Everything on the one PCB is great, just ask Tesla owners that get stranded with a hardware failure, or need to reboot their screen for a software failure by holding down steering wheel buttons to get their car operable again.

The reason cars have lots of computers is for price - its cheaper to use a power and CAN data bus rather than have individual wires going from a central computer to each device.

For example, a door module can control the locks, windows and mirrors with just a 2 power wires and 2 thin wires for CAN bus.

Contrast this to old cars which had thick bundles of wires to power the mirror, doorlock and window motors from outside the door.

What if you don't want OTA features, but a simple car you can fix separately form the manufacturer's supply chain?

This might not be a huge concern for the HN demographic, but it is for developing countries operating whatever vehicles the EU deems too dangerous or polluting for their roads. There are no PCBs making their way to Central Asia.

The problem with black boxes is that they work until they don't. In some cases like fuel injection, they're a significant reliability improvement. In others they're a ticking time bomb that can make the entire vehicle unusable.

This a problem in the motorcycle world. You now have bikes that are dead because of computer issues. Small pebbles if you're near a dealership, possibly deadly if you use adventure bikes for their intended purpose.

Yeah, there's some problems with the approach. But I guess if you had an old one, you could install some open source software, or replace the whole computer. I assume it would cost a few hundred bucks at most. It's peanuts compared to engine, or in electric car, battery work.

The main board on an iphone is taking a really small part of the whole nowadays. https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/JtBACGbyZcYSdBfL.hug... Besides maybe some machine vision things, the computing in a car seems to have very low performance requirements.

Sensors, actuators and controllers etc are another thing then, but they're different.

My point is that you won't be able to replace the whole computer if you're disconnected from the supply chain. A few hundred bucks is more than those cars are worth by the time they are exported to those countries.