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About a year ago the Ford CEO (who is also Chris Farley's cousin) explained why legacy car manufacturers could not make good software: each of their cars have 150+ modules, each of them from several suppliers, each of them writing their own software.

For every software change on each module, they have to go to a supplier to ask because of IP rights.

That is why Ford is/was trying to build a new generation of modules with in-house software which they never wrote before.

Also pertinent: "Why Ford decided to merge its next-gen architecture with its current platform" https://archive.ph/CR2Pv

2 comments

They also dictate that their suppliers will all use AUTOSAR which is a legacy framework that makes even toggling a GPIO difficult.

https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/leq366/comment/gm...

  you'll spend a few more months sitting in online seminars while some talking head explains why it takes 6 hours to configure a million goddamn things so their garbage tool can shit out an entire Italian resaurant's worth of spaghetti code just to blink an LED at 1Hz. Except it's not 1Hz, it's 10Hz, or 0.1Hz, or some other bullshit that you didn't want, because you muttered the wrong incantation to the configuration utility somewhere around step 2 out of 800, so guess what, you get to back and do the entire fucking thing again.

Surely that's not why the interface is a laggy 10fps piece of shit and the touch latency is over 200ms. If my iPhone 3GS from 2009 can display the UI in 60fps without lagging like crazy then so can a $100k BMW that's straight from the factory. It doesn't need hundreds of extra modules.