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Re:Software is eating the car by jedberg on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:14PM (#27465213)
The problem with this is that auto companies are not software companies. They may have good engineers there, but they are hamstrung with a culture that considers software as an add on cost center at best.

Perfect example: I have no way to report software bugs to Honda. I've found a few and collected detailed reproduction data. The best I can do is give it to a sales rep in the service department and hope they send it "up to corporate".

Compare that to Telsa, which has bug reporting built right into the software in the car, as well as bug bounty program.

And then there are updates. Honda found a bug where the speedometer would just crash and not show your speed anymore. This is was pretty bad, but I had no idea about it until I went into the dealership. There was apparently a recall but I would have had to find that myself, I didn't get a notice. Honda has no built in facility to notify people of software updates and recalls. And then once I found out, the only way to fix it is for a dealership to apply the update. There is no over the air update and no way for me to apply it myself.

Car companies need to learn how to be software first, or things will get very dangerous.

Re:Software is eating the car by ketralnis on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:32PM (#27465396)
On the other hand, having seen the software industry I don't really want its values applied to cars.

Games used to be shipped on chips to customers with the assumption that they could never be updated, but now the expectation that that's possible results in multi GB release day patches. Games used to be shipped to consoles without network access but if Blizzard goes out of business tomorrow, Starcraft II will just fail to boot because the software you get isn't enough to run the game. Games used to make most of their money by selling you a fun game that you wanted to play, but now they make most of their money from DLC's or selling in-game currency.

I don't want my car to move fast and break things. I don't want my car to fail to drive me to the hospital because it has updates to install. I don't want my car to drop features it had when I paid for it because some PM's bonus depends on me using their monetised features instead. I don't want my car to be measured by "works on my machine"-level QA. I don't want my car reporting telemetry. I don't want my car's UI to become unuseable over time because the developers shipping constant updates to it are working on the newer hardware instead of the hardware I have. I don't want parts of my car to stop working because an app developer doesn't support my car anymore. (I've lost access to many an iOS game because of this without changing any hardware myself.) I don't want my car to stop working because it doesn't support TLS 4.0 or 6g and the licence server requires it. I don't want my car to stop working because it can't find the licence server because Volvo went out of business, or even just decided they didn't want to support me anymore. I don't want my car to fail to unlock because of a network blip. I don't want my car to suggest I go to McDonald's instead because of an advertising deal.

That's what embracing the software industry's norms will get you. Awful QA, shortsighted dependencies, terrible incentives, and the ability to monetise you.

Re:Software is eating the car by TwoBit on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:18AM (#27469568)
OK but with the complexity of games today there is no way such a game could be released bug-free. Could games be released better than they are though? Probably. We needed game software updates in order to allow the 10x complexity increase, but developers took advantage of that to also give them a couple more months of development time.
Re:Software is eating the car by jedberg on Thursday June 10, 2021 @04:58PM (#27465739)
Not every company embraces those sorts of worst practices. Especially hardware companies. Tesla and Apple are good examples of this. They have strong QA policies and make their money from hardware so they don't have to do all those "you must be connected" tricks. Sure, both still have bugs, but not like web apps and games.

Most of what you listed applies to web apps and games, not bespoke software for hardware.

Re:Software is eating the car by ketralnis on Thursday June 10, 2021 @05:06PM (#27465846)
Apple and Tesla specifically are not good examples of this https://www.zdnet.com/article/tesla-yanks-autopilot-features... & https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay... These both come from the habit and ability to remotely change what's already on my device without my knowledge or consent
Re:Software is eating the car by eaa on Thursday June 10, 2021 @06:33PM (#27466723)
Have you tried to contact an official car service center or official car dealer on this topic?

They may have no way to "report a bug", but they have to deal with customer complaints and issues which need service. It is possible that car service will actually report an issue to SW vendor.

Re:Software is eating the car by jedberg on Thursday June 10, 2021 @07:02PM (#27467082)
> The best I can do is give it to a sales rep in the service department and hope they send it "up to corporate".
Re:Software is eating the car by TwoBit on Friday June 11, 2021 @01:20AM (#27469583)
I feel like this really is the biggest gap between Tesla and others. Other car companies treat software as an afterthought and may never recover.