Featured Toyota debuts its first SDV (software-defined vehicle)

Not necessarily "extremely long" periods of time.

Less than 100 years passed from the time Nebuchadnezzar II made Babylon a world power until it was conquered by the Medes and Persians under the rule of Nabonidus.

Persia remained a dominant power for only some 200 years.

Greece's expansion was made by the conquests of Alexander the Great who only ruled for 12 short years, from age 20 until his death at 32 years of age. After that, the empire was divided among his generals into 4 separate nations. The remaining Greek nations were then conquered by the Roman Empire some 130 years later.

Others did last quite a while. From the time the Roman Empire conquered the Greeks and Macedonians until it fell were around 650 years.

 

Yes, that is great news. But again, remember that all of this will cost a lot of money.

It's kind of like healthcare. It's better than ever, saving a lot more lives than ever. But I do know an increasing number of people who "just can't afford it." I just switched jobs, one major reason being that our premiums alone were starting to reach 1/3 of our income, and that was on the cheapest plan possible with a hefty deductible that all together wasn't that far from total yearly income, if ever needed.

Can I afford a new Toyota? Hands down no! I can't hardly afford a place to live in.

We need better traffic safety. But we also need to keep hard working citizens from facing poverty.

Personally, I don't see a human solution that fixes it all. Hopefully, over time, the SDV take-over might trickle down to the rest of Americans in the used car market, making traffic 99.9999% accident free. I just don't know if it'll happen quite like that.

 

In some ways, I see a software defined world as being an easy way to do the same kinds of things to customers.

You want to live longer?
You want better safety?

Then get ready to fork over the $$.

Hopefully I'm wrong. We also don't have the technology yet to say how much it costs compared to how well it works.

But like anything, it's driven by profits, not altruism.

 

Sure, no doubt about it. But there are other OSes used in automotive...like QNX and Green Hills. Successful and relatively small companies.

Mike

 

We are already much safer than 99.9999%. There is about 1.3 deaths per 100,000,000 miles. That is about 99.9999987% safe if my math is right.

Mike

 

99.9999987% safe compared to what? Do those deaths account for pedestrian accidents too?

The average American drives some 12,000 miles per year. If that's all he drives in 35 working years, then during those years the average American racks up 420,000 miles. If one dies every 76923077 miles, then every 183rd driver will die (assuming all drive those same amount of miles on average).

 

Despite the claims to the opposite from Apple and Microsoft, It does not require "a massive amount of long term investments" to maintain well written software. All it takes is one person who understands the code. I've maintained software for years ( around 21367 words, 5902 lines, 143814 characters) . We had a fair following among the home automation enthusiasts. After 25 years I finally released the code to the public domain because I could no longer follow the logic of the code that I'd written when I was a much younger man. Doctors blamed a stroke.

There were many reasons that I stopped maintaining the code. First was that the repository that was used for chatting was shut down.
Next was that the other person who had taken over maintaining the code had died. Then there was the advent of the Amazon Alexa.

I've had several programs that I created which lasted for decades. One of my first programs (written in the 1970s) was still in use when my company did it's Y2K audit. The program was NOT Y2K compliant. The person who was maintaining that system had to re-write the logic surrounding the truncation of the mm/dd/yy so that it was consistent. It took just a couple of afternoons to find and fix the Y2K bugs.

I don't code much any more. But it's not the cost of hiring people. It's the inability to recall the reasoning for laying out the code in the way that I used.

 

It's one thing for old code to work today. For an example, good ol' MS DOS can work natively on modern CPUs based on the x86 architecture with little or no modification.

But it's another animal when the internet and reasons to hack are involved.

An SDV will be connected to the internet and that connection will have a huge ability to control and manipulate the vehicle. There will be very good reasons (in the eyes of criminals) to hack such a connection in order to steal cars or wreak other sorts of havoc on society. This will mean there will be a need for constant security updated and patches.

Anyone want this kind of thing happening to cars all over the streets? And it wasn't even a planned attack.

 

I don't see the logic for the assertion that the internet and hacking means more maintenance costs. It might mean more opportunities for slovenly developers to write bad code, but it's not really a given that they HAVE to write bad code. Nor is it a given that they have a golden hall pass to skip over the need for vigorous examination of new and existing code.