“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Sun Tzu may have known about open source 2000 years ago and its ability to elevate winners. See Michelin’s Community as another example.
Respected Strategy Analytics study also shows there is a great deal of differentiation opportunity left for the OEM as Android Auto does not deliver all the media sources (such as FM tuner – duh), at least not yet.
Why does Chromium in automotive matter? It moves the developer ecosystem outside the niche occupied mostly by Qt and into more innovation. Performance is not an issue now when running web apps in the car. Add the work of W3C in automotive and you have a killer combination for cars entering SOP in the next 3-4 years. Blended interfaces with smartphone apps will clearly benefit from using the same technology.
I generally support Doug’s opinion that technology is good, but given the ethical question I have not seen any evidence that robots make smarter decisions, just more consistent ones.
Is CAN encryption (or lack of it) the issue? I think the rest of the ECU’s in he car would need modification. A CAN firewall is another proposed solution. It is clear the designers of CAN never envisioned 2015.
“The vehicle is saying ‘I’m Alice, this is my location, this is my speed and my direction.’ Everyone around you can listen to that,” says Jonathan Petit
So it appears safety and security/privacy are tightly linked and possibly at odds with each other. I remember this issue being raised 15 years ago in the VII world, it was never solved.