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I'll bet a hidden factor here is development and testing.

They can probably develop for a car ethernet lan with a desktop pc and car "peripherals".

Not that there aren't canbus cards for pcs, but still.

This sounds like the real answer. Replacing an automotive standard with Ethernet is going to reduce friction onboarding junior webdevs with MacBooks, and enable a more stable higher turnover labor intensive organization.

CAN to PC adapters are a few hundred dollars, it isn't causing much friction.

With ethernet you can probably run the car software in containers.

I can imagine a container to simulate each hardware unit, a small inter-contaner lan, and develop code that way.

Reminds me when my Opel resetted itself while driving on the highway. Oh, the adrenaline...

You can already do this trivially with Linux vcan[1] so I don't buy this argument.

I think the bigger factor is that innovation in the CAN ecosystem has been lagging behind Ethernet for decades now. Only reason it's had such staying power is industry inertia.

1. https://netmodule-linux.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howto/can.h...

The relative cost is probably a factor (which overlaps with inertia of course, but if the thing you already have implemented is also cheaper, you aren't going to hurry up and change).

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