March 6, 2019 at 6:40 am
I think drive-by-wire (wether it's brake, accelerate or steer does not matter) has nothing to do with this discussion, but to mention it for the sake of discussion: Sensor lag there has no impact, if your acceleration is delayed by a few milliseconds, account for it. Do you think race car drivers just accept that they have a 10 - 50 ms shifting delay? No, they account for that when shifting so your shifting points move from "where you engange the clutch" to "where you would like the clutch to actually be engaged".
Formula 1 is full on drive-by-wire for more than 10 years now, yes drivers did report very unusual feel but that was on the brake-by-wire part as you initially had no feedback at all. Meanwhile today there's actuators and such so that even with brake-by-wire you get an approximately accurate feel of the brake pedal even if you hit a curb or something like that under braking.
My 2009 Ford Fiesta with a 120 bhp NA engine is OEM throttle-by-wire and I can assure anyone that throttle response is instant to the degree where I don't notice it - and I do notice the difference between a 15 ms and a 50 ms shift even if it occurs only once. Things like Turbocharging your engine or even programming delay in the ECU (so hoffy if you're not on a Turbo my guess is, response time is dictated by the ECU) is where to look at. Just imagine how OEMs manage Eco, Comfort, Sport and whatever drive modes with the same hardware and ECO throttle response is definitely different from Race+, definitely not by deploying an array with different "QoS Sensors" or something like that. O.o
Any racing driver is proof that our brain is capable of handling that. What you don't want is varying shifting times, so instead of having a flat dead 50ms shifting time a variable 10 - 50 ms shifting time on the same action (usually shift down takes longer, therefore you usually end up with 2 different delays: shift up (if you cannot flat-shift) and shift down) is something our brain does not like.
1) the ECU is designed to operate real time + can handle data at delay. As a tech designer you would put sensors like ABS and Yaw on the real time data while your windscreen wipers can be operated and status read with some allowed delay. Think of it a bit as QoS. No your spotify will not end up on the real time bus, promise.
2) you have multiple ECUs in one car, the most I've seen in person is 7 ECUs to handle exclusively car related control (it had no satnav, aircon or anything because race car but tons of sensors for things like ride height, tyre temperature and so on), then you go and add multiple wires per sensor, usually routed to different ECUs. Once you've done that you add redundant sensors, potentially wire them through another set of different ECUs, as depending on the channel / sensor (f. ex. knock sensor) your ECU even might to read during normal Operation what both sensors and sensor paths tell you, just in case one of them might have a glitch, we're not talking about your laptop here which stands on a nice and smooth table but something that might need to read your injector state at lets say for a v6 race engine up to 10000RPM which makes up to 60.000 reads if your injector nozzle is open or not. You can safely assume at least 1 Sensor in each Injector with at least 2 data paths, at this stage it is only data path redundant, add another sensor and you have 4 Data Paths with 2 Sensors.
Think about that for a second before you just decide to comment on ECUs, not talking about criticising them or design strategies regarding that. Neither any of the rumbling about what you like or dislike with drive-by-wire systems has anything to do for the tiniest part with the discussion here.
I agree that we should focus on the Operating System discussion and the implications that might happen when your ECU has to deal with Android Car and not some dedicated OS that was written by the ECU Manufacturer like Syvecs or Bosch to name a few.
Oh and for unlocking your car by Phone / NFC: Feel free to be scared: your car has a SIM Card, that's the reason you can remotely start the car while still being at home. No you don't need to lose your key so one can steal your car, run malicious attacks against the webservice until you find the hole and you could potentially start quite a few cars at the same time. That actually sounds fun to me, and yes it is a different discussion all together - you could've leased such car without that feature (and it's not on by default.) - but nfc might eventually from a conceptual point at least be more secure than "keyless go" systems. Why are you not concerned about my small RF-Scanner at the parking lot you just left your car nicely for me to pick up without the car crying out loud or anyone noticing while I unlock your car and drive away? Here same story again, completely different Thing and has absolutely nothing to do with Android Car.
And the only thing between me applying a different ECU Map to your car on the fly in regards of security is a long enough brute force attack (yeah, can do on GPU these days) against the encryption key of your ECU, once I bypass that the ECU is all ears to me.
March 6, 2019 at 7:04 am
AnOldAmigaUser - Monday, March 4, 2019 1:49 PMThe car companies want to get in the data collection business as much as Google and Facebook already are. This is not good news for consumers, especially, car enthusiasts, as no doubt, one's driving style would not meet with the nanny's approval. This is not a means of providing extra value and convenience to the customer; but of gaining more behavioral data from the customer, which can be analyzed and sold.
I would argue against parts of that - especially for car enthusiasts - there are things like the "AMG Track Pace" which you can get officially from MB with your brand new AMG car and the whole purpose of this is to help you keep track of your lap times and add suggestions where you could still shrug off some seconds while driving around for example the Nurburgring. You will not lose your car warranty with this, however you will still lose warranty if you change ECU Maps.
Ofcourse there is also the different example of enthusiasts cars where GPS Sensors are hardwired to your ECU (including: car will not start once you attempt to bypass or remove them) so next time you visit the car dealer it pulls the recorded GPS Data, if position is matched to a race track, you instantly lost your warranty BUT in this example it's explicitly stated that you lose OEM Warranty if you go to the track.
March 6, 2019 at 8:04 am
DinoRS - Wednesday, March 6, 2019 7:03 AMAnOldAmigaUser - Monday, March 4, 2019 1:49 PMThe car companies want to get in the data collection business as much as Google and Facebook already are. This is not good news for consumers, especially, car enthusiasts, as no doubt, one's driving style would not meet with the nanny's approval. This is not a means of providing extra value and convenience to the customer; but of gaining more behavioral data from the customer, which can be analyzed and sold.I would argue against parts of that - especially for car enthusiasts - there are things like the "AMG Track Pace" which you can get officially from MB with your brand new AMG car and the whole purpose of this is to help you keep track of your lap times and add suggestions where you could still shrug off some seconds while driving around for example the Nurburgring. You will not lose your car warranty with this, however you will still lose warranty if you change ECU Maps.
Ofcourse there is also the different example of enthusiasts cars where GPS Sensors are hardwired to your ECU (including: car will not start once you attempt to bypass or remove them) so next time you visit the car dealer it pulls the recorded GPS Data, if position is matched to a race track, you instantly lost your warranty BUT in this example it's explicitly stated that you lose OEM Warranty if you go to the track.
There are other manufacturers that offer similar sensor packages, and while that data is tremendously useful for the driver, it will be downloaded when the vehicle is serviced. Using your vehicle for track days, or other events will often void a warranty; maybe not with MB, but I am pretty sure that Ford and Chevy do. I am just about positive that it was mentioned in the documentation received with my Corvette. It is hard to deny the car has been tracked if the evidence is downloaded, and I cannot imagine any car manufacturer not having the ability to download data from every system in the car. There is also no guarantee that this information will not be shared with third parties, such as your insurance company. It is far more likely to assume that it is.
EZ-Pass data has already been used to issue speeding tickets (though these were extreme cases as I remember); what is to prevent this type of data from also being used for that purpose? Add a data connection, which manufacturers are racing (pun intended) to do, and the data can be collected in real time. As with all the data that is collected on us, there is some benefit that accrues to the individual; but there is far more value for the collector of the data.
Color me jaded, I think we surrender our privacy too easily, and with it our freedom. I will be driving older vehicles with fewer built-in nannies, as long as I can register them.
March 6, 2019 at 1:01 pm
jay-h - Tuesday, March 5, 2019 5:44 AMInterestingly a survey a while back indicated that drivers with built in Nav units still preferred to use their phone or a dedicated GPS.
Personally, I prefer using my phone for navigation vs. my very expensive Nav unit, but that's mainly because Google was able to do what Tom Tom tried to do but wasn't able to (due to too few users): compile real-time traffic data and use it to alter route planning. At least I normally prefer my phone -- there was one version of Google navigation which was, apparently, buggy and while on a long trip through territory I didn't know it kept crashing my phone forcing me to try to unlock my phone and restart navigation while on the highway -- not a safe thing to be doing on the highway and pulling onto the shoulder in heavy traffic isn't much better. After the second or third time I started using my in car nav unit along with my phone, just in case.
March 6, 2019 at 3:15 pm
jay-h - Monday, March 4, 2019 1:42 PMThis is not so much of a discussion of electric drive but of electronic controls, applicable to any car.
Conceptually, electric drive is simpler though there are still quite a few potential failure points primarily in the control systems. Nonetheless locomotives and large offroad trucks successfully use electric drive (with diesel generation)Tesla certainly has not achieved a high Consumers' reliability rating, in fact it's quite low. but the biggest current issue is the battery. A while back the price was about 27K, I don't know that has changed much. This is not a problem under warranty, but potentially devastating to the resale value, as any potential buyer will be factoring that risk into the resale value much as some exotic high performance cars drop like a rock when factory coverage expires. But even a blown engine on a Porsche can be replaced for about 12-14K which is miles away from the hit for a drive battery.
As I had mentioned earlier, I would be much more comfortable with a system based on industrial automation controls rather than a general purpose consumer OS.
Actually, on the issue of reliability, Consumers Reports did ding Tesla this year, but they also note that Tesla Model S has one of the highest level of Consumer Satisfaction of any vehicle. The biggest issue with recent S models was with the air suspension system, which turned out to be a problem with their supplier, and a software bug. Those have been resolved as I understand. The battery is warranted for 8 years, so if you keep the car that long, it does make the resale situation a challenge. Anecdotal info suggests that excessive use of supercharging contributes to battery failures - so far zero problems for me so far.
Wendell
Colorful Colorado
You can't see the view if you don't climb the mountain!
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