talent.
• adamc 5y ago
  This terrifies me.
• kumarsw 5y ago
  Once again, a plea for moderation from those calling for a return to analog gauges. Remember that outside of Tesla, automakers are generally pretty conservative and most computing in cars outside the head unit is decentralized MCUs that don't connect to the internet. And within the head unit, CarPlay/Android Auto has moved most of the work to phones.
  • eaa 5y ago
    Well, actually, with CP & AA there is more work, not less work, because they are perceived as an additional cool feature, not as a complete substitution to built-in "infotainment".
  • oldgradstudent 5y ago
    Analog gauges have been controlled digitally for many decades now. A professor of mine was writing code for BMW around 30 years ago. He said they were filtering the RPM so it would appear that BMW engines are solid and heavy.
• geonic 5y ago
  150 million lines of code in a Ford F-150? How is that even possible? A Volvo with 100 million lines including 3 million functions. This sounds like generated code to me. I can’t believe this is handwritten or even necessary.
  • eaa 5y ago
    Easily. There are lots of MCUs, and the "infotainment" unit contains big amount of code including an OS like linux or qnx or android.
    • kfarr 5y ago
      Yeah they must be including all underlying os and libraries in that LOC not to say that it's all official Ford created code. Still insane tho
  • TwoBit 5y ago
    A lot of that is third party libraries, same as with PC and phone software. And the OS itself.
• johntfella 5y ago
  I've been exploring building my own car from scrap. This wsj sort of motivated me (1). The ideal would be no electronics at all. An issue I have with new cars are monitors, I hate them they are distracting. My eyes are pretty sensitive to computer screens etc. Maybe, I'd settle for just a radio. "Maybe" because you then get looking at a cd player then all the sudden you want the further desire to control what you listen to and before you know it you are talking about mp3/digital and more computerization/softwaring of the car. The first question is... what do I want? The second is the more complicated issue of getting it done. However it has always been a dream of mine since being a kid and watching the Home Improvement sitcom in the 90s. (1) https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-odyssey-to-recreate-a-rare-jaguar-e-type-from-scratch-11577110319 https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-odyssey-to-recreate-a-rare-j...
  • mft_ 5y ago
    A Youtuber has been working on putting a v8 into a Tesla model S: https://youtu.be/b85MS7MiTKM https://youtu.be/b85MS7MiTKM It would be fun to go one step further, and turn a Tesla into a totally analog car. A Tesla might be a good starting point as they’re structurally some of the safest cars around (and this is one area where older, naturally analog cars compare badly) and turning the most technologically-laden car into the least... would be apposite.
• kwdc 5y ago
  What's the effective lifespan of a new car now? Software will likely shorten it in many ways. Especially with subscription models being so tempting for manufacturers. As the decades progress, will we care? But the street will find uses for these future old cars. Those powerpacks will be reused. Parts will be swapped. Limiting factor: will manufacturers lock down components so they have a shorter and finite lifespan and/or compatibility? Very likely. The Right to Repair movement is still gaining traction. How this plays out will be quite a story. I hope its not a repeat of most IoT where stuff frequently turns into junk within five years and usually heads off to some sad landfill.
• ivan1783 5y ago
  Does anyone want to team up and build the "dumb" electric car company?
• havocsupreme 5y ago
  A bit of a naive question I admit, but how do you even test hundreds millions of lines of code to ensure they all fit perfectly when different ECUs have different suppliers, and by customizing the car you can have different types of chips? Just curious how integration of all the components is done. Also, there seem to be a lot of recalls due to software issues, so I wonder if there's any open source or anything close to it that has tools such as CI or VCS for newer electric car companies that use ECUs from different OEMs?
• Areading314 5y ago
  With WFH one could expect the total miles driven per year to decrease drastically due to less commuting. This would make the lifetimes of cars longer and lead to lower demand -- a second way in which software is "eating" the car.
• throw111444 5y ago
  I own Mitsubisi Pajero (Montero in the US) that is basically designed in the 80s-90s. I installed a dumb car radio with monochrome display, which plays sound via USB and BT. I want a car that is controlled by me directly: electrically, hydraulically and pneumatically rather than algorithmically. With only the exception for ABS and ignition control which are the only valid uses for the software in the car.
• glitchdout 5y ago
  > Stout’s data shows that occurrences of software being used to fix vehicle hardware problems has steadily increased in the past five years. Reminds me of the Boeing 737 Max and MCAS