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That's a non-starter in most countries. Since the car software is tied into a number of important safety features and regulated controls, custom operating syst

• dada216 4mo ago
  Those two set of systems are separate and very distinct.
  • Arainach 4mo ago
    They're not. Use any car's heads up display and you can configure an enormous number of things. Even if there was somehow a pure separation, things such as "playing video while the car is moving" are regulated in many jurisdictions and would land firmly in the "UI" layer.
    • dylan604 4mo ago
      You can detect the car is in motion or not without talking to the engine computer. Just like my phone can tell I'm in motion without connecting to the car at all. You're trying to justify a bad design with bad reasoning
      • mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
        People watch videos on their phone while drive and will continue to do so no matter what infotainment OSes allow or don't allow.
        • Arainach 4mo ago
          "Some people break the law" is not a reason to not have laws. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
      • Arainach 4mo ago
        Not with the necessary precision. GPS doesn't work in tunnels or parking garages and can be wildly inaccurate in city centers with skyscrapers blocking line of sight, for instance.
        • ssl-3 4mo ago
          The built-in, offline mapping in my Honda uses a whole host of local-only sensors to handle these situations where GPS is intermittent. It works rather well at figuring out where the car is on the map, and when it deviates from the prescribed route. It works in tunnels. It works in cities with tall buildings. It works on Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago. Is there some technological limitation that precludes using this data to determine whether or not a movie can be played? (It's not like it's new tech. It's decades-old. Honda started using it over 20 years ago.)
          • Arainach 4mo ago
            There's no need when OBD does just fine for this purpose. It's also not clear what the purpose of this line of argument is. Some sensor says "car is moving". The operating system in the car/head unit is responsible for enforcing that signal, and it could ignore it equally from either OBD or some pile of gyroscopes. Where that signal comes from has nothing to do with why you will not see cars accepting custom operating systems.
            • dylan604 4mo ago
              The point of argument is that it no longer becomes a security issue to allow customOS on the infotainment system because it absolutely has no connection to the engine computer.
              • Arainach 4mo ago
                This is not an architectural issue. The threat isn't a bad OS causing the car to explode. This is a safety issue where the car is required to prohibit certain things - such as video playback.
  • juliangmp 4mo ago
    You'd hope so but I fear that many safety critical aspects run on the same system as the infotainment system... And that's a perfect excuse for manufacturers to keep these things completely closed
• binary132 4mo ago
  “Users shouldn’t be same to control their own engines actually” hmm well ok then
  • Arainach 4mo ago
    One person's "controlling their own engines" is another "spewing nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and other pollutants into the air, giving cancer to neighbors and destroying the atmosphere". We tried the "don't regulate" path and it ended in a multitude of disasters.
    • mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
      You can regulate emissions without preventing custom tunes
      • Arainach 4mo ago
        In practice, no, you can't. Certainly not without enormous costs such as mandatory regular vehicle inspections.
        • mnw21cam 4mo ago
          I don't think "enormous costs" is a strong argument here. The annual MOT is usually under £50, and that includes a fairly comprehensive roadworthiness check and emissions check. A stronger argument would be that a car owner could change some settings on their car specially to pass the emissions check, and then set them back to dirty afterwards each year.
          • Arainach 4mo ago
            An MOT is a cost to every driver every year - significant in money and in time - plus the cost of running the infrastructure to provide the testing. All so that a few people can tune engines? No thanks.
• dylan604 4mo ago
  > Since the car software is tied into a number of important safety features and regulated controls, custom operating systems will never be supported. Then that's a poor design that should go the way of the dodo. Someone hacking the entertainment system should not be able to take over control of the engine. The entertainment system on planes do not allow one to hack into the autopilot. There should be no need for a firewall, they should have no shared wires between them.
  • Arainach 4mo ago
    "Safety critical" isn't just the drivetrain. I don't work in automotive and won't pretend to understand all the rules, but off the top of my head, some things that my car uses the head unit for: * Backup Camera * Turning traction control on/off * Turning auto hold (maintaining the brake pedal while stopped) on/off * Window defrosting Many cars are even more integrated - are there any physical buttons inside a Tesla or is it all through the touchscreen?
    • dylan604 4mo ago
      > Many cars are even more integrated - are there any physical buttons inside a Tesla or is it all through the touchscreen? If you're going to use the worst example as the comparison, then we'll get no where fast.
• mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
  The free-software and right-to-repair communities have a different weighing of tradeoffs than you do.