Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds

Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by indoorcomic on Saturday August 10, 2024 @12:41AM (#41207356)

I love this. I hope this more manufactures go this route. I've always felt that having ~100 ECUs in a car is complete overkill.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by AlotOfReading on Saturday August 10, 2024 @01:27AM (#41207529)

I've been a (somewhat successful) advocate of similar approaches at the automakers I've worked for, but it's not as simple as the article makes it sound. Individual components in each "zone" can have different reliability requirements, for example. They also might be produced by different suppliers, or only be present on certain models / trims.

Rivian is able to do this because they're taking advantage of modern heterogenous processors and they haven't made the mistake of outsourcing almost all of their software capabilities to tier 1,2,3 suppliers. Legacy OEMs find it much more difficult to adopt, especially once the institutional inertia takes over.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by Ekaros on Saturday August 10, 2024 @03:24AM (#41207912)

Replacing word ECU with micro-controller makes number seem less insane. Okay, PCs are having less and less components. But one might ask why do so many components have any logic at all? We got extremely insanely powerful central CPUs with loads of memory and storage space. So why not just do absolutely everything there?

Remove any logic and computing from screens, keyboards, mice, SSDs, HDDs, off load everything from network chips and sounds chips. Just move all of it to CPU?

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by moring on Saturday August 10, 2024 @07:16AM (#41208719)

I think you'd want at least some "dumb" logic moved to the periphery, otherwise everything has to be conected directly to the CPU and you would still end up with tons of wiring. Also, some functions done in the periphery are ideal candidates for parallelization, such as the keyboard scanning the key matrix for pressed keys.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by maxerickson on Saturday August 10, 2024 @10:26AM (#41209751)

Seems like modularization is going to be beneficial pretty much anytime you can define an interface you think is going to be somewhat stable.

I wonder to what extent Rivian has removed intermediate controllers here, where they used them in the first place to get things done on a tighter timeline.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by kevin_thibedeau on Saturday August 10, 2024 @10:58AM (#41209977)

The value proposition of CAN bus is that peripherals can be scattered around connected by two data lines and a power wire. Dumb peripherals need more wiring.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by moring on Saturday August 10, 2024 @11:54AM (#41210335)

They are deviating from that already, aren't they? If they use one ECU per zone, then the peripherals in that zone can't be connected via CAN bus, otherwise they would need their own controller.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by londons_explore on Sunday August 11, 2024 @12:17AM (#41213951)

Can is a great idea... But in practice the hardware to connect to the bus is ~10 cents, whereas the cheapest microcontrollers are ~1 cent. That means if you want thousands of connections for every peripheral, the costs of CAN transceivers really start to add up.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by Jtsummers on Saturday August 10, 2024 @12:48AM (#41207381)

See gregmac's comment, it changes the failure modes and makes what could be isolated subsystem failures larger regional failures. However, components are also becoming much more reliable so this is an engineering tradeoff. Cases can be made in both directions.

EDIT: That's not the only tradeoff, but it is a key one.

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Re:Rivian reduced electrical wiring by 1.6 miles and 44 pounds by metadat on Saturday August 10, 2024 @02:39AM (#41207759)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41207335

In the future, please include the actual link. It is 10x more useful.

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