The Rise of Linux In In-Vehicle Infotainment

DeviceGuru writes "The 2014 Toyota Lexus IS reportedly will be the second major automobile to offer in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems based on Linux, following last year's introduction of the Debian-based Cadillac User Experience (CUE) IVI system, which now appears in Cadillac's XTS and SRX models. Cadillac's CUE IVI implementation was developed by GENIVI Alliance members MontaVista and Bosch and uses similar code, but is not listed as GENIVI compliant. Meanwhile, ABI Research projects that Linux will grow to 20 percent IVI market share by 2018, behind Microsoft and market leader QNX."

Comments

Flashable?

[XanC]

The big question: will I be able to put something else on there? Like what OpenWRT did for routers?

Re:Flashable?

[aitikin]

Yes, but that's what's brought the cost down. Just ask Mulally about it. Unfortunately I cannot find my source on this right now, but I recall an article on this exact topic from a business magazine. In it, Mulally's mother called him nearly crying over the fact that she couldn't decide on a Lincoln that she wanted. There were simply too many options to the point that it truly overwhelmed her.

They then proceeded to redesign nearly every car they make to be built off of the same basic chassis. This allowed them to mass produce them, more inexpensively, making it more inexpensive to you, the end user, while still allowing them to improve the overall quality of their products. They then made it so there weren't over 100 different options of the same car, not counting paint even, making it so that there was a good chance that the car would be available at your local dealer, which further drove the price down, allowing more mass production (which is what Ford has always been known for).

Furthermore, most of the time, people who want the GPS center console, want to have that premium leather seating, those aluminum rims that you don't want, the spoiler, and the floor lighting, or at least some combination of more than just 3 of them. Getting just the one, probably less expensive than all 5, but getting 3 of them under the old system would likely get you to the same price point or damned near it.

Of course, you're here at Slashdot, which means that you think everything should be tweakable and customizable to the extreme, so why not do that on your own? You bought it, so just make it happen. I'm sure that someone out there has done something similar and will give you a fairly straightforward guide. I didn't even get off the lot before I replaced the horn in my hybrid (went from a "meep meep" to a "honk honk").

For example, a quick Crutchfield search found me 20, in-dash GPS solutions for my 2011 Honda Insight (that does not have Nav built in already). Of course, by the time I will feel the need for an in-dash GPS, I'll probably be buying my next car anyway.

Mercedez-Benz S Class w/LGPL

[sofakingon]

I went for a test-drive of a pre-production 2014 S Class last week, and to my surprise, the owner's manual came with a loose copy of the LGPL -- in English, no less (everything else was in German.)

Re:QNX FTW

[TechyImmigrant]

It's more than the scheduler. It's the memory management, driver interaction, IO semantics and probably a bunch of other things. If you don't build it RT from the ground up, you don't get RT at the application layer.