4 ms·

Ties pressure sensors, why is this silliness needed? Automatic climate control? Just another overly complicated system that is more expensive to repair. ABS? Le

Ties pressure sensors, why is this silliness needed? Automatic climate control? Just another overly complicated system that is more expensive to repair. ABS? Learn to brake. Suspension control? More marketing than a useful feature, something else to go fail. Death traps? No.

gameswithgo 5y ago
While you may do a good job of monitoring your tire pressures most people do not and this has saved many lives. If you are an enthusiast and your car shows you the psi of each tire it is also a handy time saving convenience
makeitdouble 5y ago
In our field your answer would be the equivalent of “Memory management ? allocate and free your memory yourself. IDE ? another things that eats memory, use nano. Syntax Highlighting? count your brackets and watch your semi-colons. Static analysis ? validate your code yourself. Memory leaks? No.”
- bb88 5y ago
  "Unit tests? Unit tests are a crutch for wannabes."
com2kid 5y ago
> Tires pressure sensors, why is this silliness needed? So I know when my tire pressure is low? Roads have hazards on them, I'd prefer to know something is causing my tire to slowly leak well before it starts to cause a problem. Also TPMSs aren't critical path tech, if they break down the car still runs fine. > ABS? Learn to brake. Is this a joke? ABS has saved countless lives. In emergency situations higher order thinking goes out the window. ABS is a "do what needs to be done to save my life right now" system. Heck even automatic climate control is pretty damn simple. While I don't prefer using it, a thermostat that turns a heater on or off is not exactly new technology. Setting up a feedback loop to narrow in on "how hot" the heater should be set to for the fan to kept continuously while keeping ambient air at a constant temperature is also quite simple. This is 40-50+ year old tech.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Are you seriously under the impression most of the computers in a modern car have anything to do with safety? My car has a full blown ECU for my seat memory. And a second one for the passenger seat memory. Another one for my soft close trunk. One for my HUD. One for my gauge cluster. One that exists entire for... playing fake engine sounds. One for the head unit, which is a separate ECU from the one for the amplifier, which is in turn separate from the DVD changer ECU. One climate control... but only in the rear! Front gets a separate ECU for AC. One for interior accent lighting (not lighting your dashboard, I mean dim lights around your door handle). And if you think ECU is a stretch here, these are individually versioned ECUs all residing on a shared bus. If my amplifier ECU dies, the optical fiber ring it's connected to might go down. Things connected to that bus include 911 emergency dialing the headunit's RTC...
  - com2kid 5y ago
    > Are you seriously under the impression most of the computers in a modern car have anything to do with safety? I never said that. I said the examples pointer out by the GP post were all terrible examples to demonstrate too many computers in a car. Also ECU is Engine Control Unit. Your seat probably has a tiny microcontroller in it, MCU. And yes, your examples are all great examples of complexity that can break. Anti-lock breaks, bad example. Tire Pressure Monitors, bad example. Computer controlled LED accent lighting, good example.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      So you agree with their point and just wanted to nitpick? I mean they're mostly right in their comment, a large number of people don't even know what the tpms light is (https://www.aftermarketnews.com/forty-two-percent-of-drivers-cannot-identify-tpms-warning-lights/ https://www.aftermarketnews.com/forty-two-percent-of-drivers...) Climate control is a largely overcomplicated system in many cars, using everything from humidity sensors to skin temp scans and then refusing to work when any one part stops working Adaptive suspensions have left entire generations of vehicles pretty much unusable as they slowly fail and essentially "total" perfectly good cars Even if they're wrong on one or two counts, the point is clear enough... - Also anyone who knows cars knows when ECU is referring to an Electronic Control Unit from context... It's been a few decades since anyone really got confused by that one. The ECU in charge of the engine in this car is called the "Digital Motor Electronics" ECU or DME. They are proper ECUs with a lot more complexity than a single MCU. Every single one is a node interconnected with separate firmware versions that need to sync up in certain ways. The DME in charge of the engine is treated with exactly the same as the ECU in charge of accent lighting when it comes to manufacturer tooling, the tooling simply enumerates over these ECUs and provides an identical interface to them.
NavinF 5y ago
I refuse to believe that you’re not trolling.
muzika 5y ago
Main purpose of ABS is to preserve ability to steer while braking hard. Even if you are a very experienced driver, you can not pump the brake and steer a corner as well on a car that does not have ABS.

gameswithgo 5y ago

While you may do a good job of monitoring your tire pressures most people do not and this has saved many lives. If you are an enthusiast and your car shows you the psi of each tire it is also a handy time saving convenience

makeitdouble 5y ago

In our field your answer would be the equivalent of “Memory management ? allocate and free your memory yourself. IDE ? another things that eats memory, use nano. Syntax Highlighting? count your brackets and watch your semi-colons. Static analysis ? validate your code yourself. Memory leaks? No.”

bb88 5y ago
"Unit tests? Unit tests are a crutch for wannabes."

com2kid 5y ago

> Tires pressure sensors, why is this silliness needed? So I know when my tire pressure is low? Roads have hazards on them, I'd prefer to know something is causing my tire to slowly leak well before it starts to cause a problem. Also TPMSs aren't critical path tech, if they break down the car still runs fine. > ABS? Learn to brake. Is this a joke? ABS has saved countless lives. In emergency situations higher order thinking goes out the window. ABS is a "do what needs to be done to save my life right now" system. Heck even automatic climate control is pretty damn simple. While I don't prefer using it, a thermostat that turns a heater on or off is not exactly new technology. Setting up a feedback loop to narrow in on "how hot" the heater should be set to for the fan to kept continuously while keeping ambient air at a constant temperature is also quite simple. This is 40-50+ year old tech.

BoorishBears 5y ago
Are you seriously under the impression most of the computers in a modern car have anything to do with safety? My car has a full blown ECU for my seat memory. And a second one for the passenger seat memory. Another one for my soft close trunk. One for my HUD. One for my gauge cluster. One that exists entire for... playing fake engine sounds. One for the head unit, which is a separate ECU from the one for the amplifier, which is in turn separate from the DVD changer ECU. One climate control... but only in the rear! Front gets a separate ECU for AC. One for interior accent lighting (not lighting your dashboard, I mean dim lights around your door handle). And if you think ECU is a stretch here, these are individually versioned ECUs all residing on a shared bus. If my amplifier ECU dies, the optical fiber ring it's connected to might go down. Things connected to that bus include 911 emergency dialing the headunit's RTC...
- com2kid 5y ago
  > Are you seriously under the impression most of the computers in a modern car have anything to do with safety? I never said that. I said the examples pointer out by the GP post were all terrible examples to demonstrate too many computers in a car. Also ECU is Engine Control Unit. Your seat probably has a tiny microcontroller in it, MCU. And yes, your examples are all great examples of complexity that can break. Anti-lock breaks, bad example. Tire Pressure Monitors, bad example. Computer controlled LED accent lighting, good example.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    So you agree with their point and just wanted to nitpick? I mean they're mostly right in their comment, a large number of people don't even know what the tpms light is (https://www.aftermarketnews.com/forty-two-percent-of-drivers-cannot-identify-tpms-warning-lights/ https://www.aftermarketnews.com/forty-two-percent-of-drivers...) Climate control is a largely overcomplicated system in many cars, using everything from humidity sensors to skin temp scans and then refusing to work when any one part stops working Adaptive suspensions have left entire generations of vehicles pretty much unusable as they slowly fail and essentially "total" perfectly good cars Even if they're wrong on one or two counts, the point is clear enough... - Also anyone who knows cars knows when ECU is referring to an Electronic Control Unit from context... It's been a few decades since anyone really got confused by that one. The ECU in charge of the engine in this car is called the "Digital Motor Electronics" ECU or DME. They are proper ECUs with a lot more complexity than a single MCU. Every single one is a node interconnected with separate firmware versions that need to sync up in certain ways. The DME in charge of the engine is treated with exactly the same as the ECU in charge of accent lighting when it comes to manufacturer tooling, the tooling simply enumerates over these ECUs and provides an identical interface to them.

NavinF 5y ago

I refuse to believe that you’re not trolling.

muzika 5y ago

Main purpose of ABS is to preserve ability to steer while braking hard. Even if you are a very experienced driver, you can not pump the brake and steer a corner as well on a car that does not have ABS.