Your car contains more code than Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner | Hacker News Reader

Your car contains more code than Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner

news.discovery.com

17 pointsskorks8 comments

First of all, LOC is terrible measure as we all know. Second, the author separates the plane's LOC into avionics vs. entertainment but lumps them together for cars to make the car LOC count bigger. It isn't a fair comparison.

That said, maybe the auto industry needs to learn to separate their systems like the airline industry since they have entertainment system buttons moving seats. I don't want my volume to affect my cruise control, thanks.

They do include the entertainment system of the car, which has to have some GUI controls, probably some map rendering and speech recognition, which unsurprisingly adds up to a few more lines of code than you would expect from steering alone.

Of course, the entertainment systems of planes mostly run some kind of Linux or Windows CE, which include a lot more code than the above. AND they deploy one entertainment system for every few seats, so you would have to multiply the lines of code with that. AND all those displays have some microprocessors (or FPGAs) of their own, which add to the number of "ECUs".

In short, the article is just not fair.

Without wishing to get into a flame-war with anyone driving a flashy car, but my two year old desktop running both Linux and Windows has more Lines of Code than that, therefore mine is bigger than yours. LOC should never be used as a metric, is like comparing computing power by weighing computers.

Well it's not something to boast about, more lines = more bugs - I don't want to crash

Frankly, I find this terrifying. So, I'm hurtling down the highway in a sheet metal box travelling faster than the fastest land animal, controlled by hundreds of millions of lines of code, and bugs in this code could erroneously stall my car or trigger my airbags? That's too much. It's too much code. More code means more bugs, and now more bugs means more danger. I'll gladly trade in my GPS for a car that could still drive even after being hit with an EMP. (Not that I run into electromagnetic pulses regularly... I just trust the mechanical stuff more than I do the code.)

Millions of lines is an exaggeration... You can't add up the code for the ABS to the code for engine control, to the car navigation system.

Those systems may share information, through limited signals or simple data busses, but they are separate, not a big code blob like a PC or a server.

I wonder hoe much of this is hackable?

I'd say little to none. This, of course, excluding the kind of stuff you can do just by interfacing the engine ECU with a computer (using the OBD-II port that all new cars have).

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