Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't know how "firmware update made care less safe" or "adaptive cruise control disengaged unexpectedly" or (my personal concern) "car UI negatively impacted drivers situational awareness and reaction time" etc would show up in e.g. IIHS rating?

What percentage of crashes can be attributed to that? Let's make it simpler, how many crashes per year as a raw number happen due to those reasons you listed?

Because out of all things I would be worried about when it comes to car safety, this is the one that is least concerning to me. Especially since for most modern cars that have such a thing as "software updates" in the first place, they have the driving subsystem and infotainment subsystem entirely detached (yes, even on Teslas). Very easy to confirm yourself by force rebooting the infotainment center and seeing that the car still drives just fine.

This is false, even more so for most Tesla models. Cars have a distributed E/E architecture where embedded software runs on several computers (called ECUs that range from anywhere between 10 and 100+). Most newer Tesla models are ahead of the curve and have a more centralized (zonal) E/E architecture with very few number of ECUs.

In summary, the infotainment system and the drivetrain definitely speak to each other and unless a secure architecture comes along, I would not discount the possibility of unintended interactions due to bugs. In fact, most famous car hacks start from the infotainment system and make their way into the drivetrain.

1. I am not a car engineer,or anywhere near it, but everything I've ever read about modern cars indicates their infotainment system and engine control unit are at very least on same bus and can and do communicate.

2. I don't have those numbers, in fact point of my post I'd that I don't know how we get those numbers. When I'm a passenger I'm terrified how distracted people can be by poor UI. I wish we had more hard data. Some studies are slowly emerging.

I'm all for forbidding touch screens for driver interaction in vehicles and I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't happened yet. Anything that takes your eyes of the road is a risk. Where I live we're pretty hard on smartphones in the car while driving (and rightly so) and yet we accept touch screens with menus four levels deep for basic stuff.

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