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Your Next Car's Electronics Will Likely Be Connected By Ethernet
Lucas123 writes "As the sophistication of automotive electronics advances, from autonomous driving capabilities to three-dimensional cameras, the industry is in need of greater bandwidth to connect devices to a car's head unit. Enter Ethernet. Industry standards groups are working to make 100Mbps and 1Gbps Ethernet de facto standards within the industry. Currently, there are as many as nine proprietary auto networking specifications, including LIN, CAN/CAN-FD, MOST and FlexRay. FlexRay, for example, has a 10Mbps transmission rate. Making Ethernet the standard in the automotive industry could also open avenues for new apps. For example, imagine a driver getting turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays."
This might get us into trouble when the Cylons show up.
What is it... this ethernet you speak of?
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
"For example, imagine a driver getting turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays."
Imagine!
Except they're already doing it now on their fondleslabs.
Lucas123 wants to stream audio and video across the same switches as his throttle by wire?????, I say we sell tickets to this event!
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Ethernet is found everywhere – on mobile phones, desktop computers, Blu-ray Disc players, set top boxes, and even in your car.
Why did these morons spend time and energy to create LIN, CAN/CAN-FD, MOST and FlexRay in the first place?
This is serious stuff. You don't want the brakes to stop working just because someone decides to start a Bittorrent client.
They should just make it Micro USB. Then you can charge your electric car and transfer data with the same cable. Just like a phone. I don't want to have to buy new cables just so I can charge my car.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
The SAE has been talking about this for years. This article is from 2012:
http://articles.sae.org/11142/
I think the BMW 7 series has used ethernet for the infotainment systems for a while now.
Yeah, everyone knows the Cylons are going to show up any day now.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What exactly do you need 100 or 1000 Mbit/s in a car for? (Especially in the control system.)
Are we talking about having the engine control on the same bus as the entertainment system (where playing a video/DVD could use a lot of bits)?
That will be the least of our concerns.
IPV4. bets?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This article is about the L1 PHY layer, not the L2 Data Link layer. There is no reason to assume this means your car will be using TCP/IP. The diagram in TFA clearly indicates that the PHY layer being discussed here is independent of the protocol.
In fact, the included diagram seems to indicate broadcom is pitching some kind of adapter device which would enable inclusion of the new L1 layer with no changes whatsoever to the programming of the devices on either end. One would hope that such a thing would be only considered a stop-gap measure while they reworked their components to use the new bus natively in future models. History clearly shows that such adapters tend to be inefficient.
If it's good enough for commercial aircraft it's good enough for your car.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
imagine a driver getting turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays.
Just because there's an internal network for the car's electronics doesn't mean there's any internet connection (and there'd better not be).
and be locked into the poor build in radio system that can't be upgraded to a better 3rd part one.
I will never buy a car that doesn't have a hard maximum in the time it takes between when I hit the brakes and the actual brakes engage. Ethernet is good for a lot of things, but there are many systems where its drawbacks are just too big, and every part of controlling a car falls in the latter category. Otoh, if they want to implement it all using token ring, maybe we can talk.
What about AVC-LAN (what Toyota uses)?
Not that I would suggest it has the bandwidth of ethernet!
Is anyone else wondering what the hell the poster actually means? Are the cars going to run blue cables back to houses?
Need teh NATz for my car!
Was I the only one who had a moment where they were trying to envision the car being connected to a really really really long cat 6 cable to your house?
Built-in entertainment systems are stuck in the vehicle. And unless you have a service that allows it, they require additional service plans for those devices. A phone/tablet needs (for longer trips) a USB power port. A 12 volt port with suitable adapter does just fine.
Have gnu, will travel.
Will they provide the paperclip to reset my car when it hangs up?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If its standardized instead of the mess of proprietary buses we have now, it will reopen the possibility of replacing components.
If they use Ethernet in my car that is fine, but it better damn well be full duplex as most drivers would prefer to avoid collisions. Almost worse than your wife jabbering away in the passenger seat with a set of runts in the back seat.
What is wrong with you people? Can't you just read a book or magazine or sleep if you aren't driving? Look out the window? Count the blue cars? An hour in solitary and you all will be curled in a ball moaning for mommy.
and the best they could do was ethernet ..... goddammit I wish the autoindustry would at least try to keep up with the times.
All new cars are hideously complex with respect to the electrical
and electronic systems, and this stuff WILL lead to reliability problems.
If you can buy a new car every two or three years, perhaps you will
never have to deal with the problems, but the fact remains that the
expense of diagnosis, repair, and replacement of some of the electronic
systems in newer cars will exceed the value of the car after a relatively small
number of years. This is a dream come true for the manufacturers, but a nightmare
for those of us who don't want to be on the gerbil wheel of wasteful consumption when older
cars which are well maintained can do the required job nicely.
You can disagree with me, but I have a master's in mechanical engineering and a EE as well, and I have
been repairing my own cars for over 40 years, so there is a pretty good chance I know
what I am talking about.
Ethernet is notoriously susceptible to the emp from a close lighting strike. If you don't think so, just work in the cable industry for a while. After every serious lighting storm we will have several modems that appear fine except the ethernet is blown. It is usually the only thing burned out in the house. Often the rf side is still working fine and sending information back to the management system. It will suck when you have to go into a parts store and say gimme a box of ethernet chips for my car.
Will you kids stop using up all of the brake and streering bandwidth?
Now imagine how much the data plan for your car is going to cost you. You'll be locked into a plan with the car company and pay through the nose.
No thanks. I have a dedicated GPS, an MP3 player I can connect to my car stereo, and most everybody has portable devices which can play video already.
Now get off my damned lawn, because I don't want or need a car which is connected to the interwebs.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
News flash; we are coming to the end of the petrochemical age. We are very much at peak oil, and the way down will only see rising fuel costs. Buying a Hybrid may be more economic and efficient, but ultimately our whole way of life will be challenged. Get used to the idea that soon we will not have the pervasive availability of cheap fuel. Get on your bike.
Nobody's saying "Man, I wish my CAN bus had more bandwidth so I could stream!
Yup, in *theory* you know that a CAN bus is used for critical automotive functionality (say engine, ABS, power steering, or even drive-by-wire, autonomous steering, etc.)
Whereas the streaming should stay confined within the media subsystem, and both should be kept completely isolated from each other.
So it doesn't make sense to speak about successor of CAN bus technologies and media consumption in the infoteinment system of the car.
They are completely separate networks.
In theory.
In practice, you know pretty much that we leave in a world of product rushed into production due to marketing constrain. A world where, due to extremely flacky design, it's possible to hack a vehicle by abusing the wireless transmission used to report tire pressure.
So you know that lack of proper separation is bound to happens and you will end-up being able to hack a vehice by streaming a specially crafted video file, simply because the various ethernet networks aren't properly isolated from each other.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What a horrible, horrible idea. Not the ethernet aspect, that makes sense, reinventing the wheel is usually a bad idea, and especially so when the competition has a multi-decade lead on eliminating bugs and malicious exploits and offers cheap, reliable off-the-shelf hardware. No, it's the idea of putting anything whatsoever user-accessible on the internal network I object to. If this data bus is carrying the information that tells my increasingly fly-by-wire care to apply the brakes or turn right to avoid oncomming semis then all it takes is one misbehaving flappy-bird clone spamming the network at the wrong moment to kill me, to say nothing of malicious attacks. There's absolutely no reason *anything* but internal systems communication should be on that network. Period. If you want an media network fine, but that can probably be provided far more cheaply and conveniently by including an airgapped $10 wireless hub with a 10' range that can only talk directly to things like the steering-wheel mounted media controls and the dashboard LCD/windshield HUD. And maybe a cellular modem. You're in a pretty decent approximation of a Faraday cage, so non-malicious outside interference should be minimal, and any communication with the mission-critical network should be heavily firewalled, at an absolute minimum. Not much reason to allow bi-directional communication at all - "spam" the wireless network with multicast up-to-the-second system and diagnostc data and you're good, at 0.01% of total bandwidth. No reason for anything not physically connected to be able to say a %$#@!* thing to the mission-critical components. If ever there was a non-hyperbolic use of the term "mission critical", maintaining control of a car is it.
* %$#@! - when no variation of "fuck" is strong enough. Bonus points if you can pronounce it. Q-Bert did, but then he had that hose-nose to work with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
As long as I don't have to make my own cables.
One of the longest days of my life was many years ago when I told a friend I could wire up his little storefront business if he bought a spool of Cat5 and a bunch of connectors.
I sat there with that crimping tool and my fumblefingers and invented entire new categories of curse words. A friend from a local Army base came by and for a few slices of pizza and a six-pack he knocked out those cables like nothing.
It was a humbling experience. Which I probably should not have shared here on Slashdot because you guys were probably all making your own ethernet cables since your were like five years old.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Doesn't the Airbus A380 have a pile of ethernet cables running all over the thing?
Guess if you are going to run cables all over the fucking roads, you might as well make it POE for all those electric "cars".
EVs are very much upcoming. The only thing holding Tesla back from making more cars is that they're already consuming something like half the LiIon cells produced on the planet.
I don't read AC A human right
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we all hybrid descendants of the Cyclons and humans which fled the Twelve Colonies?
Yeah, everyone knows the Cylons are going to show up any day now.
I fear the Cylons far less than Skynet.
The article mentions a new kind of Ethernet will be used, different from the well known CAT cables and 8P8C connectors.
It seems it will be Gigabit Ethernet over a single(!) twisted pair. Full duplex ? Nice.
It is called RTPGE (Reduced Twisted Pair Gigabit Ethernet): http://www.ieee802.org/3/bp/index.html
Also "PoE" over RTPGE is in the works: http://www.ieee802.org/3/bu/index.html
I can imagine that this has the potention to not only be used in cars, but also replace many proprietary control busses currently in use.
I for one, was quite terrified after looking over CAN-BUS and similar post ODBC-II standards that the shitheads who design car electronics would start using modified versions of USB 2/3 for automotive communication.
Seriously look over any automotive electronics spec and you can smell the steaming pile of, "I want to be guaranteed easy employment another 10 years" shit from a mile away. I wish engineering projects included more ethics audits that resulting in contractors and employees getting fired, black balled, and sued.
Is this being proposed as a replacement for the engine-control bus, like the CAN-bus ? Do we really want (relatively high-bandwidth) entertainment shizzle to be on the same bus/network as the as all the engine sensors, actuators and controllers etc. ? Fine if it's just some control signals, like 'volume up', 'play', 'next', 'accept incoming call' .. whatever. But wouldn't it make much more sense to use a separate good-old ethernet cable, or even WiFi to for the actual media devices and the internet. If it's all in the same network, any user-hot-pluggable device on said network is physically able to do crazy stuff, like 'deploy airbags', or 'unlock', 'engine start', etc.. Let's not even think about connecting this to the internet.
Ethernet is already in widespread use in vehicles. The Tesla already uses Ethernet for almost everything mentioned in the article including real time connectivity to the internet for turn by turn directions, streaming music, diagnostics and more. It also uses WiFi for things like tire pressure sensors. Tesla is just one example; many luxury vehicles use WiFi for their tire pressure sensors. Yet another standard for automotive cabling and the use of existing protocols is common sense and hardly a major breakthrough.
Greed is the root of all evil.
So wait, my car will be on a hundred meter tether to my router? [rimshot]
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we all hybrid descendants of the Cyclons and humans which fled the Twelve Colonies?
Dunno. I stopped watching partway into the third season.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
so i'm guessing truck drivers have had this for years?
I hope they specified Cat5e STP.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Yeah, sorry, but I don't want a protocol in my car that's subject to script kiddies DoSing it. I'm sure they'll get to CAN and everything else soon, but at least for now you can't just go to a warez site and take down a car. I think the crack about Cylons was spot on.
I was told that all the components in my 2005 Chevy Trailblazer (the model came out in 2002) - instruments, mirrors, seats, etc., are connected via Ethernet. Not 1-gig Ethernet, but who needs 1-gig Ethernet to change the station on the radio?