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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."
BMW's come with what amounts to an EULA. If you look under the hood, you'll notice a little sticker that says you are not to connect any third party electronics to the car, CB, ham radio, etc, or even use a hand-held cell phone within the car, unless you buy a BMW approved carphone. This is under threat of voiding your warantee.
I'm sure in the US there's some protection offered under the same law that forces manufacturers to allow you to use aftermarket parts, but I don't know if that precedent would extend to electronics equipment that isn't really part of the car.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I currently have to hard boot my Dell Axim X5 after roughly 2-3 hours depending on the app that locked (RealOne Player, X-Lite (SIP Phone), etc..). I think CE/PPC is still too unstable for possible life threatening experiences in the car.
Alan Cooper's book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity" has a great story about a Porsche that required a factory reset if the fuel level was too low. This feature was designed to protect the fuel injectors from running on empty. Unfortunately, the engine could shut down if the tank was close to empty and the car went around a corner. The centripital force of cornering left the fuel level center high and dry. The car could only be restarted at a Porsche dealer.
"We couldn't breathe because there was no air," he added.
I have not yet met the car that was utterly and completley sealed. And there's a lot of air in the passenger space of even a small sports car, and this was a "luxury car". See below for more reasons why, even if it were completley sealed, this is totally stupid. Even if they mean no air conditioning, I can't imagine in the time this occurred it got so hot they couldn't breathe.
To draw attention, the minister and his driver waved frantically at passers-by. The incident ended only after a nearby security guard smashed the car's windows with a sledgehammer.
Even with the heavy-duty tool, Suchart said it took a long time to break the windows as the "glass proved to be very resistant".
The harrowing experience lasted about 10 minutes, he said.
Let's see "it took a long time.... about 10 minutes". What exactly is wrong with this statement? Certainly 10 minutes is longer than you expect for a sledgehammer to go through glass, but even so, that's NOT really a long time. Certainly not enough time to asphyxiate. Can you say complete panic?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Interesting, I could honestly see some car company not wanting to let you install an after market stereo. Especially now that several of them are trying to push things like XM radio, dvd players and like at the dealership.
I just had the opposite problem.
In my brand new Honda Accord, I came out to the cold Canadian air last week, pressed the button on my key to open the door, and All I heard was a faint thudding click. It seemed the locking mechanism was a tad frozen ( it was -26c that night).
Repeated attempts were not producing results, so I inserted the key into the lock, figuring I'd just open in manually. It turns out there is no physical connection to the locking mechanism, the key simply triggers the electronic lock!
Needless to say, I ended up popping the trunk with the remote, and crawling thru, pushing down the back seat. When I got inside the car, I had to end up pulling the lock up mannualy, and boy was it ever stuck.
Seems like a simple thing, but how the hell could some idiot engineer put together a single point of failure for getting into the car?
What if the battery was dead? then neither the trunk nor the door would open, and I couldn't get in to pop the hood to replace the battery. Needless to say, I'm still quite pissed about it.
I'll be yelling rather profusely at the Honda rep this week.
G
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
The trouble with such a highly computerized car...I feel, is that once you get electrical demons in there...they are almost impossible to get rid of. Their diagnostic stuff could never catch the problems.
I sold it...got a 1986 Porsche Turbo (half the price...half the monthly note). Yes, things do still break...and expensive to repair, BUT, most everything on the car is mechanical....and if something does go wrong...my mechanic can usually diagnose the problem quickly...and find a quick fix for it.
I'm now up to almost 10 mpg....and it runs like a rocket sled on rails. I'm a definite believe in a more 'mechanical' car....much more dependable and easier to maintain IMHO.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Near Heidelberg/Germany there seems to be a bump in a highway that causes some BMW firmware to crash everytime a BMW runs over it, with the same effect as reported in the second article: the engine stops, the doors and windows are locked and the occupants are trapped. Fortunately people don't need to wait long, because there's usually a local breakdown service waiting to rescue the drivers. Interesting business idea :)
The main reason being you want a real small real time kernel tucked in there for the engine controller, ABS, stability control, traction control, gear box.
All those systems are normally kept on a seperate network for traffic to from any telematics (industry BS word for the nav, steroe, DVD, phone, climate etc...). If they do use the big optical network it is through a gate way that is written to safety critical standards. Of course not every writer of safety critical or safety related software meets what I would consider adequate standards.
The car was still operational, though, so I drove to a friend's house and eventually got their attention. Two hours later a locksmith finally got me out. In the mean time I had to sit through each passerby feeling compelled to go around the car and try every door, and then signal me to pull up on the lock. As if somehow no one had yet thought of that. It was a bit like waiting for an elevator, where each new arrival feels the need to press the button.
Someone may have already posted this, but a while back, a retired test engineer had a website with video of his misbehaving 7i series BMW. The errors were many, and the dealership indicated that the car was functioning normally inspite of numerous software problems. The car was running WinCE. Is the site still up?
except that 7-series owners are trading their iDrive-equipped(and hideous-looking) cars in for Mercedes and Audis. They just don't "get" iDrive, and since it's tied into so many goddamn features on the car, if you don't "get" it, you're not "getting" most of the car. WinCE has been a -spectacular- failure in that car. There are videos running around the net showing a guy's 750iL hunting for gears on the highway, closing+opening the trunk incessantly, ejecting the key from the keyslot(making it impossible to start the car!), changing radio stations on its own...
If you want to see the interface done right, check out an Audi A8L with MMC. Similar idea, but instead of putting absolutely everything on the dial and making you push/pull/twist/etc, it's simply an "adjuster"; buttons around the dial are used to actually navigate around the menus. Oh, and it's also not in control of absolutely everything in the bloody car. It's only in charge of suspension settings, the radio, phone, and nav system(actually, it might have climate control too, I forget.)
The running joke in the auto industry is that the only reason Chris Bangle(BMW designer who ruined the 7-series and now the 5-series) has a job is that all his bosses got 7-series cars and can't get them out of the driveway to go into headquarters and fire him.
Please help metamoderate.
Despite liking BMW's, I'd say their choosing MS OS for their cars seems to dovetail with their latest love-hate designs of the new 7 and 5 series. Bangle seems to make very controversial decisions which even to the plainest view, have warts. MS OS seems to fit the Bangle model for feature-ful failed designs. I just hope BMW recovers sooner than later (the board should already have taken action but so it goes).
I hope the government forces car companies to label any car with an MS OS in it. Caveat emptor!
True story: In the mid 70's in Egypt, the u.s. ambassador was using a souped-up car that had been confiscated form a drug dealer as his official car. It was perfect for the job: bulletproof, had hidden sirens and lights, plus a megaphone and tear gas for crowd control (and being free was something the government liked, too). One day a critical fuse blew and they were trapped, just like the Thai ministers... it took a lot of energy to break through the bulletproof glass, but they eventually got him out.
Solution to the problem? A fire ax became standard equipment in the back seat of that car.
I never got to see the car, but I always imagined it as totally pimp-rific.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Had a BMW 850CSi a few years ago. It had those frameless windows which drop a bit when you pull on the door handle so you can open the door. I wasn't amused when the electronics decided to suddenly activate that mechanism INSIDE THE CAR WASH. But that wasn't all. One day, I open the door, sit down on the driver's seat and the moment I turn the key, the car decides to move the driver's seat aaaaallll the way forward and pushes me against the steering wheel. I couldn't get out and had some trouble reaching the controls from that position.
;-)
Anyway, the chicks liked that car.
I'll second it. My bmw (2003 330i) had a sticker on the windshield, and another on the computer (engine compartment, on firewall in front of driver).
;-)
But, go ahead and visit a dealer. That should be pretty hard to fake
The reason for the sticker is that they don't want to be resposible for interference-testing every possible combination. I didn't heed the warning, and I found that when I kept my cell phone stashed away in the compartment under the radio, the radio would randomly turn off about every 45 minutes. Now, I keep it in the cup holder, and the radio is fine.
I also suspect that interference is the reason they moved the computer into the engine area - they used to keep them in the passenger area, where the temperature is controlled (and not searingly hot), but that provides less shielding.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I still cary the same bag of tools in the trunk of the Benz, but mostly out of stubborn habit (and the fact that they provided a hidey-hole for them that was exactly the same size as my bag ;-), but I know that there's no way I'll be able to work on my new car with all the electronics.
As it was, I just had it winterized and requested they put a trickle-charger on the battery instead of a blanket heater. They had to disconnect the battery to do this. When I got back into the the car to drive it home all the electronic devices - seats, windows, sunroof, mirrors, etc. refused to work properly until they were "reset" - meaning run through their entire range twice. I paniced and thought the dealership had totally screwed my car up until I realized how to get functionality back.
Take this to the extreme then. What happens when, instead of just windows and seats, we have steer-, accelerate-, and brake-by-wire in our vehicles? If a computer program is controling this instead of some sort of redundant solid-state system, I want it to be bullet proof and open to public review - with the ability to mod it if I feel the need (yes, yes, warrantly, blah, blah) I just don't want a completely closed system where I have to trust the manufacturer (or God forbid, Microsoft) with critical systems in my car. And since it is MY car, I want the freedom to be able to "get under the hood" if I want/need to.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Car and Driver Magazine reviewed 6 luxury sedans in their December 2003 issue. They rated the Lexus and the Jaguar 1 and 2. Here is what they said about the BMW iDrive:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
'NEEDS' have nothing to do with it. How many gadgets do you need? Well, not many. How many can you have if you really want? How many fish in the sea man?
I submitted a story about this a while ago (rejected of course because I don't know the secret handshake), in the latest high end models, the cost of the electronics is rapidly approaching 50% of the cost of the car. Yes nearly HALF!
Well, you've got all those things like navigation, tuner, TV, MP3 player, cellphone, rearview camera, electronic windows and mirrors, A/C, let's just put it all in one box baby! And all the bits can talk to each other. So when your airbag goes off, your cellphone can automatically make an emergency call, retrieving your GPS coordinates from the navigation system. Or, when your engine management system predicts failure of some critical component within 100 miles, it navigates you straight to the nearest service centre. You need it *all* man, come on baby you know you want it?
I swear I'm not making this stuff up, I write software for some of these systems! And yes, there's a hell of a lot of it. And like you, it completely doesn't fill me with confidence how much of the car is being taken over by this stuff.
For example from the article:
"We couldn't breathe because there was no air"
and
"it took a long time to break the windows as the "glass proved to be very resistant"
Now that is scary. What happened to manual backups? On my washing machine, there's an electronic door opener, but there's also a hidden tab you can pull manually in the event of a power cut etc. There's no way in hell it should be impossible to open the doors if the system crashes, that really sucks! There's no way those systems are bulletproof.
Man, I can't wait for electronic brakes!!!
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The F22 and B2 aside, there are no aircraft the USAF flies that were designed and build in the time frame that Windows has come into being.
The F22 only just fits the time period; it started its software development process in the days of Windows 3.0.
No aircraft has Windows based Flight Control systems, not even the civil stuff.
Though that is not to say flight qualified software doesn't reset.