13 ms·

The big automotive semiconductor problem

58 points by picture 5y ago

bayindirh 5y ago
From the article: > Mobile phone SOCs integrate a substantial amount of function right onto the chip. Why hasn’t that been the case for the car? Because your mobile phone SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius, copious amount of vibration, error-free operation on many environments (incl. inputs with wrong voltages, shorts, etc.), and have a lifetime of 10+ years with the same performance characteristics. Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. More information: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scandal_dieselgate https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  How does functional integration interfere with robustness?
  - JRKrause 5y ago
    One method of making a chip 'tougher' is to physically increase the size of the semiconductor elements (e.g. transistors, FETs). This would seem incompatible with highly-integrated ICs.
    - xyzzy21 5y ago
      This is true. For radiation hardening for space, this is exactly what is required for anything more harsh than LEO. And as a consequence, the generation of processors and memory typically used are 10-20 years behind the current state of the art. That's simply the price of reliability in harsh environments!
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    The discrete components are designed, tested and verified after a long stint and their specs are frozen. It's a bit like space hardware. You verify an older CPU design can work reliably in space, and certify that processor. Then, you use the same foundation for a decade or so. It's same with automotive industry. You have a well defined and certified stack from Delco, Bosch, Delphi, etc. and you can trust that hardware. Integration makes you return back to square one. I remember Toyota tried unifying some control units into a single box, and 5-6 years considered realistic if not a little optimistic.
    - pySSK 5y ago
      To add to that, some of these features are extremely specialized, and for each feature, 1-2 of the big players might have a huge technical advantage and economies of scale in production and in supplying. This leads to higher barrier to entry and not enough margin for other players to replicate the feature.
      - foobarian 5y ago
        Funny, this sounds exactly like why microservices have an advantage over monoliths in big organizations.
    - Isinlor 5y ago
      SpaceX works around that by using consumer grade stuff and just replicating it 3 times. Tesla also managed to handle issues with supply shortages very well. The old practices are just not good enough.
      - hulitu 5y ago
        Tesla is not a car. It looks like one, it might behave a bit like one but i would not touch such a thing even with a 9 m pole. I heard too many horror stories about Tesla requirements.
        bayindirh 5y ago
- pySSK 5y ago
  They do however use SoCs for HMI/head-units/carputers now however. The bigger reason is just the nature of automotive development. Every part is developed by a specced or sourced by different teams and outsourced to a different Tier 1/2/3. Things are designed to be modular, so if you pick Option A for something, it might use ECU A, and if you pick Option B, they might pack a whole different ECU B. Also, every ECU is costed down to only support the intended application, so ECU A likely doesn't have the extra bandwidth to add on extra features for Option B. Also, none of this is decided or developed at the same time, so you have all the different features and ECUs developed throughout. Some things are changed mid program. Some things carry over from previous programs, so it's usually just easier to go your own way and not work with other teams on combining features. Every automotive OEM has a person who comes up with the brilliant and cost saving idea of combining ECUs. I know 4 such people from different OEMs but they have all failed for some of the reasons mentioned above.
  - nudgeee 5y ago
    SoCs in head-units would still be automotive qualified variants (temperature grade, etc).
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius That is basically the operating range of the average graphics card these days. Not many people go sub-ambient with their cooling but no graphics card would complain if they did. The actual silicon is perfectly fine with such temperatures. The only real issue is the external cooling rig, a classic engineering problem that any car company shouldn't have a problem solving. A water cooler tied to the vehicle's coolant loop would easily cap the upper temperature range at water boiling points. A car engine has plenty of power available for fans or even air conditioning if necessary. Hide the controller chips somewhere in the passenger compartment and the humans will die of heat before the silicon.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    I’m not talking about processor temperatures. The temperatures I’m talking about are ambient/enclosure temperatures. So, the board, and all integrated components will be at least that ambient temperature, and they’ll work without any transient errors. Also this means, no solder joints or any other component won’t act funky. A transient error in your GPU is a one pixel blip. In an ECU, that’s a power loss event in best case.
  - ptsneves 5y ago
    In low temperatures you start having issues with moisture saturating the air. Things get wet out of nowhere. There are also electrolytic capacitors which are water based so these need to be ruled out as well. Given air has at any given time a lot of water and water goes through a phase change at sub zero i find the comparison quite invalid.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      That's a difference with automotive/aviation products. They will all be in sealed containers and then the actual circuitry will all be covered in plastic. There shouldn't be any exposed metal that could possibly short, even if immersed in water. Pouring buckets of water on a running engine (ie a gap in the hood closure on a rainy day) or even into the passenger compartment (ie sunroof left open) shouldn't do much of anything to a car's electrical systems. (This is also done for fire safety reasons. Any metal that could possibly short if wet could also ignite a fire during/after a crash.)
- hulitu 5y ago
  -20 ° C - + 80 °C is for keyfobs. For ECUs in the passenger compartment is -40°C - 85 °C and for ECUs in the engine compartment is -40 °C - 105 °C.
- shadowpho 5y ago
  Also... mobile phone SoC are made in much higher quantities then car chips: there are much more phones shipped then cars. Therefore R&D costs per unit are significantly lower with phone chips and you can spend more.
- ryanobjc 5y ago
  When you buy semiconductors on digikey or whatever, there are several different 'classes' of performance. Everyone imagines milspec being the top one, and it's true, but for most people the ideal class is 'automotive'... Because precisely of what the parent said: tolerances of temperatures to 140F or more. Think of a car sitting in a baking parking lot in Phoenix, no shade. You don't build semiconductors for that purpose by using 10nm process then adding a lot more redundancies when all you need is a simple opamp. You instead build the thing beefy and resistant to the environment. And all the excitement over new chip plants by TSMC etc, won't do a thing for these automotive applications.
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    There are classes ABOVE mil-spec. These are several "Space grade" classes above mil-spec which have far wider temperature and radiation ranges.
- rasz 5y ago
  >Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. Lets not exaggerate :) ECU reads a bunch of sensors, does some mild compute, uses that to do a table lookup, interpolates and slaps the result into actuators. 8bit 10MHz is enough to accomplish this task.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    These are not my words. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875680
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  > Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. Well, it takes some parameters, goes into a lookup table and decides how much timing to retard, or fuel to give, and probably has a o2 sensor, checks knocking, etc. All done on pretty barebones 80's tech.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    You're right on the tables part, but these are the words of the guy who worked on BMW for 14 years, who's on the video. And, as a person who's doing simulation coding, I tend to behave to him about that. The relevant part starts here: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scandal_dieselgate#t=2231 https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
geocrasher 5y ago
This article does a good job outlining why these systems can't just be replaced with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino: Durability. At one point I was interested in replacing the ECU in my old '88 Suburban. The ECU is probably the only "real" bit of electronics in the whole vehicle. And yet after almost 35 years it's still doing fine. The Arduino based ECU I was looking into, as it turns out, is a great hobby project, but not so good for reliability due to the harsh conditions. Still, I think electronics in modern vehicles are completely over the top, but then again... I drive a 30+ year old Suburban. I'm prone to thinking that way :D
- dylan604 5y ago
  The space shuttle used a hardened 386 (or something similar) that cost a bazillion dollars. The drone currently on Mars used commidity off the shelf chips (snapdragon IIRC). The harsh conditions thing is not something to laugh at, but I also think we might have over-engineered somethings a bit.
  - Retric 5y ago
    The surface of Mars being further from the sun and inside an atmosphere has vastly fewer issues with radiation.
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      But more issues with temperature swings—ideally radiation wouldn't be the main concern here in Earth's atmosphere.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Rovers regulate internal temperatures to keep electronics happy. Ex: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover/temperature/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover/temperature/
    - Symmetry 5y ago
      In both cases you're well protected against the solar wind by distance and atmosphere in the case of the Mars rover and by the Van Allen belts in the case of the Space Shuttle. But both still have to worry about cosmic rays. Mars's thin atmosphere helps a bit with that but not nearly as much as you'd like. EDIT: I suspect a lot of what lets you use Snapdragons in the rover is the idea of making error resistant systems rather than error resistent devices. The same thing that let us replace a single $10,000 hard driver with ten $100 hard drives in a RAID with the same performance and reliability despite the individual drives being much worse.
chmod600 5y ago
What devices are left that are fairly normal (that normal people might interact with in a given week), mechanical or electromechanical, have at least modest complexity, and have no microchips? Locks? Guns? What else? EDIT: perhaps an extra requirement that it's fairly durable, i.e. easily lasts ten years of normal use. EDIT2: maybe it should also fit the requirement that it's a current model in production and that you don't have to go out of your way to find a non-semiconductor version.
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  Is gas water heater complex enough?
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Gas water heaters often have control boards and displays with buttons. The only type that might not are the low-efficiency type with a pilot flame and room air intakes—but even those usually have forced exhaust fans that require some sort of smarts to know when to turn on.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Your typical $400-$500 tank style gas water heater has none of those things. It has a PCB with some analog circuitry to do sparky magic to light the pilot light. A gas/propane heater or stovetop is basically the same thing in a different form factor. Tankless water heaters are necessarily much more fancy.
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        AKA low-efficiency water heaters.
        chmod600 5y ago
        Can you explain? Are you talking about inline water heaters as the efficient ones? I have only seen the tank style in the U.S. So it seems to fit, though I guess you are implying those will get replaced by something better.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> Automakers found that mechanical, hydraulic or pneumatic controls failed to achieve enough accuracy and consistency over each vehicle's usage life to meet these emissions tests. This was especially the case as the car aged. Decades ago, I owned an old Alfa Romeo that incorporated a complicated cam system to control the oxygen ratio to the fuel injection system. More complex than your typical 1-dimensional function of a cam, this cam was "two-dimensional" in its output. The cam follower was able to slide along the axis of the cam based on something or another (RPM? temperature?) and the profile of the cam varied from one end to the other. Now there's a pretty wild "mechanical computer". A mechanic though told me that over time the middle of the cam would wear — a kind of "saddling" — and engine performance (and probably emissions) would suffer.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >Decades ago, I owned an old Alfa Romeo that incorporated a complicated cam system to control the oxygen ratio to the fuel injection system. More complex than your typical 1-dimensional function of a cam, this cam was "two-dimensional" in its output. The cam follower was able to slide along the axis of the cam based on something or another (RPM? temperature?) and the profile of the cam varied from one end to the other. V-tech, yo.
  - linksnapzz 5y ago
    You laugh, but the 1980 Alfa Romeo Spider (with the Arese DOHC 4) was the first regular-production car with variable valve timing. This might actually be what the grandparent post is referring to-it had a mechanical variator attached to the intake camshaft to adjust the phase of valve opening....
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Every car engine loses gradually power with wear. Top gear famously showed this multiple times with their older car episodes. Usually it was in 20-30% range. Basically new car is a 100% system and from first kilometer / month of ageing and exposition to elements various items go down the hill. Each car type had its own set of reasons for that, but result was +-same.
dclowd9901 5y ago
> It would be a misconception to look at your standard internal combustion car as a fundamentally mechanical device. Today's cars are some of the most complex electronic systems mankind has ever made. As a car restorer, mechanic and enthusiast, yes. This is also why bringing a car in for service has ballooned in cost over recent years. Oddly, it’s become remarkably _easy_ to chase down a problem in a car because the systems will just tell you exactly what’s wrong. Now it’s just a huge time sink to actually fix the problem because it’s probably buried deep in the gubbins of the car and the parts are very costly.
- linksnapzz 5y ago
  The current practice of having a $3 part that fails after 40,000 miles, then needs $2000 worth of labor to replace, makes me want to murder certain vehicle line execs at certain companies...glares in the direction of Munich...
froh 5y ago
My personal pet peeve theory is that automotive engineering missed the memo that the hard part of software based systems is integration and remote dependencies. All their engineering and supply structures have evolved from mass producing mechanical marvels which happen to have a few electrical and electronic E/E components, marvels and components which are hard to manufacture but simple to integrate ("plug together", essentially). At the core, their thinking goes "Creating components is expensive. Putting components together is cheap. Also minimize prototype scrap with extensive planning and scrupulous list checking processes. If parts don't work together you didn't plan well enough." And that leads to a culture that is the exact opposite of CI/CD, fail early, fail often, rebase or reintegrate continuously. Thus in the automotive SPICE and six sigma world it takes 2-3 years to replace an ECU with another one with sufficiently similar specs. Also, they prioritize "economies of scale" over flexibility and time to market. For example a "gateway controller", a router and switch, routing and switching between ethernet and CAN, with some spare CPU cycles for centralized functions? 2-3 years. Now let's say you need 3 million of these devices per year (Volkswagen group, Toyota, Stellantis each make ~10 million vehicles y/y), and you'll produce cars with that same device for 5 years? Then cost savings of 10$ per device are equal to 150 Mio bucks. As a supplier you'll happily put 20 people on saving those 10 bucks on the "bill of materials" --- not adding cool features, no, saving some RAM, CPU, ... the boring and non-innovative side of "economies of scale" Now the device is cheaper but maxed out. So your OEM won't ship new functions. the OEM is also later to market. And the OEM can't replace the part as easily because the spare would have to be as damn dirt cheap as the original. Not alone would you have to redo all these micro optimizations --- the savings from the previous design wouldn't materialize against the lower volume any more. And that is, in a nutshell, imnsho, why automotive asks for more of the old parts instead of switching to a new board design with a next-gen CPU... To summarize: automotive deals time to market and flexibility for "economies of scale" and "automotive grade quality processes". Contrast that to an OEM who thinks like a software CEO... the software CEO understands that the secret to high quality is in CI/CD with outstanding test and validation pipelines. You seek to change any part of your system just at marginal cost. And then you can replace some ECU within 6 months.

58 points by picture 5y ago

From the article: > Mobile phone SOCs integrate a substantial amount of function right onto the chip. Why hasn’t that been the case for the car? Because your mobile phone SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius, copious amount of vibration, error-free operation on many environments (incl. inputs with wrong voltages, shorts, etc.), and have a lifetime of 10+ years with the same performance characteristics. Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. More information: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scandal_dieselgate https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...

turbinerneiter 5y ago
How does functional integration interfere with robustness?
- JRKrause 5y ago
  One method of making a chip 'tougher' is to physically increase the size of the semiconductor elements (e.g. transistors, FETs). This would seem incompatible with highly-integrated ICs.
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    This is true. For radiation hardening for space, this is exactly what is required for anything more harsh than LEO. And as a consequence, the generation of processors and memory typically used are 10-20 years behind the current state of the art. That's simply the price of reliability in harsh environments!
- bayindirh 5y ago
  The discrete components are designed, tested and verified after a long stint and their specs are frozen. It's a bit like space hardware. You verify an older CPU design can work reliably in space, and certify that processor. Then, you use the same foundation for a decade or so. It's same with automotive industry. You have a well defined and certified stack from Delco, Bosch, Delphi, etc. and you can trust that hardware. Integration makes you return back to square one. I remember Toyota tried unifying some control units into a single box, and 5-6 years considered realistic if not a little optimistic.
  - pySSK 5y ago
    To add to that, some of these features are extremely specialized, and for each feature, 1-2 of the big players might have a huge technical advantage and economies of scale in production and in supplying. This leads to higher barrier to entry and not enough margin for other players to replicate the feature.
    - foobarian 5y ago
      Funny, this sounds exactly like why microservices have an advantage over monoliths in big organizations.
  - Isinlor 5y ago
    SpaceX works around that by using consumer grade stuff and just replicating it 3 times. Tesla also managed to handle issues with supply shortages very well. The old practices are just not good enough.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Tesla is not a car. It looks like one, it might behave a bit like one but i would not touch such a thing even with a 9 m pole. I heard too many horror stories about Tesla requirements.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
pySSK 5y ago
They do however use SoCs for HMI/head-units/carputers now however. The bigger reason is just the nature of automotive development. Every part is developed by a specced or sourced by different teams and outsourced to a different Tier 1/2/3. Things are designed to be modular, so if you pick Option A for something, it might use ECU A, and if you pick Option B, they might pack a whole different ECU B. Also, every ECU is costed down to only support the intended application, so ECU A likely doesn't have the extra bandwidth to add on extra features for Option B. Also, none of this is decided or developed at the same time, so you have all the different features and ECUs developed throughout. Some things are changed mid program. Some things carry over from previous programs, so it's usually just easier to go your own way and not work with other teams on combining features. Every automotive OEM has a person who comes up with the brilliant and cost saving idea of combining ECUs. I know 4 such people from different OEMs but they have all failed for some of the reasons mentioned above.
- nudgeee 5y ago
  SoCs in head-units would still be automotive qualified variants (temperature grade, etc).
sandworm101 5y ago
>> SoC is not certified for -20/+80 degrees Celsius That is basically the operating range of the average graphics card these days. Not many people go sub-ambient with their cooling but no graphics card would complain if they did. The actual silicon is perfectly fine with such temperatures. The only real issue is the external cooling rig, a classic engineering problem that any car company shouldn't have a problem solving. A water cooler tied to the vehicle's coolant loop would easily cap the upper temperature range at water boiling points. A car engine has plenty of power available for fans or even air conditioning if necessary. Hide the controller chips somewhere in the passenger compartment and the humans will die of heat before the silicon.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  I’m not talking about processor temperatures. The temperatures I’m talking about are ambient/enclosure temperatures. So, the board, and all integrated components will be at least that ambient temperature, and they’ll work without any transient errors. Also this means, no solder joints or any other component won’t act funky. A transient error in your GPU is a one pixel blip. In an ECU, that’s a power loss event in best case.
- ptsneves 5y ago
  In low temperatures you start having issues with moisture saturating the air. Things get wet out of nowhere. There are also electrolytic capacitors which are water based so these need to be ruled out as well. Given air has at any given time a lot of water and water goes through a phase change at sub zero i find the comparison quite invalid.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    That's a difference with automotive/aviation products. They will all be in sealed containers and then the actual circuitry will all be covered in plastic. There shouldn't be any exposed metal that could possibly short, even if immersed in water. Pouring buckets of water on a running engine (ie a gap in the hood closure on a rainy day) or even into the passenger compartment (ie sunroof left open) shouldn't do much of anything to a car's electrical systems. (This is also done for fire safety reasons. Any metal that could possibly short if wet could also ignite a fire during/after a crash.)
hulitu 5y ago
-20 ° C - + 80 °C is for keyfobs. For ECUs in the passenger compartment is -40°C - 85 °C and for ECUs in the engine compartment is -40 °C - 105 °C.
shadowpho 5y ago
Also... mobile phone SoC are made in much higher quantities then car chips: there are much more phones shipped then cars. Therefore R&D costs per unit are significantly lower with phone chips and you can spend more.
ryanobjc 5y ago
When you buy semiconductors on digikey or whatever, there are several different 'classes' of performance. Everyone imagines milspec being the top one, and it's true, but for most people the ideal class is 'automotive'... Because precisely of what the parent said: tolerances of temperatures to 140F or more. Think of a car sitting in a baking parking lot in Phoenix, no shade. You don't build semiconductors for that purpose by using 10nm process then adding a lot more redundancies when all you need is a simple opamp. You instead build the thing beefy and resistant to the environment. And all the excitement over new chip plants by TSMC etc, won't do a thing for these automotive applications.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  There are classes ABOVE mil-spec. These are several "Space grade" classes above mil-spec which have far wider temperature and radiation ranges.
rasz 5y ago
>Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. Lets not exaggerate :) ECU reads a bunch of sensors, does some mild compute, uses that to do a table lookup, interpolates and slaps the result into actuators. 8bit 10MHz is enough to accomplish this task.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  These are not my words. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30875680
calvinmorrison 5y ago
> Your car is running a real-time simulation of your engine to keep itself operational, and it's a much serious business than running Android or iOS. Well, it takes some parameters, goes into a lookup table and decides how much timing to retard, or fuel to give, and probably has a o2 sensor, checks knocking, etc. All done on pretty barebones 80's tech.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  You're right on the tables part, but these are the words of the guy who worked on BMW for 14 years, who's on the video. And, as a person who's doing simulation coding, I tend to behave to him about that. The relevant part starts here: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scandal_dieselgate#t=2231 https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7331-the_exhaust_emissions_scand...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

geocrasher 5y ago

This article does a good job outlining why these systems can't just be replaced with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino: Durability. At one point I was interested in replacing the ECU in my old '88 Suburban. The ECU is probably the only "real" bit of electronics in the whole vehicle. And yet after almost 35 years it's still doing fine. The Arduino based ECU I was looking into, as it turns out, is a great hobby project, but not so good for reliability due to the harsh conditions. Still, I think electronics in modern vehicles are completely over the top, but then again... I drive a 30+ year old Suburban. I'm prone to thinking that way :D

dylan604 5y ago
The space shuttle used a hardened 386 (or something similar) that cost a bazillion dollars. The drone currently on Mars used commidity off the shelf chips (snapdragon IIRC). The harsh conditions thing is not something to laugh at, but I also think we might have over-engineered somethings a bit.
- Retric 5y ago
  The surface of Mars being further from the sun and inside an atmosphere has vastly fewer issues with radiation.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    But more issues with temperature swings—ideally radiation wouldn't be the main concern here in Earth's atmosphere.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Rovers regulate internal temperatures to keep electronics happy. Ex: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover/temperature/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/rover/temperature/
  - Symmetry 5y ago
    In both cases you're well protected against the solar wind by distance and atmosphere in the case of the Mars rover and by the Van Allen belts in the case of the Space Shuttle. But both still have to worry about cosmic rays. Mars's thin atmosphere helps a bit with that but not nearly as much as you'd like. EDIT: I suspect a lot of what lets you use Snapdragons in the rover is the idea of making error resistant systems rather than error resistent devices. The same thing that let us replace a single $10,000 hard driver with ten $100 hard drives in a RAID with the same performance and reliability despite the individual drives being much worse.

chmod600 5y ago

What devices are left that are fairly normal (that normal people might interact with in a given week), mechanical or electromechanical, have at least modest complexity, and have no microchips? Locks? Guns? What else? EDIT: perhaps an extra requirement that it's fairly durable, i.e. easily lasts ten years of normal use. EDIT2: maybe it should also fit the requirement that it's a current model in production and that you don't have to go out of your way to find a non-semiconductor version.

stevenwoo 5y ago
Is gas water heater complex enough?
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Gas water heaters often have control boards and displays with buttons. The only type that might not are the low-efficiency type with a pilot flame and room air intakes—but even those usually have forced exhaust fans that require some sort of smarts to know when to turn on.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Your typical $400-$500 tank style gas water heater has none of those things. It has a PCB with some analog circuitry to do sparky magic to light the pilot light. A gas/propane heater or stovetop is basically the same thing in a different form factor. Tankless water heaters are necessarily much more fancy.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      AKA low-efficiency water heaters.
      - chmod600 5y ago
        Can you explain? Are you talking about inline water heaters as the efficient ones? I have only seen the tank style in the U.S. So it seems to fit, though I guess you are implying those will get replaced by something better.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> Automakers found that mechanical, hydraulic or pneumatic controls failed to achieve enough accuracy and consistency over each vehicle's usage life to meet these emissions tests. This was especially the case as the car aged. Decades ago, I owned an old Alfa Romeo that incorporated a complicated cam system to control the oxygen ratio to the fuel injection system. More complex than your typical 1-dimensional function of a cam, this cam was "two-dimensional" in its output. The cam follower was able to slide along the axis of the cam based on something or another (RPM? temperature?) and the profile of the cam varied from one end to the other. Now there's a pretty wild "mechanical computer". A mechanic though told me that over time the middle of the cam would wear — a kind of "saddling" — and engine performance (and probably emissions) would suffer.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Decades ago, I owned an old Alfa Romeo that incorporated a complicated cam system to control the oxygen ratio to the fuel injection system. More complex than your typical 1-dimensional function of a cam, this cam was "two-dimensional" in its output. The cam follower was able to slide along the axis of the cam based on something or another (RPM? temperature?) and the profile of the cam varied from one end to the other. V-tech, yo.
- linksnapzz 5y ago
  You laugh, but the 1980 Alfa Romeo Spider (with the Arese DOHC 4) was the first regular-production car with variable valve timing. This might actually be what the grandparent post is referring to-it had a mechanical variator attached to the intake camshaft to adjust the phase of valve opening....
saiya-jin 5y ago
Every car engine loses gradually power with wear. Top gear famously showed this multiple times with their older car episodes. Usually it was in 20-30% range. Basically new car is a 100% system and from first kilometer / month of ageing and exposition to elements various items go down the hill. Each car type had its own set of reasons for that, but result was +-same.

dclowd9901 5y ago

> It would be a misconception to look at your standard internal combustion car as a fundamentally mechanical device. Today's cars are some of the most complex electronic systems mankind has ever made. As a car restorer, mechanic and enthusiast, yes. This is also why bringing a car in for service has ballooned in cost over recent years. Oddly, it’s become remarkably _easy_ to chase down a problem in a car because the systems will just tell you exactly what’s wrong. Now it’s just a huge time sink to actually fix the problem because it’s probably buried deep in the gubbins of the car and the parts are very costly.

linksnapzz 5y ago
The current practice of having a $3 part that fails after 40,000 miles, then needs $2000 worth of labor to replace, makes me want to murder certain vehicle line execs at certain companies...glares in the direction of Munich...

froh 5y ago

My personal pet peeve theory is that automotive engineering missed the memo that the hard part of software based systems is integration and remote dependencies. All their engineering and supply structures have evolved from mass producing mechanical marvels which happen to have a few electrical and electronic E/E components, marvels and components which are hard to manufacture but simple to integrate ("plug together", essentially). At the core, their thinking goes "Creating components is expensive. Putting components together is cheap. Also minimize prototype scrap with extensive planning and scrupulous list checking processes. If parts don't work together you didn't plan well enough." And that leads to a culture that is the exact opposite of CI/CD, fail early, fail often, rebase or reintegrate continuously. Thus in the automotive SPICE and six sigma world it takes 2-3 years to replace an ECU with another one with sufficiently similar specs. Also, they prioritize "economies of scale" over flexibility and time to market. For example a "gateway controller", a router and switch, routing and switching between ethernet and CAN, with some spare CPU cycles for centralized functions? 2-3 years. Now let's say you need 3 million of these devices per year (Volkswagen group, Toyota, Stellantis each make ~10 million vehicles y/y), and you'll produce cars with that same device for 5 years? Then cost savings of 10$ per device are equal to 150 Mio bucks. As a supplier you'll happily put 20 people on saving those 10 bucks on the "bill of materials" --- not adding cool features, no, saving some RAM, CPU, ... the boring and non-innovative side of "economies of scale" Now the device is cheaper but maxed out. So your OEM won't ship new functions. the OEM is also later to market. And the OEM can't replace the part as easily because the spare would have to be as damn dirt cheap as the original. Not alone would you have to redo all these micro optimizations --- the savings from the previous design wouldn't materialize against the lower volume any more. And that is, in a nutshell, imnsho, why automotive asks for more of the old parts instead of switching to a new board design with a next-gen CPU... To summarize: automotive deals time to market and flexibility for "economies of scale" and "automotive grade quality processes". Contrast that to an OEM who thinks like a software CEO... the software CEO understands that the secret to high quality is in CI/CD with outstanding test and validation pipelines. You seek to change any part of your system just at marginal cost. And then you can replace some ECU within 6 months.