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A comment on SoCal man says computer on his Tesla froze, causing it to be stuck at 83 MPH. Parent comment

Re:SoCal man says computer on his Tesla froze, causing it to... by bee_rider on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @01:56PM (#31017905)
Not sure which computers you mean, or what you mean by "industrial grade," so possibly I'm off-target, but cars could happily have some less reliable computers, for example in the entertainment center. Even stuff like high-level navigation could be run on the entertainment center level computers -- if google maps crashes, it shouldn't cause a human operated car to crash, and a thoughtfully designed "autopilot" system should mimic that split. No idea if the Tesla autopilot system is thoughtfully designed though.
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Re:SoCal man says computer on his Tesla froze, causing it to... by kfajdsl on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @02:26PM (#31018347)
It seems at least recent versions of the Tesla Model S and X have seperate computers for their infotainment system and autopilot [1]. That wouldn't have helped out the guy from the article, though, I believe he was manually controlling it.

If Teslas have their infotainment (running in React Native?) and motor control/drive by wire on the same computer, I'd be shocked. That's awful.

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/414323/teslas-computers-different...

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Re:SoCal man says computer on his Tesla froze, causing it to... by bee_rider on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @02:58PM (#31018720)
> What happens is that the Model S and the Model X have two physically distinct computer units: one for infotainment and one for Autopilot. The infotainment computer is called MCU, and it is integrated with the central screen. The Autopilot computer is installed above the glove box.

I wonder what the architecture there is. The author just says "physically distinct," so it is hard to guess much. One one hand the different "computer units" appear to each contain different compute elements -- at least, I think we're seeing the back of the boards and can see multiple CPU cooler retention brackets, right? On the other hand, they all are talking over a network of some sort, so hypothetically they could end up in a situation where the one device ends up dependent on the other (I agree though that it would be shockingly awful and it seems really unlikely).

Even within the Autopilot I guess there must be a mix of safety critical and not so critical elements, right? Autopilot has two tasks -- finding the directions to some address, and not crashing the car. The former is not really safety critical (in the sense that a lost driver can operate the car without crashing it) and is hopefully run on a different computer.

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