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Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

Especially the lag that you see on some brand new cars, only BMW and Audi seem to have lag free interface, but anything else that involves touch interface is just horrid! I've recently sat in my friend's brand new Honda SUV and the interface lag is just plain silly, for a car that costs $30,000+. Why is that?

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Because the software development was started 3 years ago on a platform that was spec'd out 5 years ago.

Over those 5 years, the software requirements slowly crept upward while the hardware performance stayed the same and couldn't be changed.

How did the quality control passed it? The lag on some of these car infotainment system just to change the sound is abysmal, someone definely saw that and should have said something, you paying $30,000+ for something that takes 4 seconds to respond to a music volume change. Whoever is responsible for that should not work there...

The quality control came last in the process, so when they 'finished' not long before the delivery date is due, QA gets a ton of political pressure to not make the date slip.

That's why test-driven design is valuable -- you iterate while testing.

What's the point of quality control then if it means nothing in that case?

Making sure it doesn't burst into flames

... whilst it's still in warranty.

If only we'd work together then the car could have a common bus system and you'd just swap out the control console on the front and choose your level of [stupid, annoying, distracting] graphics and what have you.

There's no competition in these systems because people choose the car and get lumbered with the UI on the console. Kinda like if houses had unique electrical systems and you couldn't change the white-goods.

Cars already have CANBUS as a standard thing so it shouldn't be difficult.

I think the CarPlay/MirrorLink/Android Auto thing is probably a better model though. Make the console dumb and let me connect my upgraded-every-year phone that's far more powerful.

Believe it or not, the software quality in these things is often quite cruel, and even a mediocre javascript framework might perform awesome against it. I've seen enough things things like handcoded UI frameworks in C++ (in order to be fast), and then doing things like blocking network calls on the main thread from there.

Some newer systems are based on QT or Android. These typically have better performance, because the underlying frameworks have at least a decent design.

I wish there were car reviews out there that take software quality in account in particular for things like lane keep assist. When I was in the market for a car the reviews that I have seen only mention if they have the feature, not how well it actually works.

For what it's worth, there's a specific distinction for software systems like lane assist. The bar for "working" is so high that if it doesn't essentially work perfectly we can't say it works at all.

We would expect reviews to point out if a feature such as lane assist fails or has noteworthy failures (such as rapid weaving inside the lane) but maybe not so much if it works properly.

I currently have a Honda Civic with lane keep assist. It doesn't slow down before curves and disengages frequently. Tesla's autopilot works much better from what I have seen.

I have a 2016 Volkswagen (Tiguan II), whose Lane Assist also leaves a lot to be desired. It handles nearly straight roads with no traffic quite ok, but it would surely crash the car on nearly every obstacle (lane narrowing/widening, obstacles, tighter corners, ...) without manual intervention.

That's a reason why I don't believe in seeing safe autonomous cars during the next few years at all. But maybe Tesla is that much better - haven't ridden one.

It is much better, but a LONG way from autonomous.

I recently got a Mazda3, their newer MazdaConnect system is running an iMX6 (dual CortexA9 w/GPU and video accelerators) and uses Opera as the interface. All of the core UI is written in Javascript.

It's also highly hackable. =)

But how's the lag?

The UI is simple, there's nothing swipable by design and animations are minimal. It works quite well.

I don't have the navigation enabled, so I can't speak to how responsive the map display it.

That's interesting. I don't know too much about what Mazda uses. Is there any documentation in the web about it?

There's a PCB teardown here

http://www.2x4logic.com/mazdaconnect.html

It was designed by Johnson Controls (JCI) but the IVI group was recently sold to Visteon, which probably explains the sudden lack of momentum from Mazda on new features (like, cough, Carplay...which was announced 2 years ago and never showed up).

Most of the people hacking on the unit hang out at mazda3revolution.com. Here's a page indexing their work so far:

http://mazda3revolution.com/forums/2014-mazda-3-skyactiv-aud...

I found this advertisement from Mercedes interesting: https://i.redd.it/wwxk8nqh88ex.gif

I can't speak for the quality of Mercedes interface (and this is obviously marketing for non-programmers) but LOC seems like an odd thing to be emphasising.

These things are quite random, because most likely they counted also all dependencies in - including LoC for OS kernel, all libraries, etc. And how much LoC is boost alone? :D

As a programmer who strongly believes in less being more, remind me to never buy a Merc.

Because some marketing guru thought that it's a great idea to advertise it that way? Common...they are great cars

Everyone needs to hit 100,000 LOC this week to hit our target from marketing

Here is one line of code to solve all of their software problems:

rm -rf /

Sounds like it's full of spaghetti code.

At one undiscovered bug per KLOc, that's basically advertising that their software is a disastrous ball of mud.

KLOC are something you spend, a debt you accumulate.

Same with in-flight entertainment systems on planes. They always have terrible, slow interfaces.

This causes people to press harder in reaction and then they are bouncing the person in front of them's head. It's comical if it's not happening to you.

I recently took a flight with Virgin Atlantic and was actually pleasantly surprised. It still wasn't perfect, but it was by far the best I've seen from in-flight entertainment.

Mostly I'd agree, but Emirates ICE system is pretty decent https://www.emirates.com/au/english/flying/inflight_entertai...

I always want to turn it “off” because it’s too distracting, and the only way is to turn the Brightness down to off. It goes like this: BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, oh now it’s off. Then 5 minutes later, the airline starts its welcome mostly-advertising video which TURNS THE DAMNED THING BACK ON AT FULL BRIGHTNESS. Then it resumes DirecTV at which point I have to say: BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, wait, BrightnessDown, annnnnnnnd now it’s off.

Most of the newer ones I see these days are just Android tablets with capacitive digitizers and a pretty decent shell.

VW's newer interfaces are also quite lag-free. But then again, it is the same concern as Audi, so I guess it makes sense.

I have a 2016 car that I hate the screen's ui/ux... it's laggy, and looks like something from 2007. That doesn't even get into the fact that the onboard wireless is 3G, not LTE on something in 2016.

Really makes me wish the whole thing was more hackable.

Have you seen BMW's Display Key or however it's called? Ridiculous.

I've used it, the lag on it is abysmal, whoever approved it should be fired right away.

Just to be clear: That is a KEY with a DISPLAY. THAT is ridiculous.

I think it will get worse with time as younger generations have never experienced lag-free appliance technology.

I'd love to see a cost breakdown of a modern car, especially Tesla.

Car is say 100k, how much of the componentry is the cost of the wiring harness, nervous system and screen?

Our 2013 Honda Accord needed several updates just for the radio to work reliably. You would go to change a channel, the screen would blank out and come back on with all presets set to 97.3. Of course, if you "rebooted" the car, they came back correctly.

And the lag when hitting a tough screen button, incredibly frustrating. I want my buttons!

are these non-Android/Apple infotainment systems running a high-level language runtime?

Because Honda at its core is not a software company?

Honda isn't a tire or windshield company either, it does not prevent them from ordering high quality tires or windshields...

Actually, a lot of the Japanese car companies are built on vertically integrated companies where a parent (usually a bank) company owns both the primary company (Honda) and a set of complementary companies that provide things like Windshields or Tires. It's called a Keiretsu.

Then maybe they should keiretsu their way to software because whether they're a software company or not they make shitty software. And either they can make good software or they can buy good software, but if they make shitty software they're a software company, just a shitty software company.

Most manufacturers are only responsible for powertrain components, contracting and assembly.

They're not experts in much, but contracting for quality parts IS something they're supposed to be experts in.

It should be as simple as stipulating a requirement of "sub 100ms response time to all user input".

I've worked at several companies where at least one manager/exec says "We are not a software company, we're a ___(their core product/service)___ company".

If an organization creates and utilizes software as part of their ongoing concern...is at some level, a software company.

Indeed. Yahoo pretending it wasn't a software company is what lead to a billion user accounts getting compromised in the largest data breach in history.

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