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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.
"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."
Because obligatory.
This signature is false.
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!
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.
Ethernet may work all the time - but there are no guarantees on packet latency. The basis of ethernet is that all traffic is equal; nobody has priority.
Which, to me, sounds all wrong. I'd much rather the packet from the collision-avoidance system to the brake system saying "holy shit stop NOW" gets higher priority than the next packet of Justin Bieber headed to the back seat.