

Your car contains more code than Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner - skorks
http://news.discovery.com/tech/toyota-recall-software-code.html

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MicahNance
First of all, LOC is terrible measure as we all know. Second, the author
separates the plane's LOC into avionics vs. entertainment but lumps them
together for cars to make the car LOC count bigger. It isn't a fair
comparison.

That said, maybe the auto industry needs to learn to separate their systems
like the airline industry since they have entertainment system buttons moving
seats. I don't want my volume to affect my cruise control, thanks.

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Derbasti
They do include the entertainment system of the car, which has to have some
GUI controls, probably some map rendering and speech recognition, which
unsurprisingly adds up to a few more lines of code than you would expect from
steering alone.

Of course, the entertainment systems of planes mostly run some kind of Linux
or Windows CE, which include _a lot_ more code than the above. AND they deploy
one entertainment system for every few seats, so you would have to multiply
the lines of code with that. AND all those displays have some microprocessors
(or FPGAs) of their own, which add to the number of "ECUs".

In short, the article is just not fair.

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yannis
Without wishing to get into a flame-war with anyone driving a flashy car, but
my two year old desktop running both Linux and Windows has more Lines of Code
than that, therefore mine is bigger than yours. LOC should never be used as a
metric, is like comparing computing power by weighing computers.

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rythie
Well it's not something to boast about, more lines = more bugs - I don't want
to crash

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mcantor
Frankly, I find this terrifying. So, I'm hurtling down the highway in a sheet
metal box travelling faster than the fastest land animal, controlled by
hundreds of _millions_ of lines of code, and bugs in this code could
erroneously stall my car or trigger my airbags? That's too much. It's too much
code. More code means more bugs, and now more bugs means more danger. I'll
gladly trade in my GPS for a car that could still drive even after being hit
with an EMP. (Not that I run into electromagnetic pulses regularly... I just
trust the mechanical stuff more than I do the code.)

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CrLf
Millions of lines is an exaggeration... You can't add up the code for the ABS
to the code for engine control, to the car navigation system.

Those systems may share information, through limited signals or simple data
busses, but they are separate, not a big code blob like a PC or a server.

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impeachgod
I wonder hoe much of this is hackable?

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CrLf
I'd say little to none. This, of course, excluding the kind of stuff you can
do just by interfacing the engine ECU with a computer (using the OBD-II port
that all new cars have).

