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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

I’m also horrified by the trend to put more and more of the meters into the UI. My Ford has done the booting thing before on a highway as well as once it flipped the screen horizontally until it was shut down and started again. I can’t imagine the quality is any better for the display components that will replace speedometers and such

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The media head-end software tends to be much less robust than the digital dash display software. I've had the head unit crash and act poorly on many cars, while digital dashes boot quickly and tend to be pretty solid.

The only time I had an issue w/a digital dash was in a Volvo that had a battery that was nearly flat. The screen itself would glitch in various ways, but the data itself was still solid.

My (admittedly-beloved) 2015 F-150 will reboot Sync if I'm listening to music (usually on Soundcloud) if the song title includes non-ASCII characters.

I'm reminded of: ( https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-... ) the Mazda head unit being allergic to Roman Mars.

Or Janet Jackson's song Rhythm Nation crashing some old laptop hard drives, due to the hard drives' resonant frequency. The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...

The concept of technology being unable to handle some input as an "allergy" for some reason makes me giggle.

Awesome, a real world example of the phonograph-destroying record from the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" ! What a time to be alive! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

My 2011 Ford Focus with Sync would randomly lock up and loop the same 10th of a second of the current track. Like a really old PC if it crashed while playing a sound.

Turning the car and back on again to stop the noise got old really fast. All of the radio inputs stopped working when this happened.

Hey, ring buffer... I want you to play this, and I'm going to give you more data, just keep looping the buffer.

Oops, I forgot to give you more data... or tell you to stop... >:)

Car software is a lot more involved than most of the people here would think. These days, the dashboard display is typically rendered by separate pieces of software. A pretty normal, moderately fancy rendering engine does all the animations and backgrounds while the really important information (e.g. engine/brake system malfunction) is overlaid from a separate, isolated software system with a stack that meets quite high functional safety standards. That is, the chance of the second part of the system ever failing is comparable to winning the lottery.

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