Japanese Auto Makers Teaming Up To Create Standard OS

CNet is reporting that Japanese car manufacturers are teaming up to develop a standard automotive operating system. "Just as computer operating systems [...] allow multiple applications to communicate with one another, an automotive operating system enables different driving systems to work together. The standard automotive operating system from Japan will include everything from fuel injection, brakes and power steering to power windows. Currently, certain mechanical car parts are interchangeable from model to model. Smart car parts that operate off a common software standard would enable that kind of convenience to continue, while allowing them to communicate more easily with other smart components in a car."

I thought this was what TRON was for?

[WillAdams]

TRON is an embedded OS that Japan tried to use as a general-purpose desktop OS as well back in the late '80s, but was stopped from doing so by a Federal Government lawsuit claiming it was anti-competitive:

http://www.tron.org/index-e.html [tron.org]

Or is this an extension to TRON? (The article is really slim), though it seems to be about OSEK:

http://www.osek-vdx.org/ [osek-vdx.org]

William

Re:Oh, yeah, I love the idea of an OS on my car.

[CaptainPatent]

Don't be so naive, Every production model of car for the past few years has an embedded operating system. Many people improperly compare their car's OS to that of Windows desktop. There's a major problem with that comparison though. The software is made specifically not to crash and to be fail proof at (almost) every conceivable pitfall it may encounter. A better comparison would be to medical devices to keep people alive. When lives hang in the balance, a little more attention is paid to the details.

Currently?

[Himring]

Currently, certain mechanical car parts are interchangeable from model to model.

Currently? Back in my teens, in the 80s, I hung out with a family that built street machines. There used to be this company called GMC and it had others called Chevrolet and Pontiac, et al. We could take a bell housing off a 66 Pontiac whatever and fit it perfectly to a 68 Chevrolet whatever. ALL water thermostat housings between all of these makes were the same. I can remember helping my dad with his 69 Ford Bronco to replace a cracked thermostat housing, and when we went to the junkyard the dude pulls out a huge box of ford thermostat housings -- even between Ford cars they were different. You could fit a Nova front-end to a Ventura and all the bolts matched. Anyone toying around with American cars from the 60s learned to love the GMs, especially Chevys....

GMCs, and especially Chevys, from the 60s, were God's gift to cars and auto mechanics and it was all interchangeable. Couple this with the raw power of those cars (yes yes, environment concerns and all that) and those are some of the best memories of my life....

Hehe, currently.... Reminds me of my daughter saying, "way back in the 90s...."

Could make a better OBD2

[GreenEnvy22]

If we can get all the cars to use a common language, doing diagnostics could be made much easier. OBD2 that all cars sold in North America currently have, can be useful, but is quite limited in what it can do.

Re:OSEK and AUTOSAR

[aldaran]

The development of a standard operating system for cars is not exactly groundbreaking news. OSEK-VDX, a cooperation between German and french manufacturers, exists since 1995. AUTOSAR is a newer set of standards for automative software where European and American (Ford, GM) companies have teamed up. As mentioned in a previous post, first implementations of AUTOSAR are expected for 2008. Both OSEK and AUTOSAR are not operating systems itself, but standards and specifications (like POSIX and TRON, correct me if I am wrong). Actually I'd be surprised if there were not something similar already in use by Japanese manufacturers. As for TRON, I always thought it is used mostly in consumer electronis.

Re:Oblig.

[waterm]

I know you are just making the obligatory "beowulf" joke but you aren't that far off. Modern auto electrical architectures consist of many computing nodes communicating on high speed subnets. Of course, on the vehicle, each node performs a distinct function. They are also not "commodity" hardware, but you get the point.

Re:offering Compatibility?

[waterm]

To prevent newer and compatible parts from working..

Not likely. These companies run service organizations that are stuck maintaining their vehicles for years, it is in their best interest if everything plays nice together. It saves them money if the same service part can be used across many model years and vehicle platforms.

Re:A day late and a dollar short...

[nonsequitor]

This should make the individual components cheaper allowing them to use cheaper micro-controllers. Cars are increasingly comprised of smart components which communicate electronically, as opposed to analog or mechanical signals.

This means that the newer ECUs have a throttle command which is part of a message packet transmitted over a bus rather than a mechanical push/pull cable controlling the throttle lever on an engine. Even the engines that still have throttle levers aren't mechanical anymore, the lever is connected to a potentiometer which then converts the lever position into an analog signal which feeds into the ECU.

Its the natural progression that distributed systems again become more consolidated. Remember that this network inside your car is going to be electrically isolated from other systems. The likelihood of anyone hacking your car without physical access to the microcontrollers is slim to none. Unless they do something stupid like try to network this OS with outside systems which aren't wired to it.

Re:A day late and a dollar short...

[ionFreeman]

Mércédès was (according to Wikipedia) the daughter of late 19th century entrepreneur and Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft board member Emil Jellinek.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes_(car) [wikipedia.org]

Deja Vu...

[pm3ball]

As an experienced automotive embedded software engineer, I can say for sure this OS standard will bring nothing to the industry that isn't already in place. There are extensive standards for diagnostics, operating systems, safety systems, and pretty much everything else you can think of. I think the enthusiastic nature of many of the replies to this thread is an indication of a larger problem with how the US automakers are portrayed. Most people assume that it's good simply because the Japanese are doing it. Had a US automaker come out with this announcement, they would have be destroyed for being so far behind. Over and over again the media gives the Japanese and Europeans credit for technologies/strategies that have been in place for years. While they do bring a great deal of new technology to the table, no one gives US automakers credit for their contributions. For example, those of you BMW drivers (me included), your transmissions are most likely GM hydra-matics (http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=21160 ). BMW also has widely used Chrysler developed engines in the past (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritec_engine). Mercedes drivers might be interested to learn that Mercedes does not even have an engine software department. Nearly 100% of this task is outsourced to Bosch, who supplies the same software to numerous other auto manufacturers (as well as the electronics to go with it). This trend of sharing and partnerships is present all throughout the industry and the framework for interchangeably sharing software has existed for years. In short there is really no technology gap from one auto manufacturer to the next (the exception being hybrid development at Toyota and fuel cells at GM). Everyone is buying the same systems from the same suppliers. The quality difference comes from US executives looking to increase the per vehicle margin by saving 5 cents here and 10 cents there at the cost of long term quality. In fact most of you would be interested to know that your 2007 Toyotas have powertrain electronics technology dating back to 1997. This is not a bad thing as it leads to high reliability, but don't be fooled into thinking that something is high tech just because it is Japanese. The bottom line is that whether its BMW, Toyota, GM, Ford, etc...most vehicles share many of the same parts and it's the cost reduction mindset of US executives that leads to the quality differentiation.

Real-time, also.

[SanityInAnarchy]

You can't even compare it to embedded Linux -- which is generally rock-solid and capable of running in almost anything -- because Linux is not real-time. (Neither is Windows or OS X or BSD, by the way.)

I mean, sure, there are plenty of so-called "real-time" applications that these OSes work perfectly well for. Audio, for instance -- Protools, Ardour, etc. But it's a bit like Java -- while on average, you know how long something is going to take to process, you don't have any guarantees. (In Java's case, the garbage collector might decide to run at exactly the moment you need something important to happen.)

"real-time" means that you can actually guarantee, often with mathematical proofs, that a given thing will happen by a given deadline, and usually the deadlines are much shorter than anything a modern desktop OS can handle. It means you can say things like "If the sensor reads foo, I need a shutdown command sent to the nuclear reactor within 20 milliseconds." Done properly, you can actually guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that this will happen -- and in 20 milliseconds, not 21. On a desktop OS, there's just no guarantee -- for all you know, a filesystem driver, of all things, could lock the whole IO system up for half a second.

That's not to say that you can't make Linux realtime -- there are projects to do so. It's also not to say that you can't build a desktop out of a realtime OS. But right now, as far as I know, there are no real-time OSes which are used for anything other than embedded apps which actually need the real-time capability.

Re:Yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Japanese. Ooh, you've been to Japan! Just because someone who guesses at how an English word is spelled doesn't mean that they pronounce it the same way.

Re:Yeah?

[Oranse]

Obviously not, the summary says "to power Windows."