5 ms·

It doesn't take much more than not going for the cheapest offshore team possible to make better car media center code than we get. I'm sure most of us could eas

It doesn't take much more than not going for the cheapest offshore team possible to make better car media center code than we get. I'm sure most of us could easily do it ourselves in a month or less. It seems like such a simple problem. Play songs and interface with some controls/radio receiver/etc while being at least a tiny bit conscious of efficiency.

Rayhem 3y ago
This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.
  - sterlind 3y ago
    I do wonder about the CAN bus. there's no access control on the CAN network, there's one shared bus for the whole car, and any controller can starve the bus by spamming with a high address, unless that's changed. you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      The Tesla Cybertruck doesn’t use CAN for steer-by-wire. It uses Gigabit Ethernet. According to my mechanic my ABS system is using something similar. CAN isn’t the only bus in the car. According to Wikipedia the LIN bus is intended to supplement CAN with non-critical components.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Most modern cars have more than one CAN bus. (And it’s lower ID messages which have priority over higher, which is more trivia than argument against your premise.)
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      Is that really a security issue, though? If someone has access to your center console, they have access to your car. If someone has access to your car, they can cut your brake lines or do a million other things that are impossible to defend against.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        The concern is that the attack could be carried out remotely. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... is one such example (might be the one GP is referring to).
        fallingknife 3y ago
        I agree that is a serious concern, then. I thought it sounded like voting machine hacking where the dramatic headlines are hiding the fact that the hackers had physical access to the machine.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Voting machines are scary for different reasons. 1) The general public has private physical access by design. 2) The chain of custody is unclear and hard to prove. This undermines trust in the system.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        That depends on the jurisdiction. When I voted in Maryland, there was a machine that I directly cast my vote into. When I vote where I live now in Massachusetts, I fill out a paper form in private and then I manually feed the forms into a voting machine where I have only supervised physical access. I think it's entirely possible to have machine-counted ballots without giving unfettered and unsupervised access to the counting machines and I prefer the MA system (for the reasons you describe), but I also recognize the Constitution is clear in its reserving the power to each state for how to conduct the election (at least for President) in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.
- blcArmadillo 3y ago
  This is not correct. The main infotainment system is not considered safety critical. There are some functions such as rear view camera that are but often this is handled by a real time os that overlays the video on top of the infotainment output. The infotainment system crashing will not take down your steering or braking.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Can confirm that. My xdrive unit in my BMW died a few months after buying, and everything worked, I could even hear the parking sensors even if I couldn’t see the camera feed anymore because that was piped through the X-drive unit.
- willvarfar 3y ago
  I have heard from industry insiders that this is true for some major manufacturers, and not for others. If the infotainment is integrated with the driving functions then every release of the infotainment system needs recertifying. Some manufacturers avoid this by having completely separate systems.
- foobazgt 3y ago
  Dear no, rather exactly the opposite. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if all new cars have the capability to reboot the display system in the middle of driving. You definitely don't want these systems intertwined. It has the side benefit of allowing you to do pretty aggressive things like using more modern hardware, software, etc. E.G. last time I checked, Tesla uses Godot for a decent amount of their UI.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Absolutely wrong. Infotainment systems in cars these days typically run on Linux, not a hard realtime OS, and are definitely not any kind of safety-critical system whatsoever. There's no need for it either; they're isolated from critical systems on the car, in case there's a problem (and there frequently is).
- yourusername 3y ago
  I don't think that's right. VAG's software is terrible and crashes all the time. I've been locked out of adjusting my AC on a long drive because the infotainment system crashed.
dntrkv 3y ago
The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult. Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder. And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies. Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so. The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.
  - fl7305 3y ago
    > infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought. Also, cars sell in the millions. Car manufacturers will redesign a circuit board if it will save them cents on each board. So it is always a struggle to put a more powerful CPU in there.
    - jimmaswell 3y ago
      Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?
    - 3y ago

Rayhem 3y ago

This is an incredibly myopic take bordering on arrogance. The infotainment system of a vehicle needs (as in, is mandated) to be as safety compliant as the rest of the vehicle's software so your steering doesn't lock out when the display crashes. Writing software for safety critical systems is not a task most developers are familiar with.

mulmen 3y ago
Uh, what? If my infotainment system is capable of influencing my steering or any safety-critical function then malpractice has been committed. Infotainment needs only read (one-way) capability on the vehicle.
- sterlind 3y ago
  I do wonder about the CAN bus. there's no access control on the CAN network, there's one shared bus for the whole car, and any controller can starve the bus by spamming with a high address, unless that's changed. you'd hope that there'd be some kind of filtering to prevent the infotainment system from sending (arbitrary) CAN messages, but I recall some crazy demos of researchers pwning a car's accelerator after rooting the center console.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    The Tesla Cybertruck doesn’t use CAN for steer-by-wire. It uses Gigabit Ethernet. According to my mechanic my ABS system is using something similar. CAN isn’t the only bus in the car. According to Wikipedia the LIN bus is intended to supplement CAN with non-critical components.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Most modern cars have more than one CAN bus. (And it’s lower ID messages which have priority over higher, which is more trivia than argument against your premise.)
  - fallingknife 3y ago
    Is that really a security issue, though? If someone has access to your center console, they have access to your car. If someone has access to your car, they can cut your brake lines or do a million other things that are impossible to defend against.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      The concern is that the attack could be carried out remotely. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig... is one such example (might be the one GP is referring to).
      - fallingknife 3y ago
        I agree that is a serious concern, then. I thought it sounded like voting machine hacking where the dramatic headlines are hiding the fact that the hackers had physical access to the machine.
        mulmen 3y ago
        Voting machines are scary for different reasons. 1) The general public has private physical access by design. 2) The chain of custody is unclear and hard to prove. This undermines trust in the system.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        That depends on the jurisdiction. When I voted in Maryland, there was a machine that I directly cast my vote into. When I vote where I live now in Massachusetts, I fill out a paper form in private and then I manually feed the forms into a voting machine where I have only supervised physical access. I think it's entirely possible to have machine-counted ballots without giving unfettered and unsupervised access to the counting machines and I prefer the MA system (for the reasons you describe), but I also recognize the Constitution is clear in its reserving the power to each state for how to conduct the election (at least for President) in Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.
blcArmadillo 3y ago
This is not correct. The main infotainment system is not considered safety critical. There are some functions such as rear view camera that are but often this is handled by a real time os that overlays the video on top of the infotainment output. The infotainment system crashing will not take down your steering or braking.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Can confirm that. My xdrive unit in my BMW died a few months after buying, and everything worked, I could even hear the parking sensors even if I couldn’t see the camera feed anymore because that was piped through the X-drive unit.
willvarfar 3y ago
I have heard from industry insiders that this is true for some major manufacturers, and not for others. If the infotainment is integrated with the driving functions then every release of the infotainment system needs recertifying. Some manufacturers avoid this by having completely separate systems.
foobazgt 3y ago
Dear no, rather exactly the opposite. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at this point if all new cars have the capability to reboot the display system in the middle of driving. You definitely don't want these systems intertwined. It has the side benefit of allowing you to do pretty aggressive things like using more modern hardware, software, etc. E.G. last time I checked, Tesla uses Godot for a decent amount of their UI.
shiroiuma 3y ago
Absolutely wrong. Infotainment systems in cars these days typically run on Linux, not a hard realtime OS, and are definitely not any kind of safety-critical system whatsoever. There's no need for it either; they're isolated from critical systems on the car, in case there's a problem (and there frequently is).
yourusername 3y ago
I don't think that's right. VAG's software is terrible and crashes all the time. I've been locked out of adjusting my AC on a long drive because the infotainment system crashed.

dntrkv 3y ago

The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult. Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder. And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies. Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.

jonathankoren 3y ago
Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so. The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.
- fl7305 3y ago
  > infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought. Also, cars sell in the millions. Car manufacturers will redesign a circuit board if it will save them cents on each board. So it is always a struggle to put a more powerful CPU in there.
  - jimmaswell 3y ago
    Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?
  - 3y ago