The behavior of the tachometer needle was dictated by the marketing department.
A BMW engine accelerates smoothly and confidently. The tachometer needle never shakes, it rises smoothly and confidently.
It sure is. I'm old enough to have had several cars with speedometer malfunctions due to that stupid little plastic gear at the transmission. One more nuisance I'm glad we don't have on newer cars.
Analog speedometers are more complex and can’t be patched OTA. Eliminating them from the fleet means one less part to procure and inventory for manufacturing and service. Given the downside is losing precise speed awareness (you should still be able to judge rough speed visually—that’s the back-up), this seems like a fair trade-off.
Contrast that with e.g. brake lines, where digital systems can add redundancy. (That doesn’t mean they always do.) Or physical mirrors, which add critical redundancy to cameras.
We OTA spacecraft. We update planes’ software as part of maintenance. We have never written software once. We just accepted the bugs and defects as part of the product’s basket of tradeoffs, marvelling when the occasional manufacturer got it right in the first manufacturing runs.
> never needed an ECU update on a car before?
There were always weird bugs associated with models that you learned to deal with, or a tendency towards certain failure modes. In extreme cases we recalled.
We don't OTA plane software updates.
> We OTA spacecraft.
Because we can't realistically bring them back and there's an incredible amount of work that goes into make those updates flawless. Spacecraft are not a mass produced consumer product driven by profits and are less likely to have corners cut.
> Because we can't realistically bring them back
We couldn’t always OTA spacecraft. Back then we just lost them.
The point is in even high-stakes games we don’t write flawless software. Now software in cares is doing more. There will be bugs. Pretending there won’t is delusional.
What we can do is minimise safety-critical bugs by forcing standardisation and certifciation in those components, even if that slows down innovation, and ensuring timely patches. That’s easier with digital than analog, which in turn makes manufacturers more willing to admit they made a mistake.
[1] https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/2010...
But I'd be surprised if Jeep is the only example of this (outside Tesla). Surely this is the way all cars have been going for a while.