Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

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Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary that does electrical vehicles that overlap a lot with Volvo's own EVs. Polestar 2 is their main model and its specs are nice, pretty much the second best after Tesla.

However what PS2 is also known for is an absolute shite quality of their firmware.

Cars refusing to start and requiring a "service" out of blue (with one lucky guy scoring this in the middle of a forest). Chargers not engaging or, better yet, not disengaging. Basic functions, like blinkers and car locks, breaking after an update. Updates, in general, are more of "oh, fuck, not again" events rather than the positive news.

Like, I understand it's a complex software. I had a Bimmer show at "-10 km to destination", an Audi refusing to open a truck if parked too close to the wall, but the amount of bugs in Polestar is insane over the baseline.

But, yeah, it's (possibly) written in Rust. Yay.

[1] https://www.polestar.com

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Polestar/

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Edit - Added "(possibly)". The point was that the choice of the language matters less if your bugs are higher level and your QA process is lacking.

Volvo used to have a lot more control over their firmware than any other auto manufacturer that I knew of. Firmware images were counted as spare parts, and were charged for and managed by the official dealer service network.

They had a central database that kept track of the revision state of every car, including what firmware revision was installed in each ECU. Volvo owners tended to keep using official service centres longer than those of other brands, so this database was usually correct.

Not sure where I heard the story, but I’m a longtime Turbo Brick fan and actually had a Bosch ECU custom programmed in Sweden by an employee who did it quietly on the side. Went from 222hp to 285hp - would’ve been more but the AW small auto transmission would eat itself.

After Ford bought Volvo, they expected compliance and sent instructions and materials for the next infotainment system to be used in Volvo cars. A Ford product. Equipment, interface, code platform all sent from corporate out to Gothenburg and that was that. So Ford thought.

When they visited Sweden to check on the progress of the new model. When they saw the infotainment system it was nothing like what Ford had sent with the mandate to use it. Of course they questioned Volvo and I believe the response is true because I’ve known a few born and raised Scandinavians…

“Oh, that system was not good. We decided not to use it and built our own.”

By then it was already working and done to the point Ford just shook its head and let them proceed.

Needless to say, the relationship was not to be long-term, who could’ve seen that coming?! /s

No programming language will prevent "limited thinking logic" bugs. It may prevent bugs caused by bad syntax or bad practices encouraged by the programming language. If it is a programming language it must do exactly what you tell it to do. If you tell it to do something wrong, it will do something wrong, no matter if it is in rust or any other language.

As another point of reference, using the touchscreen interface was the single worst thing about the 2021 XC40 I drove for a while. So I’m not sure anyone should be taking advice from volvo on software.

Completely agree. I own a 2020 V90 CC and the software is far worse in many regards than the car that it replaced: a 2016 base model VW Golf. I have radio glitches, the parking sensors kick in when no objects are present, the drive profiles that should activate when you use paired keys don’t activate. Not to mention using CarPlay or android auto only allows you to use the lower half of the display, with the upper half rendered useless.

I have nearly every safety feature turned off in the car because they all generate false positives at an astounding rate. Automatic braking kicks in for parked cars, billboards on the side of the road, cars traversing roundabouts in front of you, heck, probably even for gusts of wind.

They refreshed the interface recently with Android Auto, however they’re missing key features and have regressed on some major integrations - for example, they don’t support CarPlay in the current iteration.

I won’t be purchasing another Volvo.

The Polstar software is written in Rust?

I'm not the OP, and I don't know about Polestar specifically, but I've worked with many other vehicle systems, and they are incredibly complex. Each ECU in a car is running it's own firmware, and the larger ones can be running their own OS.

There's usually a mix of Assembly, Simulink, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Shell scripts, Python, etc...

I've seen the OS be various flavors of embedded Linux, QNX, or even Ubuntu.

You can usually find a bit of everything even in a single vehicle. The code is integrated by an OEM and can come from dozens of potential suppliers.

I side with you. Basically "Volvo is using Rust..." translates to: "Volvo is adding Rust to its stack of complexity".

This comment makes me want to use a bicycle from now on.

I've seen rust used in a lot of bicycles.

More seriously, most ebike firmware is written in C.

My bikes run c++ (both arduino and segger-flavored) and a funny language called monkey-C in the subset of the code I know. And presumably mostly c++ in the parts that I don't know (much larger parts). Some people I ride with also have java in the mix and it doesn't seem to bother them at all.

Just use a 90s EFI vehicle with a full modern aftermarket ECU system from Haltec or Motec or whomever, and you can have a better car than was ever sold OEM.

There's no mention of the Rust language on the site or their careers page, at least with queries like `rust site:www.polestar.com/us/` or `rust site:about.polestar.com/careers/jobs/`.

Keep in mind that 90% of the engineering done in a car comes from a supplier or the supplier of supplier

Don't know for sure, but their share the "platform" with Volvo.

That's off the point though. The choice of language matters, but it matters less than the development process and the professionalism of people involved.

From what I can tell from test driving a Volvo CX90 and a Polestar these cars don’t have much in common in terms of software.

This is a terrible comment. The interview was thoughtful and constructive, and the top rated comment is a polemic rant about a subsidiary of Volvo?

Jesus fucking christ HN

I'm actually quite fond of my comment, even though it is effectively a rant.

Volvo and Polestar operate at the arm's length. There are interviews that talk about a shared EV platform. There are also numerous reported issues with core EV functionality in the Polestars, oftentimes so severe that it's unclear how they don't lead to immediate fleet recalls.

It's possible that the people interviewed are unrelated to those responsible for the problematic areas, but the context is still important.

May be the crowd is getting a bit tired of the whole "Rust fanboism".too many articles on HN about Rust. It's just another language at the end of the day.

There is nothing terrible in this comment.

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