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Which is more complex - car or an operating system?

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schmitt trigger:
Let's take a single large subassembly on a vehicle: the transmission.

Modern, 8, 9 and 10 gear automatic transmissions on themselves are so spectacularly complex, that there are only a few companies that can design and build them.

Even companies like Ford and GM had to form an alliance to design the latest automatic transmission for their trucks, as the development cost was above a billion dollars.


themadhippy:
from a long time ago

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.

4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought ‘Car95’ or ‘CarNT’, and then added more seats.

6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per cent of the roads.

7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single ‘general car default’ warning light.

8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag would say ‘Are you sure?’ before going off.

10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. You would press the ‘start’ button to shut off the engine.

JPortici:

--- Quote from: Rerouter on June 02, 2020, 11:13:30 am ---Cars and trucks usually have less total software complexity, but that is somewhat required to still be able to review and test for edge cases, its one of the few industries where its not easy to "just patch it after release"

--- End quote ---

you would be suprised :(
we also have a mechanic workshop and in the past few years many of the newer, higher end volvo and audi we serviced suffered from serious bugs in the transmission and lightning ecu. Customer would be asked to go to the dealer at least once every few weeks to update the ECUs
serious bugs meaning the gear will refuse to change, switch off / back on or that the whole rear lights would be stuck, witch of / back on.
I want to say that the engine and the safety critical parts are still immune to this problem.. i want to.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: JPortici on June 02, 2020, 05:43:59 pm ---
--- Quote from: Rerouter on June 02, 2020, 11:13:30 am ---Cars and trucks usually have less total software complexity, but that is somewhat required to still be able to review and test for edge cases, its one of the few industries where its not easy to "just patch it after release"

--- End quote ---

you would be suprised :(
we also have a mechanic workshop and in the past few years many of the newer, higher end volvo and audi we serviced suffered from serious bugs in the transmission and lightning ecu. Customer would be asked to go to the dealer at least once every few weeks to update the ECUs
serious bugs meaning the gear will refuse to change, switch off / back on or that the whole rear lights would be stuck, witch of / back on.
I want to say that the engine and the safety critical parts are still immune to this problem.. i want to.

--- End quote ---

At least they got the car out of the door. Volkswagen can't even get the software to work on their new ID.3. They are going to pull a 'Rigol' by selling the cars with many features missing.

CatalinaWOW:
Depends on what you mean by complexity.  Windows has hundreds of thousands of lines of code, while a car has only a few thousands, or possibly tens of thousands of parts.  But the Windows code works in a very simple environment where there are only a few hundred instructions and the language can be fully described in a single volume.  While the metallurgy of the various parts in a car requires multiple volumes.  And that is just one of the myriad of disciplines involved in designing said vehicle.  I suspect that the full staff designing Windows is an order of magnitude or more smaller than the staff designing a car.  Which would either mean Windows is less complex or that Microsoft is incredibly efficient compared to auto designers.  I know few who would vote on the latter.

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