Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

Point taken. However, consider that an F-22 is being maintained and operated by highly trained people. Look at what highly trained astronauts did some 200,000 miles from Earth when an explosion disabled their spacecraft (Apollo 13 ?). Would an "average driver" have survived? What fraction of car drivers know how to check their oil and tire pressure? There are literally millions of very young, inexperienced drivers and elderly drivers that panic at the slightest hiccup in their minimal driving experience, never mind what to do with a car out of control on ice, or uncontrollable acceleration or brake failure. Every week it seems there's a news story about an elderly driver who crashed thru a store front or similar "uncontrolled" accident. While thinking about the possibility of a mis-read code line in 2 million lines of code, would a misread in 100,000 lines of code be any safer? Think of the astronauts, strapped into the Shuttle as the main engines and boosters fire, and they're thinking: A hundred thousand parts and 2 million lines of code, all from the lowest bidder..... The automotive industry is known to pressure parts suppliers to constantly reduce costs and selling price. At what point do these cost savings become a fatal liability? How many cargo containers come into the country every day, and what percent are inspected? 1 % ? Another "accident" waiting to happen.

Even though your "however" is factually correct (mostly), it doesn't support the original posting's exaggeration of the problem by using misinformation to stir up fear.

There is no cited facts to even support the original posting's claim, let alone facts to back up the cause.

We hear about more and more run away cars because it is news and news is a sale-able commodity. Unfortunately, the proportion of stories broadcast does not necessarily mean a correlation to the actual problem. In many cases it is brought on by an uneven distribution of events. In some it is journalistic bias.

The only way to unravel a trend is to do a wide sampling and apply sound statistical principles to real data. At that point you can establish if there is a real problem and the magnitude of the problem. The causes and the fix (if required) are another story.

Who estimates? I want a citation or link for that statement!

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-code:

The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, "it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code," says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.

Note that the F-22 originated in the early 1990's. Its CPU(s) might well be from the 80486 generation, though upgrades are likely to have occurred during development. (It's impressive how little information has been made public about the jet.)

I too wonder if the article is playing fair with the numbers. You ask a bunch of questions, but the most compelling one is, "What is a car doing that would require two orders of magnitude of processing?"

My guesses are, playing music, interfacing with GPS, driving the DVD player(s), in addition to actually running the car. That can all add up, but heck, I just don't have a good visualization of 100 MSLOC outside of, say, Google.

I think the Toyota experience has revealed that automakers are over-relying on software. With people's lives at stake, the infrastructure to adequately manage all that complexity is probably too expensive and therefore, not existent.

the simple fact is, cars,airplanes & motorcycles are safer now than they ever were.

engines are 10 times as reliable as they were 50 years ago.cars are faster,quieter

& easier to drive. lets give our engineers all the credit they deserve.

X million lines of code means little. In my experience, that designates lines of "source" code, in a pre-compiled human readable form.

On a well documented software development project one million lines of code may include a quarter million lines of documentation, compiler directives and other extraneous stuff that never makes it onto the microchip.

Without knowing the explicit development system being used, and the programming and documentation parameters in force, it's impossible to quesstimate the size of the operational code.

Hooker

If your budget is too small, what does that say for the rest of the project's budget?

If your requirements aren't rigorous enough, it's not enough for your software to meet its stated requirements. You can be a first class software engineer but write great software that executes in a crappy system.

Cheap, on-budget or good: pick two.

If my PC can get a virus that ok! But if my cars breaking system gets a virus who you

gonna call on that cell phone while you are accelerating. Its a problematic situation

perhaps of stick/slip and electronics overheating due to friction and the mems getting

a virus, but who needs this problem when its time to stop. We might need to return to old school auto philosophy when its time to study the breaks and breaking problems.

rwengin