Nissan Exhibits IEEE 1394-Compatible Car

Dirak writes "High-speed IEEE 1394 optical fiber networks have gone off-road with new Nissan's prototype vehicle demonstrated this year's at 11th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems. The prototype is equipped with 7 cameras on the body and a 12-inch LCD monitor in the front and another in the rear seat area. Thanks to the in-vehicle IEEE 1394 LAN, which is capable of high-speed communications at 400Mbps via optical cable, the front and the rear seat monitors can display various information simultaneously, for example. The application of optical fiber also means that the weight of the cables can be reduced to about one-half the weight of a conventional wiring harness."

Comments

Big Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, seriously, whats so special?

Optical in a car? So? We've had cables in a car for quite some time. We've had monitors in a car for quite some time. We've even had internet in a car for quite some time. Whats so special?

We've moved to communicating 1394 with light wires?? Hurray.

No offense, but why is this "stuff that matters"?? Or is it just "news for nerds"?

Re:Big Wow.

[Digital_Quartz]

The article is quite light on details; is it just video sent over the firewire link, or is all car data sent by firewire? If it's the later, this could be quite an improvement. If you've ever had to pull out and reinstall a wiring harness, then you know you average car has 8 bazillion wires in it, all of which are unlabeled aside from some obscure color code. A single firewire jack on everything that needs data would be WAY nicer...

Of course, I doubt you could pull the requisite 15W to power brake lights from a firewire port. :P

Re:Big Wow.

[HonkyLips]

Perhaps it's not that special, but it's interesting. I don't know if you've played around with your car's electrical system, but they can be an absolute nightmare when something goes wrong. I had all sorts of problems with my first (crappy) car, mainly stemming from a ground cable coming loose. Auto electrical systems are not a fun thing to work on. Traditional wiring can rust, connectors can break, faults in other parts of the car (especially grounding problems) can screw up totally unrelated parts of the car... I had my headlights refuse to work when I accidentally connected my car radio incorrectly, even though it worked fine etc etc etc. I've installed a lot of car radios and in older cars there is no uniform system for wire colours or even power colours. It can take longer to figure out which cables connect to which than it does to actually mount the radio and speakers...
By moving from a traditional wire loom to an optical system with a protocol like 1394 not only are you avoiding physical problems like weight and corrosion, you're also making everything much easier to troubleshoot and install.
Personally I think this is great. It's not too dissimilar to the comparison of VoIP to PSTN.

Re:Big Wow.

[Ark42]

http://www.dansdata.com/drivedocks.htm claims up to 60W can be pulled over firewire.

Usefulness

[fembots]

I can already see some uses of this technology.

1. Sensor which alerts owners that their car tyre has been chalked (parking tickets).

2. Sensor to trigger water spray to remove any chalk marks

3. Monitor to checks all four wheels, when you feel/hear something weird, but don't want to stop your car.

4. Monitor to checks if your skirts is trapped between the door and slapping on the tarmac going 100mph.

5. Monitor to show your windscreen wiper spray tank level, so you know when to refill.

Re:Usefulness

[HeliosTrick]

How about number 6? 6. Playing high-speed driving games instead of actually driving. Actually though, your number 5 is already in existance. I had a '97 Pontiac Bonneville with a low spray tank level warning. I think with that much bandwidth though, there's no reason a car could be sensored out to the max. If only they'd toss on a mode so you could see what the check engine light really is...

400 Mbps

[Planky]

The multimedia capabilities are made possible by the adoption of a high-speed 1394 optical fiber network communications system which allows a data transmission rate of 400 Mbps (mega- bites per second).

Thats some super speedy eating :D

sweeet

[bLindmOnkey]

I love the idea of multimedia in the car, but just one problem:

"The prototype is equipped with 7 cameras on the body and a 12-inch LCD monitor in the front"

Wouldn't this be more than a little bit distracting for the driver? I mean, what's more interesting, watching the red light change green or watching neo take the red pill?

GTA

[Thomas Henden]

Now, if you can get some more of these cars and play networked GTA with your friends...

Cable Weight

[mod_critical]

Wow, they're bragging up the reduction of weight of a wiring harness in a car. That's just awesome. Holy crap don't want to go over GVWR in the Nissan with a copper cabling system. Pardon me while I go shopping for light weight optical camping gear as not to kill my gas milage.

Re:Cable Weight

[BWJones]

Actually......the typical weight of an automotive wiring harness is around 50 lbs which absolutely does impact your milage and has been an issue for automotive manufacturers for a number of years particularly with increasing fuel economy standards that will be going in place over the next few years. Every little bit helps.

Re:Cable Weight

[pchan-]

before in car networks, when you had to run a cable from the driver-side window switch to every window in the car, vehicles had somewhere near 20 miles (!) of cables inside. today, class two networks, such as CAN, MOST, and this firewire thing, have taken over alot of the functionality, replacing dumb control wires with protocol messages and microcontrollers. did you know that in a modern high end gm vehicle, and similarly in a mercedes, you can now control every non-critical component (windows, headlights, air conditioner, wipers, radio, ...) from a single lan? MOST even carries audio data from your CD changer over the same network. we're talking literally hundreds of pounds saved, especially in large and feature-full vehicles.

Re:Cable Weight

[Zackbass]

That's not right. Let's try it with some example numbers. Say we get 20mpg. Over 150000 miles with $2 gas that's 150000/20*2=$15000 in gas. Now we get 0.5 extra mpg, so it becomes 150000/20.5*2=$14634. I think you calculated the cost of running a car that gets 0.5mpg. You can't even pin that on an H1. :P

Re:Cable Weight

[theonetruekeebler]

The weight savings are significant, as are the savings in cost of assembly and maintenance. Not just the 75 pounds of copper wire you don't have to carry around, but that you don't have to route, don't have to design and build large enough channels to let pass, don't have to pay a troubleshooter $50/hour to sort through looking for the white wire with the blue dotted stripe and for God's sake not the white wire with the blue dashed stripe. Wiring harnesses are a nightmare. The wires are incredibly thin and fragile, and modern car that has been in a serious but non-totalling accident will probably have electrical problems all its life, due to damage to the harness.

Even on a modern motorcycle, it can get ugly. I've had to replace the harness on a 1999 BMW motorcycle, where it weighed almost 25 pounds and required the removal of every single body panel and parts of the rear subframe to get to parts of it. It was rated as a ten hour job for a skilled mechanic.

Compare this to the wiring system on a 2005 BMW K1200S, where the wiring harness is replaced by a four wire cable that run everywhere: two wires for power and two for data. Each section of the bike, like the instrument cluster, has a box in it that reads the signal and routes the power where it needs to be. The whole system weighs 6 pounds, and a 19 pound weight savings on a motorcycle is significant.

An on-vehicle LAN solves a hell of a lot of problems, and IEEE 1394, with its prioritization protocols and huge bandwidth, is a great idea.

Re:$1 says...

[ExtremeGoatse!]

Actually, it is a very practical car. The optical fiber used in place of wiring allows the weight of the cables to be reduced to about half of the weight of wires. Think of all the wiring that is in the typical automobile. If we can replace auto wiring with optical fiber, saving over 100 lbs in ecah car, just think of the increased fuel savings! Some of the ideas that start in concept cars end up being very useful in everyday applications.

$2 says...

[Indy Media Watch]

...You will get moderated down instead.

Reality check people...

[Indy Media Watch]

Before we get too excited about weight reductions, increased technology or bragging rights, let's remember something.

Air-conditioning, power-steering and even ABS still aren't standard despite costing next to nothing at build time and being about as essential as you could get.

Manufacturers need to cripple cheaper cars to somehow justify the extra $100k plus you can spend on higher-end models. Otherwise people start saying why does this car cost twice as much when it isn't twice the car?

I suspect it will be a long time before we see this sort of thing in wide use.

Re:No shame in saying "FireWire", dumbass

[the_proton]

FirewWire is trademarked by Apple.

And Apple licensed it to the 1394 Trade Association in May 2002:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/may/29firewir eTA.html

- proton

Isn't...

[Bug-Y2K]

FireWire a BUS, not a car?

sorry, couldn't resist.

Damn, 0wned by a Sentra

[bill_mcgonigle]

Just a reminder, if you depend on physical security and have 1394 ports powered, any 1394 device can read your system's memory through DMA.

Turn them off in the BIOS if this is an issue for you (the linked article suggest globs of epoxy...).

Coming soon to a sensationalist news story near you.

I want separate wiring

[davidwr]

When it comes to operational and safety components, I want things on their own subsystems. That means one set of wires for the brake lights, one set of wires for antilock brake control, one set of wires for the fuel tank level indicator, etc. etc.

If something gets in the wiring, I'd rather it knock out half my electrical than all of it. I'd also like key systems to be isolated from non-key systems. If my headlights develop a short and the wires overheat and melt, I don't want the wires leading to my starter motor to melt too.

Now, when it comes to entertainment, like radio, dvd player, etc., or comfort items, like climate control or the map lights, do whatever's cheapest to build, cheapest to repair, least likely to fail (bearing in mind that some wiring designs create single points of multiple failure).

Digital Cars... It's more than just cable weight.

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Digital cars will be a great thing. It's not just flying car stuff, but basic, useful improvements every geek would love:

• Those big protrusions out the side of the car... you know, mirrors? Replace them with a pinhole sized camera in the high mounted brake light. Not only does it shave weight, but look at the air flow advantages.
• Put all the LED's in some central part of the car and just pipe the light out to the headlights and tail lights. Switch the signals centrally, so you can use less bulbs (light all three brake lights with a single (plus backup) LED, a single signal light, etc...) The mounting for the lights in the back is then much lighter, and there is no need to route copper power wires back there. Reduced, power, reduced components, reduced weight.
• Like the minivan rear-view cameras, improved visibility, no blind spots, given enough cameras.
• Use infrared cameras to improve night vision (assuming HUD display instead of LCD in dash.)
• The cameras are a prerequisite for the self-driving cars in the future (sensors for the computers)
• All digital dashboard (series of LCD's for the whole instrument panel.) Then you can have three camera views while backing up. and see the speedometer when going forward. This will also make it cheaper to have "sport gauges" and can have dozens of other sensors that just don't fit into a normal dash, but only show up on the displays when they have something important to share. (oil pressure, oil volume, oil temperature, oil viscosity, tire pressure, tire temperature, brake fluid level, coolant level, coolant pressure) All of that could be made much more cheaply.
• Instead of just "check engine" ... how about a dashboard that says: "um, excuse me, this is your engine, I'm running OK, but cylinder 4 has poor ignition, probably needs a new spark plug lead." or "Hi, you've cracked a cylinder head, kiss your wallet goodbye."

Boycott Nissan!

[reflector]

Nissan Motors has been for many years trying to bully and harass a small business owner by the name of Mr. Nissan, who registered nissan.com for his computer company, before Nissan Motors had ever considered having a web presence.
Nissan Motors was stupid and slow, but they felt that by paying enough money to lawyers to harass this small business owner, they could intimidate him into handing over what did not belong to them, the nissan.com domain.
This is a well-known and unfortunate story, it's been featured on TechTV and other places, more info here:
http://www.ncchelp.org/The_Story/the_story. htm

Even though my last car was a Nissan, I decided I won't be buying from them again after learning of their behavior.

I urge you to boycott Nissan, and to write to Nissan motors exlaining to them that you don't support corporate thuggishness.