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Comment by turbinerneiter | Hacker News Reader

How does functional integration interfere with robustness?

The discrete components are designed, tested and verified after a long stint and their specs are frozen. It's a bit like space hardware. You verify an older CPU design can work reliably in space, and certify that processor. Then, you use the same foundation for a decade or so.

It's same with automotive industry. You have a well defined and certified stack from Delco, Bosch, Delphi, etc. and you can trust that hardware. Integration makes you return back to square one.

I remember Toyota tried unifying some control units into a single box, and 5-6 years considered realistic if not a little optimistic.

To add to that, some of these features are extremely specialized, and for each feature, 1-2 of the big players might have a huge technical advantage and economies of scale in production and in supplying. This leads to higher barrier to entry and not enough margin for other players to replicate the feature.

Funny, this sounds exactly like why microservices have an advantage over monoliths in big organizations.

SpaceX works around that by using consumer grade stuff and just replicating it 3 times. Tesla also managed to handle issues with supply shortages very well.

The old practices are just not good enough.

> SpaceX works around that by using consumer grade stuff and just replicating it 3 times

Falcons get refurbished after short flights. That reduces the emphasis on durability. Redundancy defends against random errors, reducing the need for radiation hardening. It does less against wear and tear.

> The old practices are just not good enough.

True, but also think about the path dependence of the old companies. They have withered a lot of ups and downs, they are not the innovators, they are the very slow incrementalists that despite this release a new boring model every few years dressed up as the new best thing ever. (If you have seen a car from one manufacturer you have seen them all from them for the past decades too.)

The whole car industry is a relatively high volume & low margin & medium risk business. (The unit economics is great, but any risk kills profitability, so there was a lot of consolidation and convergence.)

Basically the car industry is like the "iphone industry" except there's some actual price competition and worse fundamentals, plus Apple is relatively young (and Steve set up a pretty high pace, and expectations, plus the fundamentals of the components - eg. semi industry, radios, displays - are really moving forward, whereas internal combustion engines, and the material science of other car components are not).

it's really fantastic though, for parts availability and reliability. People don't remember how absolute shit any pre-80's vehicle is. Like, shit tier reliability from carbs, tune ups, constant work. 100k? that car is dead and done! Now the average vehicle age has been climbing and climbing. The best part is that 2005 brake caliper is probably just a slightly more refined version from the 90's

Yes, exactly, no questions there :) I remember here in the 90s (barely post-USSR Hungary) going anywhere with a typical car was almost like a choose your own adventure, where adventure meant something will randomly go wrong, and if you are lucky you have spare parts with you, or maybe you can simply find a workaround (for example when the cooling system loses all the water because the radiator suddenly bursts means you could still make progress, of course slow and stopping if the engine gets too hot). And in the early 90s nobody had mobile phones, so it involved a bit of hitchhiking to the nearest phone too!

Cars tend to fail more disastrously now, but less often. If my coil back goes I am SOL. There's a reason they tell you to keep one in the trunk. The difference to that and a cap+rotor is, a cap and rotor is about 12 bucks and can be done on the side of the road without tools, and that cap and rotor fits about 50 million 4 cylinders manufactured in the last 50 years, and tends to degrade more gracefully.

On the flip side, cars now tend to run more efficiently till they break fully and go into limp mode or won't run - a lot less tuneups and tweaking, no adjusting the valves and carb as the car ages

I've lost coil twice. Once was during driving. I lost a single cylinder, check engine light turned on. I was able to drive up to 70Km/h without my check engine light start blinking (means "you can melt your catalytic convertor, exhaust is too fuel rich, reduce throttle!").

Went to my service guy, he put down his tea on my engine, replaced it and his tea was half (~10 minutes). Also put in a new set of plug wires since my set was ~18 years old and gone hard at that point.

I went to office, lost 30-40 minutes at most.

The second one happened when the car was at park, at night. Started it in the morning, it was running off, so went to service. Same story. 70Km/h speed, 10 minute change, sans the cables this time.

Newer cars tend to use one per plug. It's just a disconnect, pop-off, push in, plug, go. 2-3 minutes at most.

yeah, this is actually something we are looking at for the Saab T5 engine series. It uses an integrated coil pack for all the cylinders, which in turn means, a failure of one is a failure of all. I know some of the tuners have switched to using more normal coil pack setups, but unfortunately the T5 system is pretty unique so its not a thing that can be easily hot swapped.

One interesting tidbit is the coil packs run a bit of current over the plug when it's not sparking to measure ionization to determine engine conditions (i think mostly knock)

> It uses an integrated coil pack for all the cylinders, which in turn means, a failure of one is a failure of all.

That’s interesting. My coil pack is also integrated, but it’s designed to fail independently. Maybe it’s the design of the coil, but not an inherent shortcoming of the system itself.

> One interesting tidbit is the coil packs run a bit of current over the plug when it's not sparking to measure ionization to determine engine conditions (i think mostly knock)

Didn’t know that. I knew that engine knock was measured with vibration sensors, crank position relative to other things and engine output measurements via load sensors (irregularity), but ionization measurement is new to me. Have any sources, so I can read more?

I think it was basically since Saab was fairly early to the coil pack game, these "Direct Ignition Cassettes" was in production in 88...

Yeah... no standard knock sensor, which is the normal way to do things, but it's much improved because a regular knock sensor on a 900 can't really tell, what cylinder is knocking (and no cylinder behaves the same, regardless of what you do), so on a distributed 900 with the Bosch systems, it'll hold boost back or (with ezk) retard knocking for a few full cycles.

With ionization it can determine -which- cylinder is knocking and adjust timing and fuel on that one specifically

Here's a good article

https://eeuroparts.com/blog/tech-corner-saab-trionic-and-ion...

That was an awesome read, thank you!

Tesla is not a car. It looks like one, it might behave a bit like one but i would not touch such a thing even with a 9 m pole. I heard too many horror stories about Tesla requirements.

If it looks like a duck (car), and moves like a duck (car), and quacks like a duck (car), then it's a duck (car) in my book.

What other thing should it have? An ICE? Then Nissan Leaf, Ford F150 electric, and BMW i series are not cars either.

One method of making a chip 'tougher' is to physically increase the size of the semiconductor elements (e.g. transistors, FETs). This would seem incompatible with highly-integrated ICs.

This is true. For radiation hardening for space, this is exactly what is required for anything more harsh than LEO. And as a consequence, the generation of processors and memory typically used are 10-20 years behind the current state of the art. That's simply the price of reliability in harsh environments!

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