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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Why did car companies allow themselves to make such a strategic mistake? Shouldn't they be on a standard microcontroller architecture?

Why not even use ARM, X86, etc? It'd save them money at this point. And there wouldn't be a supply risk.

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Wouldn't really make any difference. The last company I worked for did pretty much everything with MCU's based on ARM Cortex-M.

All that shit's still not in stock anywhere. And remember that ARM, x86, etc. only defines the processor architecture. The I/O is far more important in a control application and I/O is anything but standard across platforms.

For one product we ended up buying a vendors entire supply and redesigning the product to use it, crossing our fingers that the supply chain would have unwound itself by the time we ran out of inventory.

Tier 1 suppliers have an incredible amount of influence in that ecosystem, and Tier 1 suppliers have an incentive to not be easily replaceable. That'd be my guess.

I mean, it's an entire MASSIVE industry that's comprised almost entirely of truly commodity technology, and so you get all the perverse outcomes that happen when trying to "differentiate" despite being commodity by inventing ways to be "special" to drive lock-in. Interoperability only really benefits the OEM, and the OEM isn't the only part of the chain.

As others have mentioned, the peripherals/etc related to a specific model of microcontroller and how you work with them play a big factor.

But I'd also like to throw in:

- 16 years or so ago, the US side of the Auto industry was trying to steer towards PPC. Motorola/Freescale's presence in the market probably had a bit of a play in this, as well as ARM's then-status of 'not quite powerful enough to be future proof.' A StackOverflow post from 2012 [0] seems to indicate they did indeed standardize, whether they moved on from there is another question.

- Most Carmakers probably -don't- want to change designs outside of a refresh. There's a few reasons for this, including both external (updating documentation to repair network) and internal (when I worked at a place that did software/services for a US automaker, we had to submit pages of documentation/paperwork to change a couple of items placement/wording in a dialogue box.)

[0] - https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/26035/whats-...

Those processors aren't made on high reliability processes. You don't want your ECU built with the same media processor as the infotainment system.

Maybe I do! I've seen both fail just the same so it's not like ECUs are failure-proof or something.

Your radio dying won't kill you.

Correct, but you seem to have disregarded half my comment. ECUs are not failure-proof and fail all the time.

I've never heard of anyone dying due to ECU failure either..I'm not sure how that would even happen given all the critical systems on a car are mechanical first with electronic assist. So you can't lose steering, braking, etc. The worst that happens is you lose power, which is about the same risk as a subpar standard transmission driver stalling out (and can also happen in a number of different ways). Can you expand on how an ECU failing might kill you?

I would love if someone could elaborate on why I'm wrong instead of drive by downvoting. This isn't reddit.

Its easier and more realistic to kill the company via a recall.

Take for example the Boeing 737-MAX. Eh, its bigger, needs a little more elevator movement to simulate the older model, just flex the software so it can wiggle a bit more what could possibly go wrong?

Likewise, remember the VW Diesel emissions "scandal". You can nearly kill a company without actually killing anyone.

So, the specified ECU chip (which is no longer in stock) could output 40 mA to the gas tank vacuum solenoid so we spec'd the solenoid to draw 30 mA on the coldest day of the year, usually it draws much less. Got a substitute chip only rated to 20 mA usually it'll work fine, what could possibly go wrong? Until it burns out and the vacuum solenoid fails open and nationwide millions of gallons of "excess" gas evaporate per year from sitting cars. Harmless on an individual scale but on a nationwide scale its a lot of ozone... Insert yet ANOTHER $35B recall to replace all the ECUs for willful emissions violations ...

I'm just saying its not binary where either people die and it kills the company or people aren't even harmed and nothing bad happens at all. Plenty of "company killer" situations where "what could possibly go wrong" got the F-around and find out treatment.

Because the architecture is not so important. What is important is what periphereals are available. And even if you have the same architecture you still need to test if you change something. And things change rapidly also in automotive. 10 years ago you had a 100 pin micro at 32Mhz clock with 64kb ram, now you have a 384 pin micro running atva couple of hundred MHz with 256 MB ram.

There's an incentive for chip vendors to not standardize since it makes migration hard and drives vendor lock-in. The CPU cores are one part but equally important is the peripherals and external featuresets.

That incentive might exist, but what really drives the lack of standardization is that every application has different needs, so you end up with a common CPU and wildly diverging configurations tailored to various applications.

i'd guess adding an abstraction layer (between a general purpose microcontroller and the custom interfaces it needs to support) is likely not worth the added complexity (and bugs), since cars are on development cycles of many years anyway (for the benefit of simpler software development, and the risk reduction of being able to swap out the microcontroller if need be).

They actually theoretically have a thing for this already. It's called AUTOSAR (now AUTOSAR Classic). It's supposed to be a component architecture to write down the software against a framework that can be backed by different MCUs. Of course, in practice much of the underlying esoteria of any given MCU/board configuration bled up through the abstractions and/or produced custom extensions.

And AUTOSAR is a nightmare of a framework where it's nigh impossible to understand what is going on because of the crazy abstractions.

Indeed, it's a mess and the surrounding tooling ecosystem is a pile of weird Windows GUI tools of about the quality you'd expect for very expensive tools that do very little provided to a captive customer base. It's all very circa 1990s RAD-tool mania-esque still in many ways.

That said, we're working with some groups in some automotive companies who are breaking this mold rapidly.

Whom, if you don't mind me asking? I would.love to see stuff change in this field.

I can't upset the NDA Gods on this one, unfortunately. I can say one is a traditional OEM that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be the sort to take vanguard steps like this and the other is a newer OEM that's not as encumbered by tradition (though due to the supply-chain also can't rid themselves of it).

Shameless plug WARNING: we (https://auxon.io) are hiring for engineering, marketing, and BD if industrial & operational technology is your thing.

I never signed the NDA, although I follow the space distantly, and they went public on their own website a couple years ago with a list:

BMW, Bosch, Continental, Daimler AG, Ford, General Motors, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

I always rooted for an older competitor GENIVI which (very handwavy in a general sense) boiled down to "make dbus great again". I just always have a soft spot for anything that replaces CORBA and DCOP. More or less GENIVI had the same players as AUTOSAR.

I believe AUTOSAR suffers from trying to do too much; GENIVI's "all you need is a compatible bus" is the minimum you need so simplicate and add lightness and that's what should win; doesn't really matter if that guy runs QNX and that other guy runs FreeRTOS as long as the busses talk; whereas AUTOSAR tries to own and control everything top to bottom which just ends up stifling any productivity.

If you look through the "Adaptive AUTOSAR" literature and documentation that's out there you can find that enormous chunks of it are lifted straight from GENIVI's stack/specs.

However, GENIVI/Adaptive-AUTOSAR tends to serve a different function in the vehicle architecture. It's mostly cockpit and less control/platform. AUTOSAR Classic is still the champ on the MCU side of the house.

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