In-car advertising glitch may be preview of a distracting future

We, by accident of course, planned, implemented, tested and released a feature to load and show ads on your car display. Could've happened to anyone...

Oopsie, can you please look away and pretend that we are trying to fix it?

"Unfixable glitch", but you can have your ad-free vehicle for an easy $29.99/month (+ tip)

The pot getting turned up another degree.

Happy Accident.

Mid Stage Fascism isn't going to be a walk in the park either

Found anyone that can fab trim panels? It's getting difficult to keep the ol' E in good visual shape.

If only I could convert my trusty Saxo to electric car..

Not a single screen to be found! Just analog gauges and buttons as it should be.

No, they won't.

At best you'll get some sort of nearly worthless concession because they have to slap in cellular hardware to make the ad bit work - something like you'll get free traffic updates on your gps nav (sold seperately) - since they need some sort of enticement.

No way they'd offer anything remotely looking like a meaningful discount.

Didn't realize they'd gotten better.

More like F tier

When I plug my phone into the wall, there are chips in the wall charger and on both sides of the cable, because the simple act of charging requires a handshake and an exchange of information notifying the charger, the cable, and the phone what charging modes are supported, and how to ask for more or less power.

Seriously? Am I the only one thinking this could be done with less than 10 chips at most?

How many chips are in a fully configured desktop computer? There's like dozens of any given motherboard, controlling all the little I/O requirements. Each module of RAM is several chips. If you use external cards, each card will have a few chips, too. Meanwhile, the keyboard and the mouse each have a few chips, and the display/monitor has a bunch more.

I'd be surprised if the typical computer had less than 100 chips.

Now let's look at the car functions. A turn signal that blinks, oscillating between on and off? That's probably a chip. A windshield wiper that can do intermittent wiping at different speeds? Another chip or more. Variable valve timing that's electronically controlled? Another few chips. Each sensor that detects something, from fuel tank status to engine knocking to air/fuel mixture? Probably another chip. Controllers that combine all this information to determine how to mix the fuel and air, whether to trigger a warning light on the dash, etc.? Probably more chips. What about deployment of airbags, or triggering of the anti-lock braking systems? Cruise control requires a few more chips, as speedometers and odometers are not electronic rather than the old analog systems. Smart cruise control and lane detection has even more chips. Hybrid drivetrains that charge or discharge batteries need dozens of chips controlling the flow of power (and the logic of when power should flow in which direction).

By the time Toyota was in the news in 2011 for potential throttle sticking problems that killed people, it was typical for even economy cars to have something like 30 ECUs controlling different things, with each ECU and its associated sensors requiring multiple chips.

Some modern perks require even more chips. Automatic lights? High beam dimming? Automatic wipers? Remote start or shutting off the engine at idle?

And that's just for driving. FM tuner? Chips. AM tuner? More chips. Bluetooth and Carplay/Android Auto? More chips. Rear view camera, now mandated on all cars? More chips. A built-in GPS or infotainment system? A full blown computer.

All the little analog controllers that were present in cars in the 80's are now more efficiently performed on integrated circuits, including analog circuits. Each function will require its own chip. If you're trying to recreate the exact functionality of a typical car from the 1990's, you'd probably still need a minimum of a few hundred chips to pull it off. And it's probably smart to segment things so that each module does one thing in a specialized way, isolated from the others, lest an unexpected input on the radio mess up the spark plug timing.

The world is run by chips, and splitting up the functions into multiple computers/controllers, with multiple chips each, is just the easier and more efficient way to do things.

It’s because each device is made by a different vendor and they all need to talk to each other.

If you look at some of the EVs you’ll find that it’s closer to 10 because the EV manufacturers are starting to make all of their own components

Maybe they mean every single silicon component on all of the boards. I can imagine that cars need lots of diodes and discrete transistors and such. But computer-wise, thousands would really be excessive.

You can still buy Motorola 68000 chips (from the Apple II and Commodore 64) and get the job of rolling windows up and down done. Sometimes, old chip designs are good enough and cheaper than one modern design.