Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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Absolutely. It's easy to see that with Volvo - they had their own operating system called Sensus that could only be upgraded at the dealership and you know, maybe it wasn't the flashiest thing but it worked fine. I've owned a car with it for nearly 5 years and it has never crashed for me once or really did anything weird - it's as stable as any automotive software should be imho. And then they swapped over to AOSS(android based) and it's a complete mess, people have been complaining about bugs and crashes literally constantly, and forums are just full of people going "are you on 3.452.123? They fixed that bug in 3.465.234, you need that update" and the updates literally come out every week, but now owners are worried whether an update actually fixes anything or of it makes things worse again. And I 100% blame the OTA updates for this, they just come in fast and thick clearly without the engineering rigor that automotive software should have.

Is AOSP running any of the critical systems that would make the car undrivable or unsafe if it crashed? Or just IVI stuff? If the former that is horrifying.

It's running the infotainment display(the one in the centre of the car) , but not the driver display. Fortunately I've never heard about the driver display crashing while driving, so at least Volvo had the good sense of making sure that is solid - but the infotainment display is known to crash frequently requiring a hard restart(you hold the button under the display for at least 10 seconds then the entire thing reboots), which maybe it's critical but means you can't change any of the climate controls(other than windows demist since it has its own button, thankfully) while the screen reboots.

Correct, the car can function without the infotainment system but you lose conveniences like climate control, the backup camera, and sometimes even audio, which is weird because you get no feedback from the turn signals. It’s not great but not an immediately pulling over kinda thing.

All systems in a car are safety critical. If your infotainment system is freaking out it is taking your eyes off the road.

The same way that updates to Google Maps and Apple Maps kill people due to UI changes.

All systems are safety critical.

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