[waiseristy]

It is interesting how it evolved that way. As individual components were computerized (ABS, TCS, TCM's, ECM's, etc.), there was no real point at which it made sense to centralized things.

Now, with the silicon shortages, and the ever increasing complexity of vehicle networks, I think things are going to hit a crossover point. Instead of a vehicle full of "microservices", we will probably see more vehicles with some centralized compute unit controlling dozens of sensors and "edge" processors.

It's impossible to fully centralize an automotive computer, but there is a lot of work that can be done to move away from "microservices" to something that is easier to define, develop, and validate

[jillesvangurp]

Electrical cars don't need gears and a lot of the other moving parts you find in an ICE car like this. They still need lots of silicon of course.

The Tesla (and several other EV manufacturers) approach to car software is highly centralized. Unlike traditional car manufacturers, there are no external component providers that get to run their own proprietary firmware on their own dedicated chips. Upgrading and testing/integrating all these proprietary firmware blobs is a nightmare and is mostly not a thing with legacy car manufacturers. Tesla and other modern EV manufacturers on the other hand provide over the air updates for essentially all software in the vehicle. Reason: all of that is developed in house and shares a lot of the hardware infrastructure.

One big reason car manufacturers struggle so much with chip shortages is that a lot of the shortages are for decades old chip designs still used by various suppliers for things like brakes, the automatic windows, the fuel injection system, etc. Chip manufacturers are reluctant to invest in new production capacity for obsolete chip designs.

The reason Tesla managed to break some delivery records in the middle of these shortages is that they use more modern chip designs and were able to actually switch to a different chip provider. They don't use a lot of different chips for most of these things. More centralized and integrated is the modern design for cars.

Legacy ICE vehicle design is essentially stuck at where they were ten years ago. Most manufacturers are in the process of ramping down R&D around this topic. They'll milk their production lines for a while but attention has already shifted to EVs for most of them. New models (if any) are essentially the same components they've been shipping for a while with minor changes.

[waiseristy]

Good summary! I think the core of what you talk about is a fundamental difference between a 21st and 20th century OEM. 20th century OEMs see software as a not only a hassle, but something that is isolated in discrete components and thus able to be “vendorized”. 21st century OEMs understand that the entire car is a software system, and they should be incredibly closely involved with every aspect of it.

There is room still for company’s that only can transition halfway though. It’s not like vendors cant make their discrete components OTA capable. Vendors will also be just as capable of pivoting to new silicon in the case of supply disruptions. Ford, Daimler, and the other usual suspects, are going to be more involved with their software, but they will still have vendors.

Tesla can get away with a lot of this creative homebrew craziness because they have such an insane software / hardware budget. I honestly don’t know what that company’s software practices would look like if they didn’t have such amazing access to cash