The key takeaway for me here is that they want to build an Android-based OS that will run both user applications and, say, your traction control on the same stack. Given the very mixed history of Android security, updates, and more, I simply can't see how this would end well.
The article must be misleading. Android would never have the latency or reliability to run things like traction control and fuel management. The engineers at auto companies are well aware of this, but perhaps the author of the article is not.
Contrary to popular belief most managers in industry are not 100% clueless. No manager in a car company would be so incompetent that they would off-load time critical functions to a phone. My money would be on incompetence of the writer long before I'd suspect the people on the other side of the interview.
I've been through a couple of those myself, it is always very interesting to see how your words come out once they've been interpreted by someone who is essentially clueless but well-meaning and trying to understand something that goes above their normal day-to-day level of complexity. And that's the good case, the one where they don't have an agenda to push.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Well, you do know that the newspaper isn't written by a single person, but by a large team, so I guess the hope is that the journalists who wrote articles about far-off Palestine were more competent than the journalist trying to write an article about physics.
The article does say Android will be used, but it doesn't say it will be used for anything other than infotainment.
It isn't totally clear, but there is one fairly strong hint that there will be separation. They quote Singer (the person in charge) as saying, "What we are now doing with these so-called enabling functions is taking them out of customer functions, putting it in a middleware software layer." In context, it seems to be contrasting that against designs where the car's basic functions were too entwined with infotainment, so "taking out" seems to suggest separation.
The writing in-between the lines is that all car manufacturers want to run everything on a single-board computer. Perhaps the only exception is some things deemed mission critical such as the dashboard - issue being who defines what is mission critical - which will run on a separate "safer" SBC. This allows them to save quite a bit of money per a car, not just in SBCs but also potentially in wiring. Not sure it's a good thing but it is the direction things have already gone.
Cutting out other suppliers will be huge cost savings for Volkswagen if the plan works out too.
As first it's only for the infotainment system. And the rear view camera is already a part it. And then at some point the manufacturer lets you adjust your adaptive cruise control through it. Then more and more critical things are integrated into what used to be "infotainment", until very soon the entire car can't run without the screen.
I think on most cars the infotainment systems runs on a separate computer that is connected to the drive computer via a bus. With a bit of commonsense design it should be fairly simple to have a car thats still useable without the infotainment computer.
I very much suspect that "same stack" here means some blurry "API" and some shared code, not actually the same OS all the way down. Or maybe the same OS at the lowest level, and then running something like Android virtualized for some of the user-facing bits.
I greatly look forward to being able to root any 10yo car and put the traction control in "go forward no matter what" mode rather than "we're cutting throttle so the CVs can outlast the warranty" mode. That said, per the article it sounds like android is just for the infotainment system, not the actual drive-train.
Edit: Since I'm apparently I'm so wrong does anyone want to tell me why?
Being able to use every bit of power the vehicle can put to the ground is going to be harder on parts than just mindlessly cutting throttle when wheel spin is detected. I'm fine with that trade-off if it means I can give my grocery getter traction control that's tuned for maintaining forward progress in low traction (like what most of the new Jeeps do if you set the dial to "rocks") as opposed to preventing wheel spin by cutting throttle (what basically everything else does). CV joints were just an example of a part that might wear out sooner and a hypothetical justification for using the dumb kind of traction control.
I don't know where you learned about traction control, but the normal way it operates is to apply the brakes on the wheel that's spinning so torque is redirected to the other wheel.
That's how it works in theory and did on some of the first generation systems. In practice most manufacturers cut throttle too (assuming throttle by wire, which most new vehicles have) and you often have to pay for some "off road" trim to get the little button that makes it not cut throttle. On a lot of AWD mom-mobiles you can't even get that option. Also, most traction control systems aren't tuned to hit the brake on the spinning wheel aggressively enough (IMO).
The Episode of Dirt Every Day where he takes a Jeep Compass off roading (it's on youtube somewhere) is a great example of what you can do with good traction control.
