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Automobile Complexity in the Computer Age
Each year, cars, trucks, boats, and RVs get more complicated. In this new electronic world, computers manage most of the various vehicle operations, such as powertrain, transmission, brake systems, emission control system, and safety related systems, to list a few.
Here’s a software truism: Garbage in, Garbage out (GIGO). If you stuff a half million lines of software code into a vehicle computer, the chance that some part of it is garbage increases significantly. Maybe that bad line of code is what makes your car lunge at stop signs, scaring you and your passengers half to death.
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In twenty years we have gone from a completely mechanical automobile-no electronics-to vehicles that have as many as forty or fifty computers, controlling everything from acceleration to tire pressure. This sort of accelerated development has a price. Unlike your desktop PC, there is no standardization in vehicle computers, either software or hardware. Often nothing in the software is common from manufacturer to manufacturer, or even model to model.
This lack of standardization is bad for everyone. The mechanic is in trouble because he hasn’t been trained to use the sophisticated new diagnostic tools. The owner pays a heavy price because when a computer fails, finding the exact cause can be very difficult. Thus, the owner waits, often for weeks or even months, for the dealership to figure out what is wrong.
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