Cars weigh thousands of pounds and routinely drive upwards of 60 miles per hour.
The success of the first iPhone or Facebook app didn't depend on using it to navigate through life-and-death situations not only for the users but also for everyone around them.
There are places for 'move fast and break things'. But cars move fast already, and they can really break things.
I think this is a naive perspective. I've heard many similar stories from friends that work in the German automotive industry, and I think you would be surprised how many payment systems are tied together (e.g. (insecure) FTP servers to sync daily payments).
Every organization has these types of things internally. As an engineer, I don't like it, but it's a fact of life.
Banks can reverse transactions if they want to. Tesla's cavalier attitude towards manufacturing has yielded a 14% first pass through rate on the Model 3 line (which is abysmal and may bankrupt the company along with declining M3 demand) vs. the industry standard of ~80% FPT rate.
We're at the point in the Tesla story similar to that of 2008 where Dr. Berry et el were watching the housing market collapse around them and the banks wouldn't re-price the swaps. Tesla is already bankrupt, most people don't know this yet. But they will.
I don't think the rework rate is a big deal for the customer. Ultimately manufacturing is about increasing the yield rate so that costs are lowered, because rework is expensive. But if you can make money with lots of manual rework on every product, it's no big deal. Something to improve next quarter.
I have so many electronic devices, from cheap to expensive, that have some passive component manually bodged on somewhere. They work fine. It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal. Waste is worse than a product that is imperfect immediately off the assembly line.
People are waiting 3 or 4 months for replacement parts for their vehicles or Tesla has had possession of the vehicle (and the person is using a loner) for a similar amount of time. That won't fly in the mass market.
>>> It just means that paying someone to rework 1000 boards was cheaper than throwing the boards away and spinning up Revision B immediately. It's not a big deal.
It's not about money. Correcting and refacturing a board takes time, in the order of months even for a simple one. It's too long.
That link is not a source for declining Model 3 demand. Source?
My info shows that
• In July, over 60,000 test drive requests in the US alone
• 5000 Model 3 new net orders in one week in mid-July
• Total deposits greater than total refunds in the twelve months ending April 2018
• Reports of Cancellations Outpacing Orders proved to be False wording
Meaningless negative indicators include Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino saying Model 3 social media activity had lessened and frequent critic Latrilife said Tesla’s Burbank Airport lot is under 24/7 surveillance
While I agree that 14% is horrible, that was a point-in-time number that is being compared to an average. One would hope that factories regularly run well above 80%. I'd also bet that some occasionally drop well below it for a day or so.
The details matter here and given the quality that I see in the field, I'm not convinced that this is such a horrible situation.
>I think you would be surprised how many payment systems are tied together (e.g. (insecure) FTP servers to sync daily payments).
It's not like those matter. The bank itself guarantees the integrity of your account and can reverse charges. And of course would be insured for such losses.
Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety. If this guy worked on motor control or braking system firmware then that would be scary, but he didn’t.
If the infotainment system caused the MCUs to reboot while someone traveling "130mph on San Mateo Bridge" and that caused the break system to segfault due to unconventional way of loading parts firmware, it might be a life&death situation, easily. Examples in that threads go on, literally hundreds!
Well, you can reboot the system while driving(both console and dash), nothing special happens other than the AC turning off for a brief period of time. Brakes, wheel, throttle all respond normally.
Source: Done this a few times to clear bad map data or occasional glitch.
Doesn't surprise me -- a couple of times my new 3 has had nothing on the display but it's still happy to let me put it in gear and drive away, and the display pops up within a second or two.
To be sure, it's a bit unsettling, and I wouldn't be thrilled about it deciding to not work for a day or two, but, in a way, it makes me MORE comfortable that the vehicle control systems function as expected.
There’s a distinction between safety critical equipment and essential equipment. If the former fails, it could kill you. If the latter fails, you can’t drive anymore but you won’t die if it happens on the road. Brakes are in the former category, while things like HVAC and instruments are in the latter.
Safety equipment must not fail, but essential equipment can fail as much as your customers will tolerate.
Seriously yes, at least ventilation. Anybody who don't believe this, try turn off your AC completely and see how quickly your wind screen is fogged up to the point you can't see out. (depending on which climate you live in)
Even if this were true (and as another commenter says, it's not) I don't see how that fills in this gap. It would make sense if the first step were "MCU goes crazy," but not with a simple reboot.
There’s no concept of “reboot” with MCUs, since there’s usually no OS. Likewise there’s usually no concept of segfault, because segfault requires memory protection which is something most MCUs don’t use.
This must be an acronym mixup. We’re talking about the Media Control Unit, i.e. the giant screen in the center of the dashboard responsible for zero safety-critical systems.
Yes, The infotainment stuff, like the screen, internal lights, speakers are connected via a low profile third bus system, certainly not the main CAN bus or profibus or firewire. Some, like in the BMW even via WiFi.
These are the systems usually used with Linux or Windows or Android. On top of the important stuff.
Ignoring the infotainment system for this argument (as they firewall it off from CANBUS and other life critical systems [1]), I argue that their IT infrastructure is safety related, as it governs Tesla's velocity in getting patches and security fixes out to vehicles in a timely manner.
Can you imagine a zero day being found in Windows with Windows Update being down?
There's no guarantee that any given car is connected and receives updates, so the safety-critical systems need to be good enough when the car ships. They might mess up, but then they'd at least be able to patch cars faster, while other manufacturers would have to do a recall.
> Tesla’s infotainment and IT infrastructure is unrelated to their safety.
Only if it's deliberately isolated in the vehicle. It should be. Aaaand, it isn't: the firmware upgrades to all other car computing elements go through it.
Runtime isolation is distinct from compile/build-time isolation. You're citing the latter, but it's the former that matters. Tesla gets this right, e.g. an interrupt in the MCU does not have any effect on braking, drive-by-wire, or ADAS systems while a car is in operation.
If that's the standard, then almost everything becomes safety critical. Drivers can easily get distracted by malfunctioning smartphones or apps. (Or, for that matter, properly functioning smartphones or apps.) Yet the prior discussion was based on the idea that things like iPhones and Facebook aren't safety critical the way this is.
>If that's the standard, then almost everything becomes safety critical.
Almost everything in a cars front panel and dashboard can be. I've read somewhere that people have been killed even because of something as quaint as the wrong placement of car ashtray.
One time I pulled up at the red light behind a Tesla while I was on a bicycle. Straight through the rear window I could see the driver and front passenger being distracted by the massive flat touch screen. The traffic light turned green, and had I been beside the Tesla, I would have beaten it across the intersection despite all that electric motor tech in the car.
Anyway this little illustrated anecdote of mine aside, driver distraction is a genuine issue - even for drivers at red lights. The number of times I've seen this type of behaviour transcend into moving off while remaining distracted (whether that's heads down visually or just mentally) is too boringly frequent to detail. Sometimes the distracted drivers even creep forward unconsciously while traffic is flowing across them. Emergency vehicles can't get through, drivers end up splitting their attention, pressure mounts once proper movement starts again, and all the while they don't realise they don't have full attention in a changing environment.
I've missed the light turning green while just looking out the window (our car has no screen). As long as people are only distracted while waiting at a light I wouldn't worry too much.
Except they're not only distracted while looking at their screen when stopped. The distraction continues after they start rolling again - one thing directly leads to another here.
It is my understanding that two major reasons for various ugly UI and unintuitive UX in automotive infotainment systems are patents and safety certifications.
The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location. That can be life or death. In fact, "Apple isn't ready to engineer phones at a life-or-death standard" was a fairly common critique of the iPhone in the early days. In response, Apple ran a little PR campaign around their radio engineering efforts--they had a web page that showed all the cool-looking rooms for testing radios, which they invited a couple reporters to tour, etc.
> The iPhone has to reliably connect for emergency calls and provide accurate location.
An iPhone handling an emergency call is an exceptional use case.
A car driving is not an exceptional use case for a car.
A life and death scenario is occurs every few minutes, or continuously for something like a mountain road, if something like brakes, limited throttle, or steering were to fail.
But, I would, naively, assume that the operation of these critical components were in no way related to timing requirements of some process in Linux.
That PR tour was in response to "AntennaGate" when Apple failed to engineer a phone to a life-or-death standard (well, if you were "holding it wrong").
Are there any interesting papers on formal verification of some of the most modern machine learning algorithms?
Clearly when we "verify" Waymo or Tesla auto-pilot, we're going to want to use that stuff, right? Surely they won't just provide insurers with some data about the billions of miles they've driven without accidents and how humans can only drive like a million miles without an accident and try to get the insurers to give them policies...
Just like when we hand out licenses, we always check to make sure the 16 year old took some formal driving classes from professional driving instructors... I wish things were better but we don't care about this stuff as a society until much later usually. When did the car first appear? When did the first seatbelt law appear?
Read the Barr report on Toyota’s unintended acceleration incident. They didn’t have the right failsafes and watchdogs and only a single bit was responsible for a critical feature. Meaning memory corruption or a cosmic ray flipping the bit can cause disaster. They didn’t follow anywhere near best practices in their firmware development. It’s not just the young upstarts that mess this up by being “reckless”
There's still the problem with exploding phones and batteries so even if it's just a phone it can go wrong in dangerous ways. (If it happens on a plane for example)
The success of the first iPhone or Facebook app didn't depend on using it to navigate through life-and-death situations not only for the users but also for everyone around them.
There are places for 'move fast and break things'. But cars move fast already, and they can really break things.