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If Microsoft Built Cars...
trystanu writes "If Microsoft Built Cars, occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason; you'd
accept this, restart and drive on -- at least that was the joke a few years ago. ZDNET reports that Microsoft has persuaded a number of carmakers to use its slimmed-down Windows CE operating system to power a variety of in-car electronics, from navigation systems to music players to information devices. BMW, in particular, has gravitated to Microsoft systems, although the company has announced wins with Honda, Volvo and others as well. Perhaps the recent trapping of Thai dignitaries inside a BMW should be a warning to us all."
Too bad he wasn't driving a BMW with an iDrive system, but an earlier BMW. It was a catastrophic electrical system failure that locked him in the car.
3 ,3 9130270,00.htm
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/systems/0,3900115
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Well I saw it with my own eyes, but here's a usenet post to back me up.
Happy?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Well, from what I've gleaned working on warranties and listening to service managers is after market products that are installed on your car (such as remote starters, extra lights, anything that hook into your electrical system) have a high chance of voiding your manufacturer's warranty. Especially remote starters, those can fry your electronical system faster than it'll void your warranty.
As far as add-on electronics goes, I'm not going to void my warranty by plugging in my cell-phone into my car. But with aftermarket products, have them professionally installed. Otherwise it'll get ugly if you have a failure relating to that aftermarket product. Ugly for your pocketbook that is.
The little notice says you are not to even operate a hand-held cell phone in the car.
They must use some piss-poor shielding on their electronics if they are really worried about induced currents from a hand-held phone causing any problems.
Either that, or they want to scare people into buying a BMW blessed carphone from a dealership, which is much more likely.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
In the US, it's called the Magnuson-Moss Act of 1975. Google for it. It specifically prohibits product tying for warranty claims. They cannot deny your claim because you used an unapproved cell phone. There's a number of other provisions in MM that BMW seems to be trying to ignore.
Temkin
What really annoyed me was when I worked as a contractor for the Air Force, they had a fighter jet with a new computer system which would fail in the middle of the flight. After some poking around I learned it was a slimmed down version of Windows they were running.
The sad part was they tied it to the propulsion. When the computer crashed, the jet would simply shutdown and at 20,000 feet things could get interesting.
Ironically, the manufacturer provided restart instructions for the computer and claimed this was perfectly 'normal'. I don't believe this ever moved past the prototype stage.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I currently have an Acura with a navigation system built in, and I can tell you that there is no need for a familiar windows interface in that car. It's easy to use, and the only complaint I have is that it's kinda slow and adding windows probably won't speed it up. As an added thought the 2004 Acura TL already has blue tooth, plays mp3 CDs, and has speech recognition for a navigation system thats better then mine. What does Honda gain by going with Microsoft?
I've also seen the navigation systems in both BMW's and Benz's, and both of them need to become much more user friendly, so I can see them asking Microsoft for help.
Embedded != Embedded. MS products maybe used in cars, but largely in the "infotainment" sector.
WinCE is much too big for the tiny microcontrollers that control engines, breakes, gear shifts and so on.. As is Java.
If you want to really what going on in car electronics look for example for the OSEK/VDX initiative, a consortium of german and french carmakers.
You had better yell profusely. With temperatures that low, and having that single point-of-failure, your frozen locks could cause you to die of exposure. That model of car should be recalled.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
It's probably not too far off to say 99.9% of Windows crashing problems are due to operator error from installing bad drivers (from other manufacterers), installing bad hardware, installing crappy software.
Evidently you did not read the report that stated that only 50% of Windows crashes were due to such problems. By implication, the other 50% are due to Windows itself.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Consumer Reports had an article recently that mentioned this general topic. Their general suggestion was to avoid buying the new computerized luxury cars for a few years, until they get the UI right. It seems that in general their testers couldn't make much sense out of the menu-based centralized controls, and they considered these controls to be hazardous in the extreme under normal driving conditions.
BMW's newer models were not nearly the only bad examples.
Trying to discover where they've hidden some control in an N-level-deep menu tree is extremely distracting. You don't want this when you're driving.
Of course, if you screw up, the manufacturer will just call it an "operator error".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Probably pretty good. While reading the ZDNet article, I followed the link to the Court to FBI: No spying on in-car computers article (emphasis mine):
No privacy issues involved, it's that the idiots might break the bugging system. (Which includes turning off the emergency road assistance and airbag functions, by the way, but we wouldn't be spying on them unless they were already guilty, right?)
The US Government is moving very consistently toward monitoring and controlling everything they can lay their hands on, so the idea that the "copyright bit" or other DRM will follow us into cars certainly seems inevitable.
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
" Ironically, 50,000 people die every year from Automobile accidents and no one looks to blame Ford or GM for these deaths."
That is just not true. Automobile manufacturers are sued for damages created by crashes routinely. Furthermore, they are subject to Federal regulation of safety equipment and must recall defective models.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I work at a BMW retailer and I can relate a few interesting facts about why this notice is on the car in the first place.
The number one reason is that each BMW vehicle has a personalized wiring system. Each vehicle receives a different wiring harness based upon the features and options in that specific vehicle. In other words, if one 325i has an auto dimming mirror and another does not, the entire wiring harness is different between the two vehicles.
Keep in mind that the wiring harness is like the electrical backbone of the car, weighs about 50 pounds, and runs contiguously from one end of the vehicle to the other. It is NOT something you want to mess with unless you really know what you are doing. In fact, if there is ever a problem in the wiring harness BMW recommends putting in a new one.
That brings me to reason number two. Alot of your aftermarket companies hire morons to install their electronics. I know this because I see it all the time.
For example, we had a customer buy a brand new M3 convertible (~$60K american) and they installed one of those Viper alarms that tells you to "Get BACK!" when you go near the car. The guy that installed it had the great idea of yanking out the headlight control module, chopping a piece out of the wiring that controls the headlights and splicing in there to get power for his alarm. Needless to say the car was NOT OK after this. Starting the vehicle would cause the headlights to freak out...they would switch on and off randomly. To make matters worse, the malfunction caused the autoleveling feature to kick in and make the lights to bob up and down.
This led to a cluster-f$#k with the customer and the service department. The customer was pointing fingers and yelling at the sales and service staff about what a piece of krap the car was and such. Things were pretty bad until we pulled out the light control module and showed them where the aftermarket guy had spliced in to the light system and where the control board had gotten fried.
I personally think the whole reason for the sticker is because BMW wants to maintain the integrity of the electrical system in the car and to make sure people understand that if their aftermarket device screws something up BMW is not gonna pay for it. Bmw even goes so far as to place prewiring jacks in the cars for most aftermarket devices you could want: bluetooth, satalite raio, mp3 players or line in devices for the stereo, phones, alarms, cd changers, and even Universal RF transcievers (programmable garage door opener).
You could even chalk it up to those strict German engineers if you want. God knows they hate it when people mess with their systems.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Watch for the tsunami of lawsuits to come out of this. Some of the 50,000 highway deaths are bound to be due to software failure. And when a Ford, say, equipped with Windows is involved in a fatality, the case will attract lawyers like some kind of legal black hole. Can you imagine the prospect of picking the deep pockets of Ford and Microsoft?
Software manufacturers have been immune from this before, because everyone "knows" that computers are unreliable and crash. A jury isn't going to care that your desktop burst into flame and lost all your data. That's state of the art in the zeitgeist. But juries drive cars and are more sympathetic to claims against their makers. Do you want to be defending Microsoft when the other side shows the birthday party videos of the little girl who was immolated in the fiery wreck caused by your software?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'm sorry, I thought I made it clear that this was my point. The systems are very different. The systems in a car have been designed for specific purposes with independence and high fault tolerances. Windows CE was designed for high hardware compability and ease-of-use... neither of which apply in cars.
Of course, Microsoft is saying currently that WinCE is aimed at navigation and media playback, not embedded control. That wasn't always their shtick, however, as when they started this initiative they cited "better safety and security," along with reduced hardware duplication as a reason to use WinCE for all of your machine's needs. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but they truly wanted to be a central controller for the machine.
My mother dated a vehicle development engineer who created system diagnostic software for 5 years.
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