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As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software tale

As someone who works professionally on embedded software devices that update over the internet, car companies are stuck not because they can't get software talent, but because they have no ability to actually build the electronics alongside the software, which is ultimately what constrains embedded software. Without the right hardware, the constraints are just insurmountable, you can not do X feature because board A doesn't have the API to your MCU, or it runs some dogshit speed communication system that means you have 500ms lag. The feature is just unworkable, and if the PMs push it anyways you get what happens for the legacy car makers, terrible underpowered infotainment systems with no central design philosophy, stuck in an awkward, bad, middle between a full software stack and all buttons for everything. Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year.

averageRoyalty 1y ago
I understand the concept, but the question I have is why? These companies have huge wallets, and can surely scoop up a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? It seems like a problem than enough money could solve quickly, but they've been doing horribly at this for decades now.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  There have been attempts at it. Unfortunately, they consistently botch the execution so badly that most of the executives in the business have PTSD from the experience. And these were very expensive failures that become lore inside the companies. When they do acquisitions of small companies entering this market those end up getting smothered by the culture of the automotive companies. Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.
- tashoecraft 1y ago
  How many issues due large companies run into thinking they can just throw money at it? Just look at google and stadia, or amazon and their failed game studio. They have immense money and knowledge and ended up with nothing. Each car has dozens to 100+ ecus, written in different languages, by different teams, different requirements, and different companies. Some are proprietary. Ford can’t just tell Bosch, hey your abs module needs to now integrate with our api, multiplied by 100+ companies. The legacy car makers need to revisit everything, and move most of it in-house.
  - Peanuts99 1y ago
    At the same time, we've had car companies putting out cars for 20 years with 10s of different modules built by different companies and things have been working just fine. Suddenly it's a problem because apparently everyone needs a giant screen on the dashboard?
- Gigachad 1y ago
  The talent might not exist. Software development has been seen as the preferable career over electrical engineering for a long time now.
  - ohthatsnotright 1y ago
    When I started my career I had a very keen interest in the embedded space, but when it pays half of what CRUD webapps pay I quickly changed to software only. I still tinker with embedded on the side and maybe at some point I can justify the cut in pay to go back to something I'd prefer to work on.
- whatever1 1y ago
  The answer is that current car platforms were designed with flexibility as first goal. Car companies realized early on they could outsource component development and production to 3rd parties and they could make them bid each other to further lower the prices. So their platforms were optimized to be able to swap component vendors very easily (to achieve lowest costs). Of course the vendors are not 100% interchangeable and building a platform to accommodate everyone has to make sacrifices.Aka target the least common denominator across all vendors.
  - liveoneggs 1y ago
    too bad computers aren't spark plugs
    - whatever1 1y ago
      To be fair, this seemed to be the right strategy since they were able to be profitable in a very crowded market. Yes, the new companies try to verticalize everything from components to software, but none of them seem profitable (marginally Tesla passes the bar, but not so sure if you took away all the subsidies and carbon offsets). So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?
      - garyfirestorm 1y ago
        I can tell you this works if your product doesn’t need frequent upgrades/updates and isn’t cohesive. In legacy auto world, you ask for one line of code change and the supplier slaps 100k bill. This is generally why things look old, outdated, carried over and buggy.
        whatever1 1y ago
        I totally agree with what you say. I am just not sure if the car market is willing to pay a premium to have this nicer fully integrated experience. Maybe there is space for a couple of premium makers.
- bsder 1y ago
  Because the auto companies outsource everything, lay the risk onto the outsourced companies and expect that some significant percentage of them will go bankrupt every year. With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.
  - datavirtue 1y ago
    Smells like Boeing.
- garyfirestorm 1y ago
  I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’ This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy. Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff. And you’re left with bunch of MBAs trying to wing it in what is available which is - no talent, bunch of admineers, and a long list of supplier bills. They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I can go on and on about this, but one of us even tried to be Tesla trying to build our own zonal architecture - and are currently struggling due to costs, tarrifs and turnover. Also you can’t overnight change this mindset - building vs assembling. But there has to be some way and I’m too about to walk out the door due to ~10yrs of frustrations.
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    > They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems... So they've just chosen death. Fantastic, great to hear.
    - pjc50 1y ago
      Well, yes. The legacy car companies are ossified. They want to keep churning out minute variations on the same cars, and regard software as a thin layer for the entertainment system. They don't want to adapt to EVs, which force a redesign of the car as a whole. They're going to get run over by Chinese companies unless they can beg for tariffs to prop up their un-innovation.
  - doodlebugging 1y ago
    > They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please. When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000 That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits. EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now that this would only be one small change that saved an inconsequential amount of money. But each group is incentivized to produce minor changes like this that save small amounts and that those amounts do add to substantial savings and help complete the process of enshittification of the ownership and driving experience for those who choose to buy one of these vehicles.
- lmm 1y ago
  They don't have a culture that values it, at any level. Historically hardware was important and software was a nice-to-have addon cost center. That's the mentality that the people at the top are still in, and it trickles down.
- Mashimo 1y ago
  > a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? I think in a lot of cases that would be Bosch, which is huge.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago
  They did the opposite for decades in the hope to save some bucks, they outsourced everything so only business people remained. Worse this really grew into a culture of entitlement where only a ready to use product is acceptable. There is no R&D anymore, there are people looking to buy solutions that don't exist for car makers.
- speeder 1y ago
  I worked at BMW. I knew there was a project in there, using a certain ECU that was being quite problematic (as in, project being slightly late because ECU was a bit buggy and sometimes crashed when it was supposed to have almost 100% of uptime for legal reasons). You ask: Why BMW doesn't just buy the ECU manufacturer? Well... the company that was selling the ECU to BMW, is BIGGER than BMW. Even if BMW sold 100% of its assets and stock, it wouldn't have enough money to buy the ECU manufacturer.
trhway 1y ago
>Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers The iPhone on wheels paradigm shift has been stated like a decade ago and as usually the incumbents just can’t cross it while at the same time the new companies are successfully exploiting it. Not surprisingly it coincides with EV transition - both are enabled by cheap electronics and EV voids incumbents’ ICE tech moat.
typewithrhythm 1y ago
This is only half the story, working for a major vendor, we sell both hardware and software, the whole way up to a full customisable well integrated platform. The manufacturers are deliberately choosing less capable systems, or taking thing piecemeal. Most of our customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money... They tend to either want either a set of features checked off (only for existence, not quality), or something along the lines of get as close to a rivian with thirty cents per unit more than we paid last year.
- trueismywork 1y ago
  You only have to develop those interfaces once for high end cars and get your money there. Rest is then just one of the small modifications.
  - typewithrhythm 1y ago
    Not at all, a high end car will use an entirely different architecture to a mid/low end... When you target a certain feature set it can make sense to use one big central processor, for lower end things it's more sensible to use limited smart sensors (from multiple vendors, for absolute cost minimums). And it's generally not cost effective to move an old high trim platform down range due to changes in hardware and regulations.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      What you mean by different architecture here? I've never seen a situation where manufacturers choose fundamentally different architectures between price points on the same platform. I feel like I'm misunderstanding what you mean though.
      - typewithrhythm 1y ago
        Someone like Ford for example will have several software platforms, some for low cost vehicles, some high, some that are adaptable between trim levels. So as you go up in features on some model "the BigTruk" you might be going through variations of one sw platform, or jumping between platforms. Some have several platforms for high and low cost based on centralised vs distributed, so for example an s class will not have much software or hardware shared with an a class.
omega3 1y ago
> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?
- smallmancontrov 1y ago
  It is possible to put out a fire by dumping cash on it, but there's a minimum amount that you need to dump at once for it to work. They cannot stomach the amount required, so they just feed it in one handful at a time, which of course just causes the fire to grow.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  I’m not sure if you’ve worked around hardware but a year is not very long in these environments, and that 5 year plan is less like a sensible, let alone obvious step to take and more like a crazy leap of faith. You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not. It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.
  - jve 1y ago
    Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place. Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well. While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Because they are not electronics companies, and further more they are terrible integration companies. Unless the top of the company comes in and starts chopping every head that gets in the way of the new paradigm then it just ends up in locked up meetings for years of people that don't want to change. Electronics integration isn't the problem, the people currently there are.
Waterluvian 1y ago
I feel like Subaru Eyesight violates this, which is why I’m so surprised with it. It’s a stereo camera system that just works so darn well. I’ve got to imagine the hardware that runs it is not insignificant.
latchkey 1y ago
I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing... https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/
- tw04 1y ago
  That’s always been the case with Tesla. I still have no idea how the yoke with no progressive steering and a tiny button for a horn ever passed any sanity check. Not to mention the NHTSA.
  - latchkey 1y ago
    Oh, I wish they would install tiny horn buttons on all the vehicles in Vietnam! In that country, the horn is a method of communication, much to the ire of literally everyone trying to exist.
    - gerdesj 1y ago
      Excessive horning (made up word) is not just a Vietnamese thing. Italy is probably Europe's worst offender, with Greece a close contender. I'm not so familiar with Asia, but I get the impression that the entirety of Indian and most of Chinese drivers feel the need to lean on the horn with gay abandon (fnarr). In Britain the horn is generally reserved for "fuck that was close: I think you are a bit of a tosser" or "you are driving a German car and seem to have have no indicators".
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        Horns were disabled in Chongqing at least a couple of decades ago. I’m not sure what it’s like now though, but the government in China can and will deal with excessive horning using means we wouldn’t consider in the west.
whatever1 1y ago
This also works the opposite way. If the software roadmap does not inform the hardware requirements, then minimization of the bill of materials will lead to the selection of crappy hardware chips.
- mmmBacon 1y ago
  If you’re making very low end HW maybe this is true. Because HW is something that you put into the real world there are other constraints such as power, cooling, space, security of supply, ability to ramp, cost, reliability, etc. The calculus for HW selection is much more involved than simply SW. Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. This is a very rare skill in 2025. Most SW engineers I’ve encountered cannot explain stack vs heap. Furthermore even fewer understand how to use malloc correctly.
  - DanielHB 1y ago
    > Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. It also takes much more time and requires a different set of talents. Often just using a bigger chip is better than investing the R&D. The best analogy I can make is trying to make your own custom rendering engine and then code the UI in it or just use a browser and writing JS. Even if you do make it, your own custom rendering engine will probably cut a lot of features like fancy animations.
- Johanx64 1y ago
  Blaming hardware people rubs me the wrong way. People just use android and javascript front-end. It's not crappy hardware by miles, crappy hardware as a category doesn't even exist these days. It's hardware that can run everything necessary hundreds of times over, but shitty bloatland sloppy javascript it + android bloat it can not.
mikepurvis 1y ago
I’m in a loaner 2025 Volvo right now and I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised with the Android Auto setup. I thought I’d never again use anything other than phone projection, but nope — I can install Google Maps and Spotify and sign into both, and then my profiles and everything are right there including search history, and it’s actually more seamless and integrated than switching between CarPlay and the native/outer car UI.
- seszett 1y ago
  Why did you think you'd "never again" use anything like Android Auto? My own car is too old for Android Auto, but I sometimes drive a car that's from 2017 or so, and Android Auto works just fine on it, it's a pleasure to use (with the caveat that the phone has to be plugged in the USB port, wireless came later). So to me it seems like it always worked well.
  - mikepurvis 1y ago
    Overall I’m a fan of the projection model, and I definitely see the benefit in longevity as well as the ability for older vehicles to get a retrofit head unit that adds in the projection interface. My reflection was only that I was surprised at how well the built in apps worked when I tried them… but I definitely take it on board that it’s unlikely to still work this well 5, 10, or 15 years from now, so it’s important that the car still has projection available as a fallback.
- cornholio 1y ago
  Give it five years and it will be guaranteed garbage. Spotify will refuse to run on an unsupported older Android without the latest DRM API, while Google Maps will crash your system randomly, requiring you to disconnect the car battery to jumpstart it again. Volvo will offer you an upgrade of their proprietary device at the low price of $1899. It's puzzling to see this push for general computing on devices that need to far outlast the typical release cycle of GC devices. There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car. If your consumer hardware needs to last for decades, then the core functionality and automation should be provided by sturdy embedded computers that are self-contained and do not require any kind of network access or regular updates, while the general computing functions functions should be provided by the user's own device or a replaceable/upgradable computer with a standardized interface.
analog31 1y ago
>>> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Naturally, there must be some scale threshold where this is true, so I don't doubt your experience. And my workplace doesn't make anything as elaborate as a car, or with such stringent reliability specs. But my experience is that hardware is always finished before software.
- ska 1y ago
  FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …
- acheron9383 1y ago
  I mean the EEs / MEs can certainly turn out a board and housing in under 6 months, certainly on a yearly cycle. Though for the current automakers, they don't have a team for this so it would take them probably 3 iterations to get good enough to actually scale it to a mass market car, and that is if their team has good talent and strong leadership.
brightball 1y ago
It was encouraging to hear an exec from Ford recently say essentially this in an interview. The legacy manufacturers seem to realize that Tesla is eating their lunch because of their lack of vertical integration. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve but will be interesting to see what effort achieves.
- cusaitech 1y ago
  Was it the one with Verge?
- metadat 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - brightball 1y ago
    It’s led to some great deals
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2025-production-deliveries-and-deployments https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2025-... Apparently, 300k+ people in 2025 Q1, and that is with a refresh in the most popular model happening in March (presumably people who would have bought held off until the new one came out and will buy in Q2 or beyond). For comparison, this is 2024 Q1: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-deliveries-and-date-financial-results-webcast-first-quarter-2024 https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - LeonM 1y ago
    I don't understand this sentiment. Should all VW drivers have a "I hate Hitler" sticker on their car too? Because in case you aren't aware: VW was started by the German Labour Front (part of the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler himself oversaw early development of the first models. Why the need to apologize for the CEO of the company that you buy products from? Should we also have an "I hate Foxconn" sticker on every Apple device?
megamix 1y ago
Are the PM women or not qualified?
rustcleaner 1y ago
>Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Maybe it's time for an 'OpenCar' project, where a "standard car" model is designed for (all cars have ECUs, light controls, HVAC, etc), and there's also a kind of natural demarcation that could exist like between drivers (engine performance characteristics, etc) and operating system (the overall "standard car" model). We don't write custom OSes for each PC make and model, why the flying f*** are car manufacturers all d***ing around doing their own things independently? I think cheap China cars will finally kill the bloated US auto sector, and it will be a great time for the government to bail them out at a cost: they must design and manufacture parts to a national "open standard" in addition to any proprietary designs they choose to make. If they come up with a novel technology redesign for a part in the standards vehicle, the design must be open even if a patent for exclusive marketing of the improved part, as long as the part is not mandated. Automakers who don't participate don't get the competitive incentives. There should be a figurative x86/amd64 car, an ARM truck, etc. Think: volkswagens! There needs to be evergreen design in the standards cars: new parts made 30 years later should generally still fit, so it should have much looser regulations which would otherwise kill it off in a few years (like EPA regulations murdered the small truck). It must be made much harder to put customers on the rentier treadmill. Planned obsolescence and proprietary design are two important tools to the rentier, along with copyright and DMCA. Look at China: better to strengthen your people and production even if it means chasing price gouging software houses off, because China demonstrated you can just steal the software in the future and improve upon it. What matters is the soil, minerals, metals, food, and production. People need materials to survive, they don't need frilly whirlie-gig flashy wazoo SaaS applications which cost monthly. Zynga's original business model should not be viable in an ideal world, but this is the world of the NPC and the cryptoshamanic advertising industry.
- rfl890 1y ago
  A nice thought experiment, but I doubt the US will ever do something as pro-consumer as this.
ErigmolCt 1y ago
You're right that legacy OEMs can't pivot overnight and start fabbing their own boards, but unless they move toward tighter integration of hardware and software (or lock down long-term partnerships that function like internal teams), they’re going to stay in this awkward middle ground.
TylerE 1y ago
As much as everyone used to clown on Tesla for it, the vast majority of cars would be better off with an iPad glued to the dash.
- arkh 1y ago
  Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.
  - LeonM 1y ago
    For those unaware: the Volkswagen Up! is a small, low-budget car produced by VW group, it's also sold as the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii. AFAIK it was only sold in Europe and Latin-America. A family member had a early-gen Up!, and the OEM display (build by Navigon) that sat on top of the dashboard was removable, but used a proprietary connection, not USB. I believe it snapped on with magnets, which I remember thinking was quite nice. The detachability was mostly for anti-theft reasons I presume, but quite quickly an aftermarket started to form to replace the OEM screen with other options, including phone mounts. I don't think VW envisioned that, but I thought that a detachable mount for aftermarket satnav, phone mounts or other accessories was quite smart. I did wonder why they didn't just make it a phone mount as standard so you can basically BYOD, which could lower the price of the car further and probably be a better experience anyway. > Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp. Thanks to your comment I looked into it again, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see the newer generation Up! actually does have a OEM phone mount now, how cool! From what I just read it uses an app to integrate with some of the car's features. More car manufacturers should do this for their budget cars. Have a few physical buttons for controlling built-in functions (namely HVAC), and let the user's phone provide the entertainment, navigation and other driving aids. Maybe even ditch the radio interface, and just have an amplifier and speakers build in. It's a shame that phone OSes are moving away from on-device 'driving mode' in favor of Android Auto and Apple Carplay. I get it though, larger screen makes for easier controls and thus safer to interact with while driving, but still...
DanielHB 1y ago
I worked in similar systems and you are 100% right. 80% of the time was spent on communication protocols between the different boards and microcontrollers. QAing and solving issues from short-sighted dozens of unique custom protocols that worked in non-standard ways (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented). When you have dozens of communication lines required between different parts of the system it becomes just as complicated as your average micro-service cloud. Really, a car is a distributed system with dozens of "services". An analogy is that each microcontroller-microcontroller communication use their own custom binary-encoding API that runs on multiple different, incompatible versions of HTTP. We actually spent considerable amount of time just developing our own custom protocol for communication that could run on all sorts of different physical interfaces (CAN, ethernet, modbus, etc) as well as a series of proxies between devices (so component A can talk to component C through a proxy in component B). And if we had to use a custom protocol from an external manufacturer we had to wrap it into our own custom protocol. That protocol was actually used for our cloud data reporting as well, so eventually all our data communication would use a single unified protocol from micro-controller to IoT Linux to cloud data-ingestion pipeline to database.
- chii 1y ago
  > (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented). i'm sure that every time this happens, it individually makes sense to do it at the time. This is a microcosm of how large systems get developed in small pieces, by different people, over a long(-ish) period of time. It's the same in the software world too i think, but presumably has a lot more consolidation than cars (as software for cars might be less common, and thus employees moving between companies is unlikely to make any sort of cross-pollination like there would be for FAANG-like companies).
- pydry 1y ago
  This makes it sound like the problem is that they either lack a person with architectural responsibility for the cars' electronics as a whole or that person lacks the skills necessary to do their job.
  - 1y ago
kev009 1y ago
This is weird because the microprocessor industry owes a lot of early success to automotive companies. Motorola 6800, Intel 8061 (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vault/articles/book-ford.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vaul...) etc. Quoting wikipedia: "the name "Motorola" by linking "motor" (from motor car) with "ola" (from Victrola), which was also a popular ending for many companies at the time, e.g. Moviola, Crayola" TI has some powerful automotive SoCs like the AM69A/TDA4AH (https://www.ti.com/ds_dgm/images/fbd_sprsp79b.svg https://www.ti.com/ds_dgm/images/fbd_sprsp79b.svg) that target the industry.. 8 Cortex-A72s, a full GPU, multiple Cortex R5Fs that can lockstep, and a bunch of powerful C7000 DSPs. The SDK is probably not awesome as embedded BSPs tend to be but the SoC should be workable. That should be plenty of compute. So what is really going on, and what happened?
- jameshart 1y ago
  Motorola were a car radio company originally
raxxorraxor 1y ago
As an embedded developer I usually point to the fact that there is generalist hard and software available for the primitive problem an infotainment systems needs to solve. At least for that side I don't see how generalist pc hardware wouldn't suffice and fit probably 95% of use cases. At least that is how I build my self-made system, which is quite awesome compared to solutions you generally see in cars. Not for the average consumer, but classic car makers can do much better with a bit of courage.
drcongo 1y ago
Back when there were all the rumours of an Apple car, I was hoping that this was actually what they were working on.
gizmo 1y ago
Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know. I completely agree that vertical integration and building your own software stack from the ground up is the correct approach, but that's not the root cause of the problem. A better explanation here is that when all brands have awful infotainment systems then there is no consumer choice that forces competition.
MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
This seems like it is also a „purchase department got the cheapest crap instead of something reasonable“ problem. You don’t need to actually make your own electronics if the specs are decent and the features match your needs.
DanielHB 1y ago
Just to add one more thing to your point, if embedded devs work really hard and make the code work faster/better all reward you get is an _even_ more underpowered chip for the next version. Hardware procurement is cut-throat, sometimes they have mandates to reduce component costs and the procurement people WILL reach them. Often procurement > product in the power dynamics so no matter how bad the product gets those people still do it because the software gets the blame for bad product, not procurement who forced a bad chip to be used. The infotainment is usually the #1 chip to be cut down because it is often the single most expensive electronics part in the system that can be "easily" swapped for a different part.
- cebert 1y ago
  If the OEM stayed with the same chip for several years, wouldn’t the price go down over time?
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Car OEMs are modern day colonial plantation owners, they know cost structures of suppliers and schedule their price cuts. They already have an annual cost saving quota. Prices don't just go down but go down just-in-time. It would make zero sense if I drive to a Walmart and demand they sell to me with monotonically lowering prices as function of date since registration of my reward card, but in cars they do.
    - analog31 1y ago
      Ironically, this method of managing suppliers was perfected by Wal-Mart.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
        LOL. That's what I was thinking too.
- Gareth321 1y ago
  Your account sounds accurate, but how fitting then that their cost cutting focus is losing them customers and potentially their entire company. VW is losing the EV war. Most manufacturers have already lost. Tesla and BYD are going to eat everyone's lunch. They either need to revolutionise their approach, or they're toast. I suspect they'll attempt to milk their existing supply chains into bankruptcy.
ricardobeat 1y ago
> you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year The Model S came out in 2012 so they’ve had well over a decade to catch up.
eek2121 1y ago
Agreed! They also want to treat it as a new revenue stream rather than as a value add, which ultimately hurts them. We end users don’t want to pay a subscription for our car. Especially for things we already get for free on our phone.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > We end users don’t want to pay a subscription for our car. Especially for things we already get for free on our phone. I’m sure I’m in the minority, but I pay for ad-free navigation.
yellow_postit 1y ago
The VW and Rivian tie up for electronics will help answer if a traditional automaker can catch up if the electronics integration bit is taken off the table.
xnx 1y ago
How much extra work have automakers made for themselves by pridefully(?) refusing to use Android Automotive to handle some of the very things that auto makers are worse at?
amarant 1y ago
Sounds like a potential business opportunity! I don't know much about cars, how much is standardized in car electronics? Would it be possible to build a infotainment module that you could sell to several car manufacturers with only minimal modifications? I think I've heard of something called an ICANN(?) bus that is used to communicate stuff in cars and is fairly standardised, maybe?
- joezydeco 1y ago
  It's CAN, and it's old serial technology. There are already companies doing 3rd party electronics as mentioned above, such as Visteon and Continental, and Garmin is trying to get into that business too.
- dbolgheroni 1y ago
  That's what many OEMs have been doing for decades and this is exactly what many SDV have been trying to get rid of, since integrating many different products from many different manufacturers are slow, let alone iterating and designing new features. Related to CAN, the bus is standard, but the thing is, CAN is just a bus, not a protocol. There are many ways you can have two ECUs (vehicle's modules) talking in incompatible ways.
- zhengyi13 1y ago
  ITYM "CAN bus" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus Pioneer has been selling standard-sized Android Auto head units for over a decade at this point.
gorkish 1y ago
I had one of the most popular published projects on mp3car.com back in the heyday. It actually got me into a few strange meetings with companies that were actually building this stuff, like Clarion. I had literally designed, built, and installed a superior product to what they shipped as a one-off for fun in 3 months, but to them I was just a token enthusiast. The vocabulary that these people started throwing out was absolute nonsense. It was pretty evident that "vehicle informatics" was fucked the second someone said those words out loud. And here we are more than 20 years later and still no closer to getting it right. Despite being seemingly well regarded, even Tesla's in car systems are just awful. And it's more impossible than ever to fix, modify, or replace on your own.
chipsrafferty 1y ago
Why not just use iPads or some Android tablet? Why some shitty embedded system and not a real computer?

averageRoyalty 1y ago

I understand the concept, but the question I have is why? These companies have huge wallets, and can surely scoop up a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? It seems like a problem than enough money could solve quickly, but they've been doing horribly at this for decades now.

jandrewrogers 1y ago
There have been attempts at it. Unfortunately, they consistently botch the execution so badly that most of the executives in the business have PTSD from the experience. And these were very expensive failures that become lore inside the companies. When they do acquisitions of small companies entering this market those end up getting smothered by the culture of the automotive companies. Everyone has spent a mountain of money on this problem but spent it all assiduously avoiding addressing the root causes.
tashoecraft 1y ago
How many issues due large companies run into thinking they can just throw money at it? Just look at google and stadia, or amazon and their failed game studio. They have immense money and knowledge and ended up with nothing. Each car has dozens to 100+ ecus, written in different languages, by different teams, different requirements, and different companies. Some are proprietary. Ford can’t just tell Bosch, hey your abs module needs to now integrate with our api, multiplied by 100+ companies. The legacy car makers need to revisit everything, and move most of it in-house.
- Peanuts99 1y ago
  At the same time, we've had car companies putting out cars for 20 years with 10s of different modules built by different companies and things have been working just fine. Suddenly it's a problem because apparently everyone needs a giant screen on the dashboard?
Gigachad 1y ago
The talent might not exist. Software development has been seen as the preferable career over electrical engineering for a long time now.
- ohthatsnotright 1y ago
  When I started my career I had a very keen interest in the embedded space, but when it pays half of what CRUD webapps pay I quickly changed to software only. I still tinker with embedded on the side and maybe at some point I can justify the cut in pay to go back to something I'd prefer to work on.
whatever1 1y ago
The answer is that current car platforms were designed with flexibility as first goal. Car companies realized early on they could outsource component development and production to 3rd parties and they could make them bid each other to further lower the prices. So their platforms were optimized to be able to swap component vendors very easily (to achieve lowest costs). Of course the vendors are not 100% interchangeable and building a platform to accommodate everyone has to make sacrifices.Aka target the least common denominator across all vendors.
- liveoneggs 1y ago
  too bad computers aren't spark plugs
  - whatever1 1y ago
    To be fair, this seemed to be the right strategy since they were able to be profitable in a very crowded market. Yes, the new companies try to verticalize everything from components to software, but none of them seem profitable (marginally Tesla passes the bar, but not so sure if you took away all the subsidies and carbon offsets). So maybe the legacy guys were right all along?
    - garyfirestorm 1y ago
      I can tell you this works if your product doesn’t need frequent upgrades/updates and isn’t cohesive. In legacy auto world, you ask for one line of code change and the supplier slaps 100k bill. This is generally why things look old, outdated, carried over and buggy.
      - whatever1 1y ago
        I totally agree with what you say. I am just not sure if the car market is willing to pay a premium to have this nicer fully integrated experience. Maybe there is space for a couple of premium makers.
bsder 1y ago
Because the auto companies outsource everything, lay the risk onto the outsourced companies and expect that some significant percentage of them will go bankrupt every year. With that kind of adversarial relationship, you are never getting anything above the barest minimum of competence.
- datavirtue 1y ago
  Smells like Boeing.
garyfirestorm 1y ago
I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’ This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy. Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff. And you’re left with bunch of MBAs trying to wing it in what is available which is - no talent, bunch of admineers, and a long list of supplier bills. They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I can go on and on about this, but one of us even tried to be Tesla trying to build our own zonal architecture - and are currently struggling due to costs, tarrifs and turnover. Also you can’t overnight change this mindset - building vs assembling. But there has to be some way and I’m too about to walk out the door due to ~10yrs of frustrations.
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  > They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems... So they've just chosen death. Fantastic, great to hear.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Well, yes. The legacy car companies are ossified. They want to keep churning out minute variations on the same cars, and regard software as a thin layer for the entertainment system. They don't want to adapt to EVs, which force a redesign of the car as a whole. They're going to get run over by Chinese companies unless they can beg for tariffs to prop up their un-innovation.
- doodlebugging 1y ago
  > They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I'm tired. Been out in the sun all day. Explain this to me please. When I do the math I get 500000 * $0.05 = $25000 That's a small drop in a large bucket of their gross income or net profits. EDIT: Harsh sun must've burned a few of my processors. I see now that this would only be one small change that saved an inconsequential amount of money. But each group is incentivized to produce minor changes like this that save small amounts and that those amounts do add to substantial savings and help complete the process of enshittification of the ownership and driving experience for those who choose to buy one of these vehicles.
lmm 1y ago
They don't have a culture that values it, at any level. Historically hardware was important and software was a nice-to-have addon cost center. That's the mentality that the people at the top are still in, and it trickles down.
Mashimo 1y ago
> a smaller automative microcontroller company and bring it in-house? I think in a lot of cases that would be Bosch, which is huge.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
They did the opposite for decades in the hope to save some bucks, they outsourced everything so only business people remained. Worse this really grew into a culture of entitlement where only a ready to use product is acceptable. There is no R&D anymore, there are people looking to buy solutions that don't exist for car makers.
speeder 1y ago
I worked at BMW. I knew there was a project in there, using a certain ECU that was being quite problematic (as in, project being slightly late because ECU was a bit buggy and sometimes crashed when it was supposed to have almost 100% of uptime for legal reasons). You ask: Why BMW doesn't just buy the ECU manufacturer? Well... the company that was selling the ECU to BMW, is BIGGER than BMW. Even if BMW sold 100% of its assets and stock, it wouldn't have enough money to buy the ECU manufacturer.

trhway 1y ago

>Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers The iPhone on wheels paradigm shift has been stated like a decade ago and as usually the incumbents just can’t cross it while at the same time the new companies are successfully exploiting it. Not surprisingly it coincides with EV transition - both are enabled by cheap electronics and EV voids incumbents’ ICE tech moat.

typewithrhythm 1y ago

This is only half the story, working for a major vendor, we sell both hardware and software, the whole way up to a full customisable well integrated platform. The manufacturers are deliberately choosing less capable systems, or taking thing piecemeal. Most of our customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money... They tend to either want either a set of features checked off (only for existence, not quality), or something along the lines of get as close to a rivian with thirty cents per unit more than we paid last year.

trueismywork 1y ago
You only have to develop those interfaces once for high end cars and get your money there. Rest is then just one of the small modifications.
- typewithrhythm 1y ago
  Not at all, a high end car will use an entirely different architecture to a mid/low end... When you target a certain feature set it can make sense to use one big central processor, for lower end things it's more sensible to use limited smart sensors (from multiple vendors, for absolute cost minimums). And it's generally not cost effective to move an old high trim platform down range due to changes in hardware and regulations.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    What you mean by different architecture here? I've never seen a situation where manufacturers choose fundamentally different architectures between price points on the same platform. I feel like I'm misunderstanding what you mean though.
    - typewithrhythm 1y ago
      Someone like Ford for example will have several software platforms, some for low cost vehicles, some high, some that are adaptable between trim levels. So as you go up in features on some model "the BigTruk" you might be going through variations of one sw platform, or jumping between platforms. Some have several platforms for high and low cost based on centralised vs distributed, so for example an s class will not have much software or hardware shared with an a class.

omega3 1y ago

> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Why? A year is a long time and it's a solved problem. In any case even if you allow the "a year is not enough" argument why didn't they start 5 years ago?

smallmancontrov 1y ago
It is possible to put out a fire by dumping cash on it, but there's a minimum amount that you need to dump at once for it to work. They cannot stomach the amount required, so they just feed it in one handful at a time, which of course just causes the fire to grow.
steve_adams_86 1y ago
I’m not sure if you’ve worked around hardware but a year is not very long in these environments, and that 5 year plan is less like a sensible, let alone obvious step to take and more like a crazy leap of faith. You don’t know that vertical integration will guarantee that you’re more competitive, and the investment you need to make before you see a return is beyond 5 years. That’s not an easy bet to make. It looks obvious in retrospect, but it’s really not. It requires quite a bit of in-housing that many of these teams aren’t yet well-versed in, so as you vertically integrate you’re also disrupting your internal structure while adding new people. It’s a lot to take on. Meanwhile, there are other long term plans underway already.
- jve 1y ago
  Hm, reading this thread makes me realize that one of the reasons why Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/Crew Dragon UI can move so fast is by using Linux all over the place. Of course on itself it may not help, but along with other tricks like going agile with hardware does the job pretty well. While others are doing their hardware iterations that last for years, software defined stuff may be easier.
pixl97 1y ago
Because they are not electronics companies, and further more they are terrible integration companies. Unless the top of the company comes in and starts chopping every head that gets in the way of the new paradigm then it just ends up in locked up meetings for years of people that don't want to change. Electronics integration isn't the problem, the people currently there are.

Waterluvian 1y ago

I feel like Subaru Eyesight violates this, which is why I’m so surprised with it. It’s a stereo camera system that just works so darn well. I’ve got to imagine the hardware that runs it is not insignificant.

latchkey 1y ago

I'm getting IG videos in my feed for a company that sells after market fixes because older Teslas have such poorly designed electronics, that they fail in common ways. The memory goes bad because they write useless logs to a chip, and it eventually fails. End users are beta testing... https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINADISyP0f/

tw04 1y ago
That’s always been the case with Tesla. I still have no idea how the yoke with no progressive steering and a tiny button for a horn ever passed any sanity check. Not to mention the NHTSA.
- latchkey 1y ago
  Oh, I wish they would install tiny horn buttons on all the vehicles in Vietnam! In that country, the horn is a method of communication, much to the ire of literally everyone trying to exist.
  - gerdesj 1y ago
    Excessive horning (made up word) is not just a Vietnamese thing. Italy is probably Europe's worst offender, with Greece a close contender. I'm not so familiar with Asia, but I get the impression that the entirety of Indian and most of Chinese drivers feel the need to lean on the horn with gay abandon (fnarr). In Britain the horn is generally reserved for "fuck that was close: I think you are a bit of a tosser" or "you are driving a German car and seem to have have no indicators".
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      Horns were disabled in Chongqing at least a couple of decades ago. I’m not sure what it’s like now though, but the government in China can and will deal with excessive horning using means we wouldn’t consider in the west.

whatever1 1y ago

This also works the opposite way. If the software roadmap does not inform the hardware requirements, then minimization of the bill of materials will lead to the selection of crappy hardware chips.

mmmBacon 1y ago
If you’re making very low end HW maybe this is true. Because HW is something that you put into the real world there are other constraints such as power, cooling, space, security of supply, ability to ramp, cost, reliability, etc. The calculus for HW selection is much more involved than simply SW. Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. This is a very rare skill in 2025. Most SW engineers I’ve encountered cannot explain stack vs heap. Furthermore even fewer understand how to use malloc correctly.
- DanielHB 1y ago
  > Good SW/FW can be performant on much less capable HW but it does mean that SW engineers need to understand more about the HW. It also takes much more time and requires a different set of talents. Often just using a bigger chip is better than investing the R&D. The best analogy I can make is trying to make your own custom rendering engine and then code the UI in it or just use a browser and writing JS. Even if you do make it, your own custom rendering engine will probably cut a lot of features like fancy animations.
Johanx64 1y ago
Blaming hardware people rubs me the wrong way. People just use android and javascript front-end. It's not crappy hardware by miles, crappy hardware as a category doesn't even exist these days. It's hardware that can run everything necessary hundreds of times over, but shitty bloatland sloppy javascript it + android bloat it can not.

mikepurvis 1y ago

I’m in a loaner 2025 Volvo right now and I’ve honestly been pleasantly surprised with the Android Auto setup. I thought I’d never again use anything other than phone projection, but nope — I can install Google Maps and Spotify and sign into both, and then my profiles and everything are right there including search history, and it’s actually more seamless and integrated than switching between CarPlay and the native/outer car UI.

seszett 1y ago
Why did you think you'd "never again" use anything like Android Auto? My own car is too old for Android Auto, but I sometimes drive a car that's from 2017 or so, and Android Auto works just fine on it, it's a pleasure to use (with the caveat that the phone has to be plugged in the USB port, wireless came later). So to me it seems like it always worked well.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  Overall I’m a fan of the projection model, and I definitely see the benefit in longevity as well as the ability for older vehicles to get a retrofit head unit that adds in the projection interface. My reflection was only that I was surprised at how well the built in apps worked when I tried them… but I definitely take it on board that it’s unlikely to still work this well 5, 10, or 15 years from now, so it’s important that the car still has projection available as a fallback.
cornholio 1y ago
Give it five years and it will be guaranteed garbage. Spotify will refuse to run on an unsupported older Android without the latest DRM API, while Google Maps will crash your system randomly, requiring you to disconnect the car battery to jumpstart it again. Volvo will offer you an upgrade of their proprietary device at the low price of $1899. It's puzzling to see this push for general computing on devices that need to far outlast the typical release cycle of GC devices. There is nothing good that can come out of installing Android in your TV, fridge, let alone a - for fuck's sake! - a car. If your consumer hardware needs to last for decades, then the core functionality and automation should be provided by sturdy embedded computers that are self-contained and do not require any kind of network access or regular updates, while the general computing functions functions should be provided by the user's own device or a replaceable/upgradable computer with a standardized interface.

analog31 1y ago

>>> But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Naturally, there must be some scale threshold where this is true, so I don't doubt your experience. And my workplace doesn't make anything as elaborate as a car, or with such stringent reliability specs. But my experience is that hardware is always finished before software.

ska 1y ago
FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …
acheron9383 1y ago
I mean the EEs / MEs can certainly turn out a board and housing in under 6 months, certainly on a yearly cycle. Though for the current automakers, they don't have a team for this so it would take them probably 3 iterations to get good enough to actually scale it to a mass market car, and that is if their team has good talent and strong leadership.

brightball 1y ago

It was encouraging to hear an exec from Ford recently say essentially this in an interview. The legacy manufacturers seem to realize that Tesla is eating their lunch because of their lack of vertical integration. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve but will be interesting to see what effort achieves.

cusaitech 1y ago
Was it the one with Verge?
metadat 1y ago
[flagged]
- brightball 1y ago
  It’s led to some great deals
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2025-production-deliveries-and-deployments https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2025-... Apparently, 300k+ people in 2025 Q1, and that is with a refresh in the most popular model happening in March (presumably people who would have bought held off until the new one came out and will buy in Q2 or beyond). For comparison, this is 2024 Q1: https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-deliveries-and-date-financial-results-webcast-first-quarter-2024 https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-vehicle-production-...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- LeonM 1y ago
  I don't understand this sentiment. Should all VW drivers have a "I hate Hitler" sticker on their car too? Because in case you aren't aware: VW was started by the German Labour Front (part of the Nazi party). Adolf Hitler himself oversaw early development of the first models. Why the need to apologize for the CEO of the company that you buy products from? Should we also have an "I hate Foxconn" sticker on every Apple device?

megamix 1y ago

Are the PM women or not qualified?

rustcleaner 1y ago

>Their model of integrating 3rd party vendor computers just doesn't really work for this kind of thing; Tesla, Rivian, and the Chinese EV makers all manufacture all their own electronics, which lets them achieve the outcome. But you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year. Maybe it's time for an 'OpenCar' project, where a "standard car" model is designed for (all cars have ECUs, light controls, HVAC, etc), and there's also a kind of natural demarcation that could exist like between drivers (engine performance characteristics, etc) and operating system (the overall "standard car" model). We don't write custom OSes for each PC make and model, why the flying f*** are car manufacturers all d***ing around doing their own things independently? I think cheap China cars will finally kill the bloated US auto sector, and it will be a great time for the government to bail them out at a cost: they must design and manufacture parts to a national "open standard" in addition to any proprietary designs they choose to make. If they come up with a novel technology redesign for a part in the standards vehicle, the design must be open even if a patent for exclusive marketing of the improved part, as long as the part is not mandated. Automakers who don't participate don't get the competitive incentives. There should be a figurative x86/amd64 car, an ARM truck, etc. Think: volkswagens! There needs to be evergreen design in the standards cars: new parts made 30 years later should generally still fit, so it should have much looser regulations which would otherwise kill it off in a few years (like EPA regulations murdered the small truck). It must be made much harder to put customers on the rentier treadmill. Planned obsolescence and proprietary design are two important tools to the rentier, along with copyright and DMCA. Look at China: better to strengthen your people and production even if it means chasing price gouging software houses off, because China demonstrated you can just steal the software in the future and improve upon it. What matters is the soil, minerals, metals, food, and production. People need materials to survive, they don't need frilly whirlie-gig flashy wazoo SaaS applications which cost monthly. Zynga's original business model should not be viable in an ideal world, but this is the world of the NPC and the cryptoshamanic advertising industry.

rfl890 1y ago
A nice thought experiment, but I doubt the US will ever do something as pro-consumer as this.

ErigmolCt 1y ago

You're right that legacy OEMs can't pivot overnight and start fabbing their own boards, but unless they move toward tighter integration of hardware and software (or lock down long-term partnerships that function like internal teams), they’re going to stay in this awkward middle ground.

TylerE 1y ago

As much as everyone used to clown on Tesla for it, the vast majority of cars would be better off with an iPad glued to the dash.

arkh 1y ago
Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.
- LeonM 1y ago
  For those unaware: the Volkswagen Up! is a small, low-budget car produced by VW group, it's also sold as the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii. AFAIK it was only sold in Europe and Latin-America. A family member had a early-gen Up!, and the OEM display (build by Navigon) that sat on top of the dashboard was removable, but used a proprietary connection, not USB. I believe it snapped on with magnets, which I remember thinking was quite nice. The detachability was mostly for anti-theft reasons I presume, but quite quickly an aftermarket started to form to replace the OEM screen with other options, including phone mounts. I don't think VW envisioned that, but I thought that a detachable mount for aftermarket satnav, phone mounts or other accessories was quite smart. I did wonder why they didn't just make it a phone mount as standard so you can basically BYOD, which could lower the price of the car further and probably be a better experience anyway. > Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp. Thanks to your comment I looked into it again, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see the newer generation Up! actually does have a OEM phone mount now, how cool! From what I just read it uses an app to integrate with some of the car's features. More car manufacturers should do this for their budget cars. Have a few physical buttons for controlling built-in functions (namely HVAC), and let the user's phone provide the entertainment, navigation and other driving aids. Maybe even ditch the radio interface, and just have an amplifier and speakers build in. It's a shame that phone OSes are moving away from on-device 'driving mode' in favor of Android Auto and Apple Carplay. I get it though, larger screen makes for easier controls and thus safer to interact with while driving, but still...

DanielHB 1y ago

I worked in similar systems and you are 100% right. 80% of the time was spent on communication protocols between the different boards and microcontrollers. QAing and solving issues from short-sighted dozens of unique custom protocols that worked in non-standard ways (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented). When you have dozens of communication lines required between different parts of the system it becomes just as complicated as your average micro-service cloud. Really, a car is a distributed system with dozens of "services". An analogy is that each microcontroller-microcontroller communication use their own custom binary-encoding API that runs on multiple different, incompatible versions of HTTP. We actually spent considerable amount of time just developing our own custom protocol for communication that could run on all sorts of different physical interfaces (CAN, ethernet, modbus, etc) as well as a series of proxies between devices (so component A can talk to component C through a proxy in component B). And if we had to use a custom protocol from an external manufacturer we had to wrap it into our own custom protocol. That protocol was actually used for our cloud data reporting as well, so eventually all our data communication would use a single unified protocol from micro-controller to IoT Linux to cloud data-ingestion pipeline to database.

chii 1y ago
> (every time a component needs to talk to another component a new protocol was invented). i'm sure that every time this happens, it individually makes sense to do it at the time. This is a microcosm of how large systems get developed in small pieces, by different people, over a long(-ish) period of time. It's the same in the software world too i think, but presumably has a lot more consolidation than cars (as software for cars might be less common, and thus employees moving between companies is unlikely to make any sort of cross-pollination like there would be for FAANG-like companies).
pydry 1y ago
This makes it sound like the problem is that they either lack a person with architectural responsibility for the cars' electronics as a whole or that person lacks the skills necessary to do their job.
- 1y ago

kev009 1y ago

This is weird because the microprocessor industry owes a lot of early success to automotive companies. Motorola 6800, Intel 8061 (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vault/articles/book-ford.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/history/virtual-vaul...) etc. Quoting wikipedia: "the name "Motorola" by linking "motor" (from motor car) with "ola" (from Victrola), which was also a popular ending for many companies at the time, e.g. Moviola, Crayola" TI has some powerful automotive SoCs like the AM69A/TDA4AH (https://www.ti.com/ds_dgm/images/fbd_sprsp79b.svg https://www.ti.com/ds_dgm/images/fbd_sprsp79b.svg) that target the industry.. 8 Cortex-A72s, a full GPU, multiple Cortex R5Fs that can lockstep, and a bunch of powerful C7000 DSPs. The SDK is probably not awesome as embedded BSPs tend to be but the SoC should be workable. That should be plenty of compute. So what is really going on, and what happened?

jameshart 1y ago
Motorola were a car radio company originally

raxxorraxor 1y ago

As an embedded developer I usually point to the fact that there is generalist hard and software available for the primitive problem an infotainment systems needs to solve. At least for that side I don't see how generalist pc hardware wouldn't suffice and fit probably 95% of use cases. At least that is how I build my self-made system, which is quite awesome compared to solutions you generally see in cars. Not for the average consumer, but classic car makers can do much better with a bit of courage.

drcongo 1y ago

Back when there were all the rumours of an Apple car, I was hoping that this was actually what they were working on.

gizmo 1y ago

Electronics are responsible? Really? Is this why the car radio interface lags and barely responds to input? Is this why the maps apps is terrible? Car infotainment systems are comically terrible even in areas that are 100% controlled by the OEM. Carplay works by reducing the infotainment screen to a dumb terminal. Car manufacturers could have done this themselves, you know. I completely agree that vertical integration and building your own software stack from the ground up is the correct approach, but that's not the root cause of the problem. A better explanation here is that when all brands have awful infotainment systems then there is no consumer choice that forces competition.

MrBuddyCasino 1y ago

This seems like it is also a „purchase department got the cheapest crap instead of something reasonable“ problem. You don’t need to actually make your own electronics if the specs are decent and the features match your needs.

DanielHB 1y ago

Just to add one more thing to your point, if embedded devs work really hard and make the code work faster/better all reward you get is an _even_ more underpowered chip for the next version. Hardware procurement is cut-throat, sometimes they have mandates to reduce component costs and the procurement people WILL reach them. Often procurement > product in the power dynamics so no matter how bad the product gets those people still do it because the software gets the blame for bad product, not procurement who forced a bad chip to be used. The infotainment is usually the #1 chip to be cut down because it is often the single most expensive electronics part in the system that can be "easily" swapped for a different part.

cebert 1y ago
If the OEM stayed with the same chip for several years, wouldn’t the price go down over time?
- numpad0 1y ago
  Car OEMs are modern day colonial plantation owners, they know cost structures of suppliers and schedule their price cuts. They already have an annual cost saving quota. Prices don't just go down but go down just-in-time. It would make zero sense if I drive to a Walmart and demand they sell to me with monotonically lowering prices as function of date since registration of my reward card, but in cars they do.
  - analog31 1y ago
    Ironically, this method of managing suppliers was perfected by Wal-Mart.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
      LOL. That's what I was thinking too.
Gareth321 1y ago
Your account sounds accurate, but how fitting then that their cost cutting focus is losing them customers and potentially their entire company. VW is losing the EV war. Most manufacturers have already lost. Tesla and BYD are going to eat everyone's lunch. They either need to revolutionise their approach, or they're toast. I suspect they'll attempt to milk their existing supply chains into bankruptcy.

ricardobeat 1y ago

> you can not just roll all your own electronics in a year The Model S came out in 2012 so they’ve had well over a decade to catch up.

eek2121 1y ago

Agreed! They also want to treat it as a new revenue stream rather than as a value add, which ultimately hurts them. We end users don’t want to pay a subscription for our car. Especially for things we already get for free on our phone.

Marsymars 1y ago
> We end users don’t want to pay a subscription for our car. Especially for things we already get for free on our phone. I’m sure I’m in the minority, but I pay for ad-free navigation.

yellow_postit 1y ago

The VW and Rivian tie up for electronics will help answer if a traditional automaker can catch up if the electronics integration bit is taken off the table.

xnx 1y ago

How much extra work have automakers made for themselves by pridefully(?) refusing to use Android Automotive to handle some of the very things that auto makers are worse at?

amarant 1y ago

Sounds like a potential business opportunity! I don't know much about cars, how much is standardized in car electronics? Would it be possible to build a infotainment module that you could sell to several car manufacturers with only minimal modifications? I think I've heard of something called an ICANN(?) bus that is used to communicate stuff in cars and is fairly standardised, maybe?

joezydeco 1y ago
It's CAN, and it's old serial technology. There are already companies doing 3rd party electronics as mentioned above, such as Visteon and Continental, and Garmin is trying to get into that business too.
dbolgheroni 1y ago
That's what many OEMs have been doing for decades and this is exactly what many SDV have been trying to get rid of, since integrating many different products from many different manufacturers are slow, let alone iterating and designing new features. Related to CAN, the bus is standard, but the thing is, CAN is just a bus, not a protocol. There are many ways you can have two ECUs (vehicle's modules) talking in incompatible ways.
zhengyi13 1y ago
ITYM "CAN bus" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus Pioneer has been selling standard-sized Android Auto head units for over a decade at this point.

gorkish 1y ago

I had one of the most popular published projects on mp3car.com back in the heyday. It actually got me into a few strange meetings with companies that were actually building this stuff, like Clarion. I had literally designed, built, and installed a superior product to what they shipped as a one-off for fun in 3 months, but to them I was just a token enthusiast. The vocabulary that these people started throwing out was absolute nonsense. It was pretty evident that "vehicle informatics" was fucked the second someone said those words out loud. And here we are more than 20 years later and still no closer to getting it right. Despite being seemingly well regarded, even Tesla's in car systems are just awful. And it's more impossible than ever to fix, modify, or replace on your own.

chipsrafferty 1y ago

Why not just use iPads or some Android tablet? Why some shitty embedded system and not a real computer?