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The (2011) Volt (or any EV in electric mode really, with no speaker) is a squirrel genocide machine. Hung out all weekend with a buddy who's a validation engineer testing new infotainment etc, and we probably killed half-dozen squirrels. They just don't hear the car coming and *squish*. Fun car to ride around in though! Sadly, the newer Volts have speakers/emit noise, so they are less effective squirrel crushers.  Also the bike-carrying Smart car with a bed at NAIAS was the funniest thing.
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Jan 23, 2012 19:08
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Atasi posted:Actually I have a 2012 and the alert noise is still driver initiated, so squish away Ahh, gotcha. His is a weird hybrid of 2013/2014 electronics in a 2011 chassis, so I'm not entirely sure what belongs on what model. The navigation software/UI is awful though, why couldn't they just have licensed Garmin or something 
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Jan 24, 2012 03:44
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I feel like any competent EE would have seen this coming ahead, and any precautions/systems they had in mind to this probably fell victim to tightening deadlines, idiotic managers, or any other stereotypical corporate bullshit.
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Feb 26, 2012 01:05
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grover posted:Apparently, adding water to a Fisker Karma makes it catch fire and explode, as happened to 11 Karmas parked in Jersey when Sandy hit: Poor battery packs I hope the cars were submerged considerably under water, or otherwise subject to some huge deluge of water. If they weren't, then, well, it's a bit scary, anywhere where water can cause a short should be sealed/protected/etc.
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Nov 1, 2012 21:58
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Huh, I didn't realize that was a super rare thing, my 2003 Altima and current A4 both happily do that as well. Just a few lines of code to throw that up when temp < threshold, I guess. v0v
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Dec 15, 2012 08:03
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Dwight Eisenhower posted:Maybe they hosed up big time paying off the Fed loan in its entirety early, but more likely they've got a lot of money to spend right now, and the intelligent move is to spend it on increasing consumer adoption. To be fair, they transferred the debt to another firm (Goldman or someone) who paid off the government in turn, so they still owe someone money if I recall correctly, just not the government. Good PR though.
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Jun 20, 2013 22:42
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Really curious as to what the root cause of it is. Manufacturing variations or other issues from an absurdly arrogant company that often has no loving clue what it’s doing? If a software update fixes it, that is...concerning.
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May 21, 2018 19:14
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ABS calibration at fault / fix via OTA? gently caress Tesla. Hurry up and crater so the rest of the auto industry can get EVs done correctly. Someone asked / mentioned earlier if Tesla was having trouble finding vendors to supply and work with them...they have definitely had that in the past. Playing nice and then dropping the supplier after (poorly) reverse-engineering the component and vertically integrating it, and approaching suppliers with an attitude I can best summarize at “lol why do cars still have four wheels, you guys can’t innovate, move fast and break things.” Horrid organization to deal with. Good engineers buried deep down though.
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May 22, 2018 18:32
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Nice post! Our infrastructure is going to feel the pain going forward from the chargers going in. I wonder if certain models are smart enough / connected enough to negotiate among themselves? Charger: “Hey, so there’s like 10 of us on this block that all need to charge by 8AM and it’s midnight now. If we timeslice and 2 of us go for a few hours at a time, we’ll all be happy and won’t stress the local electrical grid!  “And then of course they will shittalk their owners as well. :skynet:
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May 27, 2018 01:25
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spandexcajun posted:So, Tesla fixed the breaking issue and Consumer Reports now recommends the model 3. My beef with OTA and in general the ability to cheaply push updates (see also video games post 6th generation consoles / PC games forever) is that it creates a conscious / unconscious psychological pressure on decision makers that allows QA/QC to be compressed too much. For videogames, no one (except maybe in China) died because they couldn't play a game on launch day / we as video game customers have proven that we'll spend $60 on a game that's unplayable at launch repeatedly. You have this escape rope dangling when your board is screaming at you to release the product and you have proven customer behavior that shows they'll happily bend over. For a several thousand pound machine piloted by a human that can kill its human / other humans because of mistakes, that's a different story. Yeah, mistakes / recalls do happen and unfortunately, the standard calculus is to only issue that once it becomes more expensive than human lives (and there is a number for that), but considering the sheer volume of cars produced, we seem to do OK. I think the percentage of "silent" updates is low (i.e., you go into a dealer and they reflash something without telling you) and OTA would save labor costs in the event of needing a flash, I give you that. Elon throwing around his rep / social media presence to be very laissez-faire and appear as a genius for being able to fix the problem remotely makes it even more hosed up. "Hey, we hosed up something that's safety-related but no probs dudes, we can just push an update to your car because we are the smartest!" Maybe it's the brushing under the rug attitude that's rubbing me the wrong way.
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May 30, 2018 20:56
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Exercise for the reader: 1. Capture CAN traffic from a vehicle bus. 2. Replay that traffic on the bus. 3. See how many vehicles actually behave in a safe manner in that scenario instead of going absolutely batshit. Spoiler: it’s not a very comfortably high number
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May 31, 2018 04:14
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drgitlin posted:That’s not really true, there are now separate buses like flex ray, automotive Ethernet, etc. The idiot architecture is having a single gateway where the disparate busses meet and aren’t well separated. FCA hosed this up and got owned and fueled the media with the Jeep Cherokee attack. I’d wager you’d find CAN, LIN and MOST in most vehicles today. Automotive Ethernet making more inroads now (buy Broadcom stock) delivering speed over a low number of wires, and good EMC performance by bandwidth-limited signaling.
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May 31, 2018 04:18
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Tyrgle posted:This whole argument really falls apart, though, when you're talking about level 4/5 autonomy stuff where the car is expected to drive itself. If the car's computer goes skynet, which backup computer is going to heroically seize the wheel, slam it into neutral, and bring it to a stop within its lane? I've heard that GM at least is designing redundant hardware for this reason, but they seem to be an outlier. This is a very good point. If you take an airliner’s flight computer (defined as the thing running the control laws / translating pilot inputs into commands to actuators) as an example, it is capable of incredible autonomy in certain cases. It can perform automatic landings under incredibly austere conditions and that capability grew out of the late 1960s if I recall correctly. Human supervision is 100% required but modern systems can have direct control of the flight surfaces and other systems (thrust reversers, etc.). What I’m getting at here is that this system is redundant, usually in triplicate fashion with associated voting logic, to help achieve a desired reliability and safety level. I don’t know what regulations will look like for a passenger car that has L4/L5 autonomy but redundancy requirements on sensors (airplanes have multiple pitot tubes) and compute would drive cost and complexity through the roof for a mass-market item. We don’t have redundant speedometers in our cars (ABS equipped we’d have 3 or 4 wheel speed sensors, I don’t know what most clusters do with that data), but that isn’t really required right now because we expect the human behind the wheel to exercise good judgment, and we take advantage of our human perception system to act as a backup (estimate / go with the flow of traffic which is arguably the way to do it anyways). If I get a control loop that uses speed as a critical variable, I’d want some level of redundancy to ensure that I can start react to a faulted sensor, loss of data or implausible value. One argument is that computer vision will get so good (lol) that it simply does what a human does in a fallback scenario, and that is visually estimate speed. That’s a capability that needs to be verified and validated, which costs time and money. Or we drop in enough sensors that we feel good we can in a single-fault scenario reliably determine the speed of the vehicle to an acceptable degree of accuracy, in all conditions (even in wheels slipping and spinning).
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May 31, 2018 07:59
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Sagebrush posted:Large airplanes have had anti-skid brakes since like the 1940s and they work by using a mechanical modulator. Basically a weighted flywheel that applies the brakes when the wheel is spinning, but if it stops rotating the weights come back in and open the hydraulic circuit. It's neat. It can only really be set up for one particular kind of behavior, but that's fine on a plane because most of your landings should have a very similar braking profile. FW on newer modules is thankfully signed / encrypted now in much the same fashion as mobile phones / consoles / etc, which is nice. It makes the insertion of said type of logic bomb much more difficult. Any sane FW update process I would hope uses a common A/B approach where interrupted/corrupted/etc. FW updates have no effect on the status quo functionality of the system. The new image has to be verified before being switched active. It doesn't save you if the new image has a bug in it that locks valves open, but that's what your regression / validation testing is for. Ola posted:It isn't really that amazing. It relies on few inputs, it does fairly basic calculations, has very simple outputs and it makes no decisions. When it correctly detects errors, it just sounds a warning and gives up. When it fails to detect errors, it can kill everyone on board, as has happened multiple times. It completely ignores the traffic around it and it will happily fly into a mountain if you tell it to. All of this is ok because it is operated in a very controlled environment with rigorous external controls. An autonomous car is the opposite. Complex calculations, constantly adapting to traffic around it and operated by a total moron who would not notice if a wheel was about to fall off. Regarding redundancies for a truly autonomous vehicle, it must have those implemented in some fashion. Whether it's duplicating a sensor or ensuring a combination of other sensors can make up for the lost input long enough to safe the vehicle, it can't count on a person helping out, because they're dumb or not even in the vehicle (truly autonomous cargo trucks or similar wouldn't even need a person). The regulatory environment had better enforce this type of reliability standard. drgitlin posted:Everyone is designing redundant hardware, and that’s been a recommendation in every version of the DoT AV guidance so far. GM has an executive position that is responsible for cybersecurity efforts. However, there's also knee-jerk reactions like "encrypt everything" that results in CAN traffic for the driver seat control module being encrypted to protect your precious memory seats  . It's good the thought is being given, though it does little for vehicles on the road already. Most of those vehicles remain "safe" simply by being air-gapped, honestly.
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May 31, 2018 22:00
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Cockmaster posted:That's actually one of the biggest criticisms of Tesla's self-driving program - where Waymo and GM have redundant computers and control systems, Tesla doesn't: I’m on my phone and apologies for the brevity of the post, but talking about redundancy for a second. Bit flips / single-event effects / single-event upsets are a big deal in space applications because ionizing radiation can impart sufficient energy transfer into silicon devices to potentially cause bits to change value / get stuck / a variety of other effects. We use ECC (usually SECDED) to mitigate against this, along with software mitigation’s like multiple copies of important structs in memory, voting, re-running calculations and other things, but it’s not perfect. Why I bring this up is as we dive into deep sub-micron technologies, SEEs/SEUs can and do occur on Earth in the abscence of ionizing radiation. At high altitudes (even including mountainous regions), FPGAs have been shown to take upsets and flips from neutrons. With the push towards using mobile-inspired chips like the Tegra and friends on their 16nm and smaller processes, it’s possible that they could be vulnerable to upsets in normal usage. L1 and L2 caches generally already feature parity as a simple form of protection. With normal usage patterns and running the probability of the specific bit being upset that causes something catastrophic to happen, the chances are admittedly tiny. For an airliner carrying 300 people, this is of concern and critical systems like engine FADECs will be redundant and hardened against such issues. For a car carrying a few occupants...may be acceptable risk, may not be. Lots of arguments to be made there. Bitsquatting was an interesting study that I think someone should pick up and run with. It essentially took popular domain names and flipped a few bits at random, such as aeazon.com instead of amazon.com. These garbage domains that had low chances of being from typos actually saw traffic over a period of time, skewed towards mobile devices. Whether these are from errors during transmission that were not corrected, “silent” flips in phones, who knows, but it’s interesting data. (http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html) The trick question is being the person or organization that stamps their approval or not in having to worry about this type of failure / anomaly condition and then seeing if it ends up roasting anyone (and proving what caused it). Plenty of other failure methods exist as well that may push towards redundancy as a mitigation. This is of course independent of whether the car is ICE or EV. ADAS systems like those that control steering or ABS/ESP systems already utilize lockstep MCUs to achieve their ASIL or ISO 26262 qualifications for not killing people, but they are performing relatively simple computation compared to advanced neural nets / ML type stuff.
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Jun 1, 2018 06:31
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roomforthetuna posted:Rationally, it should only have to be more reliable than human drivers, which have a failure rate much higher than the bitflip rate. True statement. I guess corporations are people though?
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Jun 1, 2018 07:23
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Ola posted:The Volt has a lot of clever design features. I don't know for sure, but I think it's the best plugin hybrid out there, and if development continues to get skewed towards all electrics, it will remain so. I’d give it serious consideration if I needed a new car; 0 gas around the city and then cheap tank fills to drive it out for hikes and camping. Plus, hatch! The Chevy badge bugs me but that’s because I’m an elitist rear end in a top hat (and what other nameplate would they have intro’d it as anyway, Pontiac or Saturn if they were still around? A new EV only nameplate?)
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Jun 3, 2018 21:59
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Ripoff posted:Speaking of FCA dealers, don’t ever buy an EV off of their lots. Their F&I guy at the local dealer was trying to sell us on oil change plans for an i3. This is thing where they’re purposefully trying to kill electric cars, right? 
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Jun 6, 2018 05:23
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KozmoNaut posted:Yes. Can't wait for the juju to start (it probably has) about "battery flushes" or other questionable maintenance practices for EVs. I guess tire places won't really care, but mechanics / regular service departments will take a beating as (perhaps if, according to some) the percentage of ICE cars drops. Not sure if there's a straightforward intercept strategy to pivot to supporting EVs; brakes are still important / require service...
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Jun 6, 2018 08:09
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Chances of that being written on a device powered by lithium-based batteries / having tantalum capacitors / other probable conflict mineral approach 1.
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Jun 8, 2018 16:26
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I picture a Looney Tunes-esque dust cloud to describe the situation at Tesla at the moment...what will emerge!
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Jun 15, 2018 15:00
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