Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matthias247 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com