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> You pay a lot for those cars, can't they at least put better electronic hardware. They probably have less than my phone from 5 years before Car electronics h
by exDM69 13y ago
> You pay a lot for those cars, can't they at least put better electronic hardware. They probably have less than my phone from 5 years before
Car electronics have a very long development process. When the cars in question (models from ~5 years ago) were designed (~10 years ago), the hardware they chose was probably quite decent for that era.
When the next model of the car is designed, they will most likely end up using the same model of computer (or a successor with conservative upgrades) to avoid having to redesign the hardware and software that much.
The cost of the actual hardware is negligible compared to the cost of the redesign.
- sitkack 13y agoWhat cost? Lives, recalls? This probably is the motivation, but it is a false myopic accounting that makes this calculation. I have personally witnessed way too many embedded engineers cost reduce themselves directly into this situation and do it as a matter of pride. They will use a 2.75$ part instead of a 3.80$ part that forces design trade-offs that cause errors like this. The WRT54 was released in 2002, it had 16MB of ram and 4MB of flash running @ 125Mhz. There is absolutely no reason that the ECU couldn't have been running something similar. I would argue that Toyota squandered billions with this failure. The ECU needs to be a protocol that can be swapped out at any time to decouple the evolution of the machine. It is a shame, morally and fiscally that embedded development isn't using safe, provable and verifiable languages.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThe WRT54 was released in 2002, it had 16MB of ram and 4MB of flash running @ 125Mhz. There is absolutely no reason that the ECU couldn't have been running something similar. The WRT54 also runs in a comfy corner of your living room, fails every few years, and crashes.