9 thoughts on “Don’t buy a self-driving car programmed by an American software company…”

  2. The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said…

    “Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you
    try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple failure.”

    “Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is
    similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor,” DiGiorgio said.

    https://gcn.com/Articles/1998/07/13/Software-glitches-leave-Navy-Smart-Ship-dead-in-the-water.aspx?Page=2

  4. America has dominated the software industry since the military industrial complex started pouring money into R & D shortly after the end of WW2. It’s one of the few American industries who products are sold all over the world. I can’t imagine that there’s another country that produces better software, unless they produce very little of it.

  5. I seem to recall seeing statements that leading/dominating ‘technology’ (computers and associated) is an explicit US strategic goal, even. Europe is certainly a mere suburb or farmer’s league, though there certainly are some competent people here.

    While I’m not in the field, I think Airbus (France/UK) does well in developing those sorts of systems. In the larger scheme of things, all sorts of vehicular software currently seems to be nightmarish, from F-35 to Volkswagen, with millions of lines of low level code in a distributed system that ought to be hard realtime in a lot of respects along with a lot of other requirements. From the outside, it seems quite ripe for improved practices, really. Self-driving is one more problem …

    Anyway, if there is a US competitor, it would be China. Of the 15 largest internet companies in 2015, three or so were Chinese and the rest American. Looking at user bases to be satisfied, East Asia is and will be interesting, perhaps more so than US/Europe by now.

    http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

    Also, it’s probably time to start thinking seriously about what comes after the smartphone. I assume a lot of people already do to launch something fresh in … five years? Or less?

  6. Tom – VW doesn’t belong in that group. Whatever “bugs” were in their code were introduced quite intentionally. The NOx reduction system was turned off if the outside temperature reading value was greater than -3,276.8 degrees (unless the car was on a dyno in a test cycle – then it was turned back on). This was no accident.

  7. If I recall NASA also did pretty well with these things in the Space Shuttle. They blew up for other reasons but the software always seemed to work rather well. If I recall they would do things like having triple redundant computer systems with “voting” – two out of the three systems would have to agree on an action. Of course if all three decided it was time for a windows update, I don’t know what would have happened.

  8. Yeah, VW was a poor example for this issue.

    Here’s an article on the topic: http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/systems/this-car-runs-on-code

    The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

    These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, ”it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code,” says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.

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