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Comment by RecycledEle | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the solution to all these screwy engine controls (tampering with emissions testing, preventing 3rd party repairs, etc.) is to standardize the interfaces to these systems so they can be replaced.

Standardizing the outputs of the sensors would let us swap in and out various components to ensure the system is not cheating the regulators.

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F1 does this. All teams are required to run the same, approved, ECU[1]. They can change certain mapping tables and such but it's a sealed unit and they can't replace the firmware.

[1]: https://wheelsports.co/formula-1s-standardised-ecu-explained...

This is quite interesting because you can imagine that lobbyists would argue that standardization would “stymie innovation.” If F1 does it why can’t you?

One could easily argue that F1 hasn't innovated much in the last decade or so. The coolest stuff we get is clever aero and advantageous workarounds that get outlawed extremely fast.

You are extremely downplaying the "clever" aero. Remember, simulation time and costs are regulated in F1. The innovation is producing extremely effective aero with minimal brute force simulation.

I'm aware that the tech to do so is really cool. It doesn't make the racing better though. It's not more exciting, the cars aren't really faster because of it because they're limited in other ways, and it's not really more competitive.

What F1 needs is disruption, more options, like too many options that all of them won't be test-able, less standardization. Even the limited sim time is a problem, because there are certainly optimizations left on the table that can't really be found otherwise. What you wind up with is a A-team and a B-team of mostly the same designs. That's booring, and moreso because if the cars really were 100% standardized, at very least it'd be competitive in terms of driver skill.

It's why these days, I don't watch much F1, I much prefer the more 'indie' racing leagues where, on any given raceday, anyone can win. The days of F1 being that way are long gone, and, it's not likely to change at-all.

Most of F1's "innovation" is around finding ways to beat the rules, not necessarily coming up with new technologies.

Indeed. Standardizing certain components may reduce some potential innovation, however I've long thought that the public sector would be better off buying modular systems with well-defined interfaces rather than the behemoths do-it-all oh-so-often fail.

At work we're a small team, providing a B2B application to perform a small, but very important task for our customers. We integrate with tons of other systems, at our largest customer we talk to 30 other systems. We're highly specialized and we rely on being good at exchanging data with other systems that are good at what they do.

This allows us to innovate and provide great value for our niche, while the other systems can focus on getting better at what they do, rather than implementing a half-assed solution because it's not their core focus.

F1 is an ecosystem in which the competitors agree to a set of rules as a prerequisite of participating. Among the guiding principles of the rules are "limit spending on aspects that don't meaningfully affect the competition" and "when possible, make it easy to enforce the other rules". Using a single, common ECU (which is both complicated to manufacture and doesn't directly influence performance [0]) saves all the teams (bar McLaren) from having to go down a rabbit hole of doing semiconductor design and manufacturing and makes it easy for the governing body to enforce rules about how the ECU is configured.

[0] How the ECU is configured does, but the ECU itself doesn't

There are devices for automobiles that intercept sensor data and feed back fake data to the ECU to bypass emissions controls. It's a fairly simple to do.

I have a buddy with a WRX that absolutely should not pass smog, has no cats, big turbos, tune, etc, but it has no codes, passes every time without issue because the sensor data is synthetic that governs those things.

The government emmissions test doesn’t measure what comes out of the tail pipe?

Nope, relies on the ECU to communicate over the OBDII port the emissions status.

There are visual inspections, but, they're not terribly thorough, and they don't disassemble anything.

That's for normal cars mind, for diesel semis/lori's they also have a measure of how much smoke comes out of the stacks at a given load, and how long it lingers in the air, so even if the ECU reads clean, if it's running dirty like that it'll still fail.

Or even just requiring the manufacturer to provide all source code to the customer and the tools to update/replace the software. Would be nice to get rid of the black holes that is firmware and allow for auditing.

It's a bit more than standardizing, since you must also remove the barriers to changing the software. And you don't need full standardization, just publicity.

But yes, it's basically it.

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