aaronbeekay

Yah, but automakers are very cost-sensitive, and flash memory/NVM is one of the easiest places to penny-pinch. I get crap about 2kB payloads.

Car companies, both electric and non-electric, frequently advertise rated horsepower of their vehicles, even non-performance vehicles. In the US, horsepower is one of the key metrics for a vehicle overall.

As somebody currently working at an automaker on software systems, the amazing thing to me is that a mess up of this level doesn’t happen weekly. It’s rough out here.

Sure, but that’s a lot different from not being able to see them at all.

Do you have a source for this? There’s a gap between semi wheels, sure, but the deck height of a semi trailer in North America is about 48”. If automotive radars weren’t able to detect objects above this height, they would miss a lot of obstacles…

One automotive radar I’m familiar with, the Bosch MRR [1], lists a vertical FOV of ±15 degrees, and a 300 m maximum detection range. Assuming the sensor is mounted perpendicular to the ground at 0.5 m high, it should be able to see the top of a 13’6” semi trailer from ~15m away all the way up to its full range.

Teslas don’t have radar anyway, so of course this wouldn’t have helped, but an AEB radar that can’t see the top of a semi truck isn’t very useful.

[1] https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/solutions/sensors/front-ra...

What?? Yes, there absolutely were people who were run out of town for being gay. There was indeed rampant homophobia. What world were you living in?

I work in the space and I have not been impressed by the quality of Thatcham’s requirements once you get past the physical domain (door handle pull force, steering column locks, etc).

Yep - and not just between automakers, the security model varies wildly between different electrical architectures from the same manufacturer. Like any industry, there are hard problems, some of which are technically difficult, and some of which are self-inflicted from history/culture/insularity. No sector with any significant value or market competition has only the latter.

I work at Ford on vehicle access and security and I’m quite familiar with CAN security challenges and solutions. (Of course, I don’t speak for my employer here.)

Without speaking specifically to Ford’s plans, authenticated CAN communications are absolutely coming. I don’t see many approaches that actually encrypt the data on the bus - instead a MAC is used for each frame with a shared key on both secure ECUs, and some protections against replay attacks and such.

I wouldn’t expect all CAN data to be protected by this kind of security - it’s a pain in the butt, and expensive. Instead, certain specific sensitive information (like whether there’s a key in the ignition!) is protected as needed.

The industry is also moving toward IP-based communications for a lot of vehicle networking, which comes with many of the benefits of the modern infosec world. Automotive has a lot of unique challenges, though - like another poster mentioned, key provisioning and management is a huge pain; latency and hard timing constraints are way more important in the onboard/embedded world; many automotive ICs have limited support for e.g., asymmetric encryption, and of course there’s a lot of pain generated from the way the industry does software development generally. It’s an interesting space.

This comment touched on a lot of the wrestling that I’ve been doing for the past couple of years with my relationships to productivity, intentionality, and fulfillment. It’s a really useful perspective and validated some of my feelings. Thanks for writing it.

That’s exactly what they’ve been adding, actually. You can also set a schedule for which mode is active or trigger them with automations.

They control the heat input, too. Software fixes:

* limit max current (dumbest) * limit max current based on moving average of current over last N seconds * limit max current based on experimentally validated thermal model of contactors (cleverest)

This might even be possible without a significant/noticeable performance hit, if the overheating is only experienced in extreme conditions.

Pretty difficult to get a “wallpaper” fix through the processes at an OEM like Ford. (I work there but I’m not involved in this issue.) Automakers have lots of experience making painful and expensive fixes to resolve recall issues, and NHTSA is watching.

I live in a major US city and my power goes out at least once every couple of months, sometimes for hours at a time. I have installed several UPSes on important electrical things (servers, routers, modem) to avoid the hassles that come with regular power failures.

(Not that the Lightning would be a big help here - these outages very rarely last a day or more - but it’s not the case that outages are rare events.)

I live in Detroit, a couple of miles north of downtown. I wouldn’t think twice about wandering around downtown, anywhere downtown, at any hour of the day or night. It’s just not dangerous at all.

There are certainly neighborhoods where I wouldn’t do that, but the most surprising thing for me when I moved here was how aggressively friendly everybody is, and how off-base the “Detroit is a crime-ridden wasteland” comments are.

Dude, your argument is “yeah, but what if the Aboriginal Australians actually deserved to be ground into dust”?? The hell?

He… doesn’t have the ability to control whether he stands silently behind other people while they work?

Sure, maybe there’s less need for charge balancing in a smartphone battery, but the rest of the constraints still apply - fast charging is hard!

Yes, it’s true that you can implement a pretty simple generic lithium-ion cell charging algorithm that will get the job done for most cells. But that’s not a “modern battery pack”. If you’re trying to eke hundreds or thousands of charge cycles out of cells, implement fast charging, do accurate state of charge estimation under load and in variable thermal conditions —- those things are very difficult to implement generically, and often do have parameters that depend on the specific chemistry being used. Modern devices have to do all of those things.

Yes, TI makes money when people use their battery management ICs with fancy cell monitoring, but I don’t see a lack of price pressure on those ICs. If manufacturers could implement the same features with a less complex, less expensive design, why would all of the modern battery systems, even in competitive sectors like consumer/retail electronics, integrate battery monitoring with the cells?

Hasn’t somebody who is born free and then later purchased and sold as a slave been kidnapped at some point, even if not by the person who is selling them at the international border?

I’m not well versed in the history of slave trade, but I would be curious to know what the relative economic benefit from slave trade was for African nations vs. the benefit of slave labor to purchasing nations.

Firstly, regardless of where a person ends up, if they get there by having several generations of their family kidnapped, enslaved, and systematically mistreated, I think it counts as “a hell of a hand”.

Secondly, it sounds like your thinking isn’t too far away from “well, aren’t they better off now?”, but you’re assuming that the development of African nations and societies progressed completely independently from the colonization and enslavement of their populations by Europeans. If you’re going to construct an alternate timeline where nobody was kidnapped, why does it follow that African nations would have developed in the exact same ways as if they were? Didn’t the United States reap massive economic benefit from the labor of those enslaved people, benefit which certainly didn’t make it back to Africa? And isn’t a lot of the quality of life that we in the United States currently enjoy built on the back of that economic benefit?

I’m engaging here because I do think you’re being earnest, but you should probably be aware that many people would find your question quite offensive, and I can see why. I think you’ve anticipated this, but I hope you don’t dismiss that offense as being “overly sensitive”, and instead ask yourself what you might be missing that would cause you to overlook the causes of such a strong emotional reaction.

I work at a major American automotive OEM on entry and starting systems. Yes, many passive-entry/passive-start systems (like those that use door handle sensors to trigger an unlock) are vulnerable to relay attacks. Relay attacks are separate from re_p_lay attacks, as you note.

Relay attacks on keyfobs seem to be much more common in the UK than in the US. Some manufacturers now include accelerometers in their keyfobs to mitigate the risk, as one of the most common attacks is stealing a vehicle out of a driveway when somebody has left their keys on a hook inside the house. With an accelerometer in the keyfob, it will refuse to authorize starting if it hasn’t been jostled recently.

Agree with this broadly, but also CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards in the US mean that it likely was not possible for Ford to eliminate sedans before CUV fuel economy increased to a comparable point.

(I work at Ford, but in a role that doesn’t give me insight into internal vehicle program strategy.)

I work in product development at a major global automaker. I have never heard somebody call a BEV program “simple”, and if somebody is trying to sabotage BEV projects, they’re doing a very, very bad job of it.

Firstly, I think there’s a pretty clear difference between enslavement, which is a practice that intentionally deprives human beings of their rights, often violently and often en masse, and beef, coffee, and chocolate, which are food products that are enjoyed by consumers around the world.

Secondly, neither slavery nor the use of CO2-generating industrial processes were suddenly found to be objectionable overnight. Both have been the subject of intense attention across the globe and over decades. Nobody at Shell is surprised that carbon dioxide is a problem. They have made the choice to continue to invest in and defend their business model for many years.

Ford released the e-Transit before the Lightning!

https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/e-transit/2022/

The automotive industry has standards that govern the systematic development of safety-critical systems (hardware and software). The most significant is probably ISO 26262, which defines an “Automotive Safety Integrity Level” and methods for ensuring the safety and reliability of components at a given integrity level. There are also standards like MISRA C, which are basically defined code quality and software development guidelines to reduce bugs in critical software.

Hmm, not us! We were there in '13 and '14, and our bike was built on a CBR1000RR chassis. I can't remember who had a yellow bike, although it sounds familiar... it may have been a bit before my time if they were talking about Agni motors.

Small world :)

I work on a team that designed two electric motorcycles for the IOM TT Zero. Yes, it's a very different game from the gas races. Aero and energy storage on board are the primary concerns - the top team for the past several years has been successful primarily by packing on ~20-30% more energy than their competitors, so that they can go faster, for longer.

The TT is really an edge case, though, since it is such a long (38mi) and high speed course.