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Average car contains 100 million lines of code, The State of Autosoftware

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Berni:

--- Quote from: tom66 on January 25, 2023, 12:34:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: Berni on January 25, 2023, 08:57:32 am ---Yeah these new automatic emergency braking systems are not to be relied on to just work in every situation. There is a mountain of software that makes it work, even involving AI into the mix.

--- End quote ---
I would say they are great based on a recent experience.  Car in front slammed on their brakes but they had no functioning brake lights, only to decide to turn off in front of me with no indicator either.  I probably should have noticed clues from their driving, as they seemed erratic and their vehicle was in poor condition, but I was in 'autopilot' as brains tend to do while driving.  The radar picked this up well before I noticed.  I was following with 3-sec distance and the immediate beep and red flashing warning in my face immediately directed my attention and I braked hard.  The nice thing is when AEB detects an event, it always enhances the brake response, so even a slight press is interpreted as significant braking.  Then ABS and ESP handle the stability of the vehicle.  Plenty of space to safely stop ... would I have avoided hitting them without, well quite possibly, but it definitely gave me extra margin.  Do I rely on them?  Absolutely no, the radar cannot detect all events, it's only there in addition to the meatbag in the driver's seat.

--- End quote ---

Yeah i really like emergency braking feature. Volvo seams to have tuned them really well in my opinion(low false positives, but triggers when it should)

The warning beeps it makes are the most useful to me. As a human i have to watch a car and observe it getting closer and closer oddly fast before i realize this is a dangerous situation. Yet the radar just has to watch the doppler shift in the reflected signal to instantly get an information about how fast that car is going, so it figures out this is a bad situation much much sooner. At this point i hover my foot over the brake pedal whenever i hear the red warning. When on cruse control it even starts more gently applying the brake itself before the warning (good for the cars behind me)

But this is the easiest example for the system to handle. It just tracks the moving targets on the radar and looks for any that slow down at a high rate. The fancy AI tech comes in to process the information from the cameras. That is because the radar can't  easily see stationary/slow targets (they could be just be lamp post or a reflection from the road). So for situations where you come around a blind corner and there is a car stopped on the other end it uses a camera to actually see the car. Similar for pedestrians that cross the road.

But i still would not want to rely on the system to do the right thing for me. I treat it more as a 2nd layer of defense for when my human reflexes end up being too slow. Not letting it do all the braking, since it probably would eventually hit a weird edge condition where it decided not to brake when it should. Same reason why i am not so trustful of full self driving cars, sure they work well most of the time, but most of the time is not good enough when your life is on the line.

Berni:

--- Quote from: PlainName on January 25, 2023, 09:35:06 pm ---
--- Quote ---My finger was moving up and down side to side according to the road surface.
--- End quote ---

Yes, that's one issue (the other is no tactile feedback). I wonder if a touchscreen could be programmed to only accept touch on active buttons (that is, those available to be touched). Then you could rest a couple of fingers on the inactive part of the screen to steady your hand, which would go a long way to resolving the wandering finger issue.

I have no idea how modern car touchscreens work so this is based on smartphone screens. However, I always have problems with my center-console satnav which often thinks I want to scroll the map rather then depress a virtual button.

--- End quote ---

At one point i was curious and tested the multitouch implementation (modern Volvo). It only registers the first touch location. So once you press and hold one finger on the display it will track that finger as the touched location, ignoring any other touches happening elsewhere. So yeah leaning on the screen is not possible there. Other cars likely do similar.

Tho i would think this is all a software thing. Pretty much all modern capacitive touchscreens support multitouch (that's why other touches didn't disturb the tracking of the first touched finger location) so the touchscreen controller is likely spitting out all the touch locations. But probably was the easiest in software to just take the first touch location is reports as a "mouse cursor" and ignore the rest.

Hopefully they sort out this giant touchscreen bullshit by the time i switch cars, i don't want to go from having dedicated buttons to a touchscreen.

Kjelt:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 25, 2023, 09:58:37 pm ---The problem is feature creep + software developers deciding how products should be developed.
To paraphase a famous quote, software is much too serious a matter to be left to software developers.
 :popcorn:

--- End quote ---
Since I am EE by education and SWE for 25+ years for occupation I can say this from my experiences:

GUI's design : yes you need people who have an deep understanding of human thinking esp those with lower iq to design a good and clear GUI.

Software coding: no you need SW architects for a good clean architecture, skilled SWE en designers to use the correct statemachines, designpatterns etc.
Hardware engineers programming software, few are really good but unfortunately most suffer from the Dunning-krugereffect in this regard and this forum is full of it  >:D

Embedded software boundary of HSI yes you really like an EE involved as well.

tszaboo:

--- Quote from: DrGeoff on January 25, 2023, 11:52:48 am ---100 million lines of code?
I don't believe that for a minute unless there are reams and reams of comments and full source revision history in every file, along with an essay of legalese and copyright information, although none of this is really 'code'.

--- End quote ---
You shouldn't, this guy has zero credibility, and just comes with controversial statements that carry zero real world value when it comes to cars. I particularly loved that video from him where he stated that because of an injection moulded air valve, Teslas are superior to every other electric car.

tom66:

--- Quote from: tszaboo on January 26, 2023, 08:56:54 am ---
--- Quote from: DrGeoff on January 25, 2023, 11:52:48 am ---100 million lines of code?
I don't believe that for a minute unless there are reams and reams of comments and full source revision history in every file, along with an essay of legalese and copyright information, although none of this is really 'code'.

--- End quote ---
You shouldn't, this guy has zero credibility, and just comes with controversial statements that carry zero real world value when it comes to cars. I particularly loved that video from him where he stated that because of an injection moulded air valve, Teslas are superior to every other electric car.

--- End quote ---

Sandy's knowledge of anything outside of his specific area of expertise (which seems to be assembly and fasteners, I'd guess) is kinda poor.  And it's poor as in he often guesses, rather than saying "I don't understand this".

He also seems very bitter about being fired from Ford, I wonder if there is more to that story.

Still, if you ignore Sandy, the other Munro&Assoc. engineers are very interesting to watch.

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