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Comment by vijaybritto | Hacker News Reader

A failure in the infotainment will brick the entire car?! I thought they would be made up of individual systems talking to each other in messages. Tesla needs Erlang!

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Not exactly new to integrate multiple systems: My 2004 Land Cruiser has the heating/cooling and a few other less urgent systems integrated into the radio. Which means I can't replace it with a radio that supports bluetooth audio, without giving up heat/AC...

You can... it just means modifying the PCB for the controls extensively. I had a friend who did this on a Subaru once. Was a huge PITA.

Same for my 2011 Explorer, and since it was such a PoS [1] the system would reboot it self while I was driving. When rebooting it would put the A/C/heat into halfway fan on 70 degree mode, whether you wanted it or not.

[1] - there's currently a class action settlement about how terrible it was

This is the case for many, if not most, modern/high-tech cars, especially EVs.

The on-board systems have become very tightly coupled, if not monolithic to the point where a broken info unit will prevent the car from starting.

I had the infotainment system replaced in my e-Golf a few weeks ago, it took two technicians three days to install and configure to work with all the car's on-board systems.

Edit: If I _had_ to guess, I’d say this is because the car industry (especially electric) has been pushing to innovate features so rapidly that the time hasn't been available to engineer, test and prove decoupled systems.

Why won't they think about these things? Do they really don't care or is it that we don't understand something very important in making cars?! I want to know !

It reduces cost and makes it easier to give a nice user experience when people are test driving. It makes it easier to manage all the different aspects of the car from a single interface.

The primary reason the car is made, in the first place, is to be sold at a profitable price. That is priority #1.

There's anti-theft considerations at play with how car electronics are coupled, reducing part count for cost savings, and I think a bit of the classic right to repair vs corporate interests dynamic happening. Automakers have been known to intentionally make things difficult to work on.

Yes, electronics are highly coupled, but in the case of the e-Golf it will at least function as a car with no infotainment system (unlike the Tesla). And MIB replacement in the VW MQB platform is simple so I don’t understand what took the techs so long. It’s one unit in the glovebox and guided coding using ODIS, the VW dealer tool (which is also available to independent shops albeit at a $1000/year fee, which is stupid and should be illegal). The VW units do have Component Protection which keeps them from simply plugging in, but with the aforementioned dealer tool, so long as it is legally obtained, a subscription to VW’s anti theft coding service Geko is already included and the process is very straightforward.

> I thought they would be made up of individual systems talking to each other in messages.

That's how my 2011 BMW is. It's not exactly the most reliable car, but I'd imagine things would be much worse if it weren't designed that way.

For example, my body control module (FRM) just recently died, but the engine still runs and the car can still be driven, just none of the lights work.

The non-critical systems communicate with the powertrain bus through a special CAN gateway in an attempt to isolate the systems.

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