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I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much
by lsaferite 1y ago
I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase.
- 20after4 1y agoI think most recently developed large commercial passenger aircraft are completely fly by wire with most controls lacking any physically interlinked backup. Thinking of this somehow reminded me of the most harrowing aircraft disaster that I've ever read about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 It's both tragic because half of the passengers were killed but also miraculous that anyone survived at all.
- jmount 1y agoHopefully I am not too naive, but I think aircraft safety redundancy remains above retail car standards. Also, in aircraft they "have time to solve some problems", versus freeway bumper cars.
- 20after4 1y agoIndeed, but read the link I posted above if you're interested in a fascinating case of failed redundancy.
- sho_hn 1y agoEngaging version by the incredible Admiral Cloudberg: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-crash-of-united-airlines-flight-232-9cf65ae14c68 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...
- raverbashing 1y agoYeah Also people say "oh what if fly-by-wire fails" well what if traditional hydraulic controls fail, which has happened plenty in the history of commercial aviation Everything can and will fail at some point No redundancy is redundancy enough in some %0.xx of cases. You can always reduce the number, but never make it 0
- patrick451 1y agoThe reliability of software is so bad this is an absurd comparison.
- dtech 1y agoThis is a safety standards issue not a "software" issue. Standards for airplane software are very high Most planes have been fly-by-wire for decades and aren't regularly falling out of the sky
- 1718627440 1y agoSoftware is much easier to break accidentally than a valve.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y agoI work for a medical device manufacturer, and software absolutely can be designed to be just as reliable as physical systems, but the development and testing process looks completely different than a developing a mobile app. Things slow WAY down: if you want to change one line of code, it'll take literally weeks before it makes it to a production environment because of all the testing, documentation, justification, and human approvals. I imagine flight safety systems are subject to a similar level of rigor.
- noAnswer 1y agoObligatory mention of SQLight going the DO-178B route. https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/#testing-and-aviation-standards https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/#testin... "Richard Hipp: Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android. "Richard Hipp: Yes, so we’ll do billions of tests."
- worik 1y ago> I imagine flight safety systems are subject to a similar level of rigor. Not for cars tho. Cars can be expected to be as reliable as the average windows PC unless there are regulations made and accountability assigned
- monocasa 1y agoI also don't believe they install OTA updates while in flight.
- sho_hn 1y agoAlthough if they did it would give a fantastic new meaning to "over the air" :-)
- monocasa 1y agoIn service to the pun, there is a relatively famous demo of using erlang for embedded development where they show off hot code reloading of a drone's flight software while it's in flight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQS9SECCp1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQS9SECCp1I
- fn-mote 1y agoMore to the point, FAS regulations would absolutely forbid any such event. They probably mandate testing of the updates before returning to airplane to service. Completely unlike the safety standards for cars.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoWhich has nothing to do with a bad update being installed during routing maintenance and only failing in flight. Or while driving.
- reddit_clone 1y agoI am assuming/hoping that testing from Boeing/Airbus is far more stringent than that of Jeep !
- 20after4 1y agoBoeing doesn't exactly have the best reputation.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoNot for software. Hence airplanes needing reboots at certain time frequencies before they bug out in weird ways.
- aperrien 1y agoLarge planes are all fly by wire. In a commercial airplane, you're talking about moving maybe a quarter-ton of metal for the rudder alone, and against high wind speeds. There is no way to move those without powerful servo motors.
- therein 1y agoThey use hydraulics, not necessarily fly-by-wire and servos. But when they lose the engines, then they lose hydraulic pressure.
- cmurf 1y agoThere's APU and/or RAT to fallback on in case of the rare dual engine failure.
- mikkupikku 1y ago[dead]
- labcomputer 1y agoI guess they are if you mean fly-by-piano-wire! The (as of a this year) second-most popular airliner, the Boeing 737, has fully mechanical controls for the ailerons and elevator (with hydraulic boosting). Elevator trim is also mechanical. The pilot needs to be built like a gorilla to fly it, but primary flight controls continue work, even with a total failure of all electrical and hydraulic systems.
- kraussvonespy 1y agoI'm still stunned by Captain Haynes's grace under pressure: Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway." Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?" And here's a truly excellent long form article on the crash by the always excellent Admiral Cloudberg: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-crash-of-united-airlines-flight-232-9cf65ae14c68 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...
- disqard 1y ago"The contamination caused what is known as a hard alpha inclusion, where a contaminant particle in a metal alloy causes the metal around it to become brittle. The brittle titanium around the impurity then cracked during forging and fell out during final machining, leaving a cavity with microscopic cracks at the edges. For the next 18 years, the crack grew slightly each time the engine was powered up and brought to operating temperature. Eventually, the crack broke open, causing the disk to fail."
- bri3d 1y agoThe Cybertruck is basically the only vehicle with true steer by wire. Infiniti offered cars for a brief time which had clutched steering columns (a truly baffling worst of all worlds solution). Otherwise what people mean is electrical power steering, where a power-off failure means you need to turn the wheel harder (a power-on failure can be very bad and there are a lot of safety systems to limit applied torque so a driver can always override the input).
- noir_lord 1y ago> The Cybertruck is basically the only vehicle with true steer by wire. It really is "The Homer" of cars isn't it.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoAirplanes are steer by wire.
- noir_lord 1y agoIf your CyberTruck is airborne something went very wrong. One isn't the same as the other - the regulatory regime/testing and redundancies on a plane are completely different to a car and not inconsequentially the person operating the plane is rather better trained on what to do when things go "oopsie" than the person loose behind the wheel of the average car. Also aircraft are serviced in a way far beyond what cars are.
- linuxftw 1y agoWell, at some point you won't have a choice. The government is going to ban ICE vehicles, tax the existing ones, and all the electrics will be everything by wire.
- brookst 1y agoThere is literally no relationship between propulsion tech and steering mechanism.
- buildbot 1y agoI for one cannot wait for my nuclear powered steering mechanism. The reactor is of course used to generate steam pressure to actuate the steering arms, the car is powered by normal batteries.
- linuxftw 1y agoWhich ICE vehicles are completely steer by wire?
- brookst 1y agoWhich EVs are?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ErroneousBosh 1y agoNot steer-by-"wire" exactly but in the 1970s and 1980s Citroën had cars with "DIRAVI" steering. In normal operation there was no direct mechanical link between the steering wheel and road wheels. The whole thing was a big hydraulic servo, with "resistance" applied to the steering wheel using a heart-shaped cam, a big spring, and a small hydraulic piston that had progressively more pressure behind it based on road speed. If you let the steering wheel go it would spring back to the middle even with the car at a standstill because of the resistance cam. If it lost hydraulic pressure while you were driving there was still generally enough in the system to allow you to pull over safely, and you could drive for much longer distances if you could cope with about a quarter of a turn of "play" in the steering wheel. With no pressure at all, turning the steering wheel would move the shuttle valve in the steering controller until it bottomed out and then the linkage would just turn the pinion on the steering rack, which was normally used for servo feedback. Uncomfortable, but acceptable for "get off the road" situations. The hydraulic system also worked the self-levelling suspension, the fully-powered braking system (similar to the WABCO systems on a lot of more modern vehicles), and on some manual gearbox models the clutch. Not really "drive by wire", because it's not electronic, but it really is a system where the steering rack could be fully decoupled from the steering wheel.
- rangestransform 1y agoThe cybertruck steer by wire IIRC has dual redundant everything including power supplies (the redundant one is powered by a DC-DC converter from the HV battery)
- teraflop 1y agoThat's great, but are they also running redundant, independently-developed software stacks? Because software failure seems to be the issue here.
- rekoil 1y agoDisregard me, I'm dumb.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoAll the electrical steering columns designs I've seen have used redundant sensors (often groups of them) specifically for that reason. The physical steering wheel to the shaft is still a SPOF, but it's also a "dumb" part where the only failure cases are mechanical. Eliminating failures there is straightforward engineering.
- rekoil 1y agoYeah, I should have spent an extra 10 seconds thinking of the problem here and I'd have realised you can have multiple sensors going to different software on one steering column...
- sam_bristow 1y agoMulti-version approaches to developing software aren't as good at reducing common-mode failures as many people expect[1]. [1] J. C. Knight and N. G. Leveson, “An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming,” IIEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. SE-12, no. 1, pp. 96–109, Jan. 1986, doi: 10.1109/TSE.1986.6312924.
- thewebguyd 1y agoIts wild to me that any car manufacturer would push an OTA update while the vehicle is in motion, or hell, even push one at all instead of having it be user initiated. They didn’t bother to put a simple check in place to make sure the vehicle wasn’t being driven before updating? And then these manufacturers wonder why people just want them to have a dumb head unit with carplay/android auto. Because they absolutely suck at software and have shown no desire to improve outside of charging people subscriptions for hardware features that are already in the car.
- Induane 1y agoIt's impossible on my Tesla. You get a notice to install and a warning that you won't be able to drive for up to 45 minutes. You cannot click install unless the car is in park. You can always decide never to install an update. This isn't exceptional design on the part of Tesla. It is absolutely baseline common sense. I can't believe it isn't the defacto rule. I guess it might need to be regulated because apparently some companies are THAT untrustworthy. All regulations are written in blood.
- spixy 1y agoCar could have been updated before trip, and some stackoverflow error can happen same time later while in traffic.
- yuliyp 1y agoThey pushed it out while the vehicle was parked. The bug seemed to not break the vehicle immediately, but after some time driving.
- fragmede 1y agoYou might need to stop dealing with cars made recently then. While steer-by-wire isn't so common, the number of cars with entirely digital drive-by-wire throttles would likely bother you. Honda: "all Honda models use Drive-by-Wire technology" (for the accelerator pedal). https://www.hondainfocenter.com/Shared-Technologies/Engines/Drive-by-Wire-Throttle-System/ https://www.hondainfocenter.com/Shared-Technologies/Engines/... Subaru's used it in a bunch of vehicles for decades: https://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/topic/70486-what-year-did-subaru-start-their-drive-dy-wire-throttle/ https://www.ultimatesubaru.org/forum/topic/70486-what-year-d... Most new Toyotas, Ford, etc. While throttle/acceleration isn't steering, if you're uncomfortable with the underlying concept of a potentiometer and a microcontroller and a small motor on the other end being used to control a vehicle and consider it unproven technology, then you'd need to avoid most new cars in order to be logically consistent.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoWhats so shocking? Did you ever study them? Any ideas of their design and failsafe modes? Or are you just posting just for engagement?
- jjav 1y ago> I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase. Indeed, the risk is far too large to ignore. I will never own a car that has steer-by-wire or braking-by-wire. Those are two controls that absolutely must have a mechanical linkage that cannot be altered by software. Other things I can handle, but if all goes haywire, I must be able to steer and brake.
- reddit_clone 1y agoEven some motorcycles have electronic throttle control now a days. When you twist the throttle, it doesn't pull a cable anymore. Its all controlled by electronics now.
- numpad0 1y agoThere's fortunately two major reported problems with DbW: 1) lack of feedback, and 2) latency. It's been attempted, and customers never liked it.
- marcosdumay 1y agoI don't think I have any issue with steer-by-wire as a concept. Yes, steering bars are very mature technology, but so are steering actuators. Car manufacturers have just never bothered to do it right. If they cheapened as much on steering bars, it would break all the time too. That said, OTA updates for basic functionality is an immediate blocker. Updates are by definition not mature technology.