All posts by Joel Hoffmann

www.linkedin.com/in/joelhoffmann

In Bob Lutz’s crystal ball, Apple, Google may replace the car industry as we know it

You think, how is the automobile industry going to supply that nondifferentiated demand?

“That is a scary proposition. That’s where you have to worry about people like Apple and Google, because 90 percent of the content of the vehicle is going to be in the electronic systems and the connectivity and, of course, the battery. The module itself is going to be relatively trivial.”

Source: www.autonews.com

You can have any vehicle module color you want, as long as it’s black.

Bob Lutz is famous for his car design leadership, his old job will be trivial in the future, but he can’t predict the date. Given that cars tend to stay around 10-20 years and still run, it will be difficult to imagine the coexistent model.

Toyota Selects TeleNav, Open Streetmap and continued interest in OPEN architecture

With this announcement is is clear that Toyota is making its best to keep away from Android Auto and CarPlay. It is also worth noticing that for the first time a leading auto maker is using data from Openstreetmap to power a turn-by-turn GPS navigation system.

Source: www.gpsbusinessnews.com

This is pretty clear evidence that Toyota continues to favor open source models and software that allows them to maintain control of their customer relationship. Add this to the news around SDL also tied in with UI Evolution and you have some nice bookends around Linux in the future of the worlds largest automaker.

Hackers dialing for driving safety? – C3 Report

Until now, car hacking demos were done only while security researchers were hard-wired into a vehicle’s electrical system. There was just one documented real-world case of remote car hacking in 2010, but that was an inside job by a disgruntled car dealer employee, who bricked over 100 vehicles by taking advantage of technology designed to allow remote repossession. …

Source: www.cthreereport.com

Doug Newcomb covers all the facts, except that the patch FCA could quickly devise just plugs a hole in the bucket. The offending messages that “drove” the Jeep demo are still a valid and necessary part of the “by-wire” cars we have today. According to Charlie Miller hackers just need to find a new way to access the message bus. The solution is to re-architect the car information backbone including CAN, but who will make the investment? Ethernet is just now showing up in cars, adding to the LIN, MOST, CAN, Flexray, VAN and a dozen other protocols we need to secure more. The PC and data center industry had this problem 20 years ago while Cisco made millions selling “Multi-Protocol Routers”. Then we settled on TCP/IP and the internet took off roaring. When will the auto industry realize that collaboration results in growth and closed designs result in losses.

Toyota, Ford Explore Collaboration to Bring More Apps to the Dashboard – C3 Report – Connected Car Council and Conferences

We keep hearing that cars are becoming smartphones on wheels. But most automotive infotainment systems don’t yet have the range of apps and effortless updatability associated with portable devices. And that there’s no single standard for smartphone integration currently on the market makes in-vehicle connectivity confusing for consumers, while automotive infotainment interfaces are among car …

Source: www.cthreereport.com

Cars are much more than smartphones on wheels, but smartphones capture the attention of the next generation of buyers more than typical car features. It’s very interesting to see 2 very large OEMs teaming up to make phones and cars come together better.

FCA, the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for auto cyber security – Automotive World Weekly

FCA may be the first OEM to issue a cyber security-related recall, but it will not be the last.

Should cyber security be something that OEMs work on in isolation, with each developing its own solutions? The silo approach certainly has its benefits, preventing hackers from making a single attack on thousands or millions of vehicles across multiple brands all at once; but it also means a duplication of R&D for the same result. Identifying threats is crucial, which is where some kind of cyber security social network would come in handy; AlienVault spoke to Automotive World about its Open Threat Exchange (OTX), where OEMs, suppliers and other interested parties can collaborate in confidence.

Source: Automotive World

I think collaboration makes a lot of sense when it comes to huge solutions needed to problems affecting nearly all people, like safety and cybersecurity.

Elon Musk’s first wife explains what it takes to become a billionaire – Business Insider

“You’re determined. So what? You haven’t been racing naked through shark-infested waters yet,” she writes. “Will you be just as determined when you wash up on some deserted island, disoriented and bloody and ragged and beaten and staring into the horizon with no sign of rescue?”

Source: www.businessinsider.my

Ok, I can live without the billion dollars, and a space program.

Daimler expects approval soon for autonomous trucks on German autobahns

“We are leaders in this technology and will stand up for ourselves,” Bernhard said, acknowledging that Apple, Google and other companies were trying to position themselves in the promising business of autonomous driving.

Source: safecarnews.com

I really like the picture of the “trucker” reading his mail on an iPad. I assume safety advantages, not cost reduction is expected since there will be a “driver” in the loop. Breaker / breaker one-niner, 10-4.

US: GM launches new active safety test area for ADAS and V2X

Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac will offer 22 different active safety technologies across their 2016 model year U.S. lineups, ranging from driver alerts to those that automatically intervene and…

Source: safecarnews.com

Great to see that GM is investing further into V2X besides adding DSRC radios into Cadillacs beginning 2016. There is a lot more to safety than wireless radios that needs to be developed, and of course this tech needs to be on all cars, not just luxury models. Costs must go down to make that happen – collaboration is one key element to exploit.

What is Apple’s secret car project, code-named Titan?

Apple doesn’t invent new industries. It revolutionizes established ones. The company changed the way millions of people buy music, rewrote the rules for smart phones, cemented the look and feel of a tablet computer, and recently stormed the high-end watch market. Now, according to reports, Apple has its eye on the car industry.

Source: www.csmonitor.com

If Apple started making cars, quality would be a high priority, perhaps Doug Betts could help with that. Will the “Detroit meets Silicon Valley” term be reversed to “Silicon Valley becomes Detroit”? Some people laughed when Elon Musk tried it, now he has a big factory there.

After Jeep Hack, Chrysler Recalls 1.4M Vehicles for Bug Fix

Welcome to the age of hackable automobiles, when two security researchers can cause a 1.4 million product recall.

Source: www.wired.com

Hacking a car is major consumer news, despite the awareness within industry that it is possible. Chrysler must want to contain this viral story using a USB delivered recall, but it will still cost millions. It’s too bad for them to be highlighted so much since almost all new cars have shipping vulnerabilities. It has to do with the pressure during product development to produce software in time for a pre-defined ship date (SOP). I think this demo proves the infotainment system is not isolated from the car safety critical parts and it needs to be treated as such. This will be a huge increase in complexity of development. Software collaboration on common problems could really help. The video by Wired is a must see: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/