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Comment by iknowstuff | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is. Failed updates are non-destructive, they also have an RTOS gateway isolating entertainment software from the software needed to drive the vehicle.

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/reverse-engine...

And this is their decade old architecture. If you watch some cybertruck videos you’ll see it is much more elegant now.

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This isn't a tesla-specific thing or even something they innovated. The earliest cars with data networks had this.

It's also not something Tesla does better; numerous security researchers have bypassed that gateway.

Since you bring up Tesla: used to be that Tesla control units would fail after a certain number of drive time hours because they did so much logging to the flash chips they'd wear them out.

In a vehicle which is highly connected and basically should never lose power most of its life, they were writing logs to flash memory. Anyone who has done embedded work can tell you how stupid an idea that is.

Yes, that happened to my car. But one could still drive their car after the failure and there was a free recall.

https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-ask...

Genuine question, in that scenario what should you write the logs to if you wanted to keep the files locally on the car?

I understand EMMC/Flash is a bad idea, but what is the better approach, a HDD/SSD?

Tesla is very very good at software engineering. They still need to find the balance in their software and process engineering, though.

You are talking about the company that wrote logs to the fully read-write filesystem of their infotainment system and killed the EMMC from raw flash cycles within as few as 2 years. Recalled 10 years later.

Yes, this happened to me, although it took 10 years. Free replacement, and the car still worked fine.

It's still a major embedded engineering oversight on their part. We had fallback developed for such cases in $5 embedded devices.

Calling out Tesla as a model for excellent software is insulting to SW that's actually quality.

What Tesla SW has and others lack, is a great "wow" factor, which consumers who don't get to see how the sausage is made, mistakenly associate with 'quality' because it behaves like their iPad, but don't know all the skeletons in that closet.

Yeah, it's also a mistake they made 10 years ago.

Tesla is very good at automotive software engineering.

>Yeah, it's also a mistake they made 10 years ago.

You're making it sound like that mistake was an "I spilled my coffee on you boo-boo" and not a terrible engineering decision that should not have passed anyone with actual experience in the embedded industry, let alone a team. If this is the kind of engineering oversights that ends up in Tesla SW, only God knows what else they have lurking in there that hasn't yet reared its ugly head.

>Tesla is very good at automotive software engineering.

Citation needed. Repeating something doesn't make it true.

You don’t appear to be arguing in good faith. It was a minor issue they had 10 years ago that was fixed.

Tesla obviously has excellent software, but I’m interested in what you’d consider to be excellent software, and which companies would meet your absurd and non-sensical expectations.

Please name some companies that meet your standards.

Yeah, they have some truly breathtaking software controlling the automatic wipers. It's like a true ai, probably competitive with a 6 month or so old child. The automatic high beams are up there with the pinnacle of software engineering as well.

I've heard a lot about how bad they are, but I've just never noticed either doing anything but their job.

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