3 ms·

Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need b

by alt227 9mo ago

Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before. There was the chip shortage during covid which held car production back becasue the auto makers couldnt source their chips fast enough. I am waiting to see if the current supply issue for ram chips modules will produce a similar effect.

nebezb 9mo ago
All of that is worth the extra safety.
hedgehog 9mo ago
Stability control, pre-collision braking, lane departure warnings, the complexity is pretty inevitable as we improve the safety of vehicles.
AngryData 9mo ago
I mean you can buy add-on 3rd party backup cameras for like $20. They don't have any cost excuses for including backup cameras, camera sensors and display screens are literally cheaper than dirt.
- dylan604 9mo ago
  That's great for cars built before the regulation were put into place. Without that regulation, you'd then be dependent on the end user purchasing an after market part and installing it. The vast majority of them won't. So if it is so important to have, you make it part of the car. They did not leave seat belts up to the owners to install after market versions.
  - AngryData 9mo ago
    My point is that if a 3rd party manufacturer can produce and sell a combination screen and camera for $20 for a profit, an automotive manufacturer has no reason to complain about the "expense" of such a setup. It is even cheaper for them than a 3rd party addon supplier since they buy in larger bulk and can integrate mounts for those devices into the car, rather than trying to devise some sort of one-size-fits-all mounting system that the addon manufacturers need. They might as well be complaining about the costs of a rear view mirror, it is nonsense from the start. If a $20 gadget breaks the bank on a $30,000 minimum vehicle, they are a shitty business to start with and we should all be clapping our hands when they go out of business.
    - dylan604 9mo ago
      The 3rd party guy isn't paying someone $40/hour to install the $20 unit. The $20 unit will not be as integrated into the car and will have the look of an after market part. Does the $20 part only come on when the car is in reverse, or is it on all the time? There's a lot of reasons the after market thing can be $20 and a lot of reasons the auto manufacturer's is not. It's not all down to greed
- pornel 9mo ago
  Legacy automakers still use these for upselling trims. It's so silly when they make some "Advanced Technology Package" with a VGA camera and a 2-inches-bigger infotainment screen that's still worse than junk from Aliexpress, and charge $3000 extra for it. I know it's just a profit-maximizing market segmentation, but I like to imagine their Nokia-loving CEO has just seen an iPad for the first time.
ncallaway 9mo ago
> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before. Was there a single mass market consumer car sold in the United States in this millennium that didn’t already have processors and RAM in them? I would be absolutely shocked if there was a single car for which the relatively recent backup camera requirement required them to introduce processors and RAM for the first time.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  I’m pretty sure that you can buy aftermarket backup cameras. The car can be a dumb bunny, and still have a good camera.
  - stefanfisk 9mo ago
    Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.
  - numpad0 9mo ago
    oh yeah. I've once bought a $10ish one on Amazon out of curiosity. There's the yellow composite plug, a 12V input, and a small bit of wire to be cut to rotate image 180 degrees, at the other end of a 30ft cable from the camera. The composite goes into the existing infotainment. There would be a wire from shifter to infotainment that switches the display to external composite video when the gear lever is in reverse. I think it even came with a miniature hole saw in size of the camera module. $10 and one afternoon later, I could have upgraded a dumb car to have one, complete with auto switch to backup on reverse. No software hacking needed. It's fundamentally an extremely simple thing.
- dotancohen 9mo ago
  I believe that in some vehicles the backup camera actually runs on a separate (possibly real time, otherwise certainly heavily nice'ed) system. Tesla has a recall where they had to nice the backup camera software. The problem was if the display freezes or is delayed, then the driver is backing up and not aware that he doesn't see where he is going (he thinks that what he sees is representative of the area around the car currently).
Dylan16807 9mo ago
Was it ever a problem to get the kind of phone SoC or camera chips you'd need for a backup camera if you were willing to pay an extra $20? I thought the issue was more specialized things. And you need one gigabyte of ram or less.
- spease 9mo ago
  A gigabyte!? You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet. And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display. Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes. Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VLM (yet) that would justify anything approaching gigabytes of RAM.
  - Dylan16807 9mo ago
    I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed. So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.
    - spease 8mo ago
      https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes. NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.
TylerE 9mo ago
All cars have required "chips" since OBDII was mandated in the early 90s. That ship has sailed around the world, returned to port, and sailed again.
bastawhiz 9mo ago
> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before. Call me old fashioned but in my opinion, processors/ram/chips/components are a good trade-off versus squished children

by alt227 9mo ago

nebezb 9mo ago

All of that is worth the extra safety.

hedgehog 9mo ago

Stability control, pre-collision braking, lane departure warnings, the complexity is pretty inevitable as we improve the safety of vehicles.

AngryData 9mo ago

I mean you can buy add-on 3rd party backup cameras for like $20. They don't have any cost excuses for including backup cameras, camera sensors and display screens are literally cheaper than dirt.

dylan604 9mo ago
That's great for cars built before the regulation were put into place. Without that regulation, you'd then be dependent on the end user purchasing an after market part and installing it. The vast majority of them won't. So if it is so important to have, you make it part of the car. They did not leave seat belts up to the owners to install after market versions.
- AngryData 9mo ago
  My point is that if a 3rd party manufacturer can produce and sell a combination screen and camera for $20 for a profit, an automotive manufacturer has no reason to complain about the "expense" of such a setup. It is even cheaper for them than a 3rd party addon supplier since they buy in larger bulk and can integrate mounts for those devices into the car, rather than trying to devise some sort of one-size-fits-all mounting system that the addon manufacturers need. They might as well be complaining about the costs of a rear view mirror, it is nonsense from the start. If a $20 gadget breaks the bank on a $30,000 minimum vehicle, they are a shitty business to start with and we should all be clapping our hands when they go out of business.
  - dylan604 9mo ago
    The 3rd party guy isn't paying someone $40/hour to install the $20 unit. The $20 unit will not be as integrated into the car and will have the look of an after market part. Does the $20 part only come on when the car is in reverse, or is it on all the time? There's a lot of reasons the after market thing can be $20 and a lot of reasons the auto manufacturer's is not. It's not all down to greed
pornel 9mo ago
Legacy automakers still use these for upselling trims. It's so silly when they make some "Advanced Technology Package" with a VGA camera and a 2-inches-bigger infotainment screen that's still worse than junk from Aliexpress, and charge $3000 extra for it. I know it's just a profit-maximizing market segmentation, but I like to imagine their Nokia-loving CEO has just seen an iPad for the first time.

ncallaway 9mo ago

> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before. Was there a single mass market consumer car sold in the United States in this millennium that didn’t already have processors and RAM in them? I would be absolutely shocked if there was a single car for which the relatively recent backup camera requirement required them to introduce processors and RAM for the first time.

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I’m pretty sure that you can buy aftermarket backup cameras. The car can be a dumb bunny, and still have a good camera.
- stefanfisk 9mo ago
  Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.
- numpad0 9mo ago
  oh yeah. I've once bought a $10ish one on Amazon out of curiosity. There's the yellow composite plug, a 12V input, and a small bit of wire to be cut to rotate image 180 degrees, at the other end of a 30ft cable from the camera. The composite goes into the existing infotainment. There would be a wire from shifter to infotainment that switches the display to external composite video when the gear lever is in reverse. I think it even came with a miniature hole saw in size of the camera module. $10 and one afternoon later, I could have upgraded a dumb car to have one, complete with auto switch to backup on reverse. No software hacking needed. It's fundamentally an extremely simple thing.
dotancohen 9mo ago
I believe that in some vehicles the backup camera actually runs on a separate (possibly real time, otherwise certainly heavily nice'ed) system. Tesla has a recall where they had to nice the backup camera software. The problem was if the display freezes or is delayed, then the driver is backing up and not aware that he doesn't see where he is going (he thinks that what he sees is representative of the area around the car currently).

Dylan16807 9mo ago

Was it ever a problem to get the kind of phone SoC or camera chips you'd need for a backup camera if you were willing to pay an extra $20? I thought the issue was more specialized things. And you need one gigabyte of ram or less.

spease 9mo ago
A gigabyte!? You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet. And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display. Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes. Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VLM (yet) that would justify anything approaching gigabytes of RAM.
- Dylan16807 9mo ago
  I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed. So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.
  - spease 8mo ago
    https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes. NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.

TylerE 9mo ago

All cars have required "chips" since OBDII was mandated in the early 90s. That ship has sailed around the world, returned to port, and sailed again.

bastawhiz 9mo ago

> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before. Call me old fashioned but in my opinion, processors/ram/chips/components are a good trade-off versus squished children