I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase.
Its wild to me that any car manufacturer would push an OTA update while the vehicle is in motion, or hell, even push one at all instead of having it be user initiated. They didn’t bother to put a simple check in place to make sure the vehicle wasn’t being driven before updating?
And then these manufacturers wonder why people just want them to have a dumb head unit with carplay/android auto. Because they absolutely suck at software and have shown no desire to improve outside of charging people subscriptions for hardware features that are already in the car.
It's impossible on my Tesla. You get a notice to install and a warning that you won't be able to drive for up to 45 minutes. You cannot click install unless the car is in park. You can always decide never to install an update.
This isn't exceptional design on the part of Tesla. It is absolutely baseline common sense. I can't believe it isn't the defacto rule. I guess it might need to be regulated because apparently some companies are THAT untrustworthy.
The Cybertruck is basically the only vehicle with true steer by wire. Infiniti offered cars for a brief time which had clutched steering columns (a truly baffling worst of all worlds solution). Otherwise what people mean is electrical power steering, where a power-off failure means you need to turn the wheel harder (a power-on failure can be very bad and there are a lot of safety systems to limit applied torque so a driver can always override the input).
If your CyberTruck is airborne something went very wrong.
One isn't the same as the other - the regulatory regime/testing and redundancies on a plane are completely different to a car and not inconsequentially the person operating the plane is rather better trained on what to do when things go "oopsie" than the person loose behind the wheel of the average car.
Also aircraft are serviced in a way far beyond what cars are.
I think most recently developed large commercial passenger aircraft are completely fly by wire with most controls lacking any physically interlinked backup.
Hopefully I am not too naive, but I think aircraft safety redundancy remains above retail car standards. Also, in aircraft they "have time to solve some problems", versus freeway bumper cars.
More to the point, FAS regulations would absolutely forbid any such event. They probably mandate testing of the updates before returning to airplane to service.
In service to the pun, there is a relatively famous demo of using erlang for embedded development where they show off hot code reloading of a drone's flight software while it's in flight.
Also people say "oh what if fly-by-wire fails" well what if traditional hydraulic controls fail, which has happened plenty in the history of commercial aviation
Everything can and will fail at some point
No redundancy is redundancy enough in some %0.xx of cases. You can always reduce the number, but never make it 0
I work for a medical device manufacturer, and software absolutely can be designed to be just as reliable as physical systems, but the development and testing process looks completely different than a developing a mobile app. Things slow WAY down: if you want to change one line of code, it'll take literally weeks before it makes it to a production environment because of all the testing, documentation, justification, and human approvals. I imagine flight safety systems are subject to a similar level of rigor.
"Richard Hipp: Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android.
"Richard Hipp: Yes, so we’ll do billions of tests."
Large planes are all fly by wire. In a commercial airplane, you're talking about moving maybe a quarter-ton of metal for the rudder alone, and against high wind speeds. There is no way to move those without powerful servo motors.
The (as of a this year) second-most popular airliner, the Boeing 737, has fully mechanical controls for the ailerons and elevator (with hydraulic boosting). Elevator trim is also mechanical.
The pilot needs to be built like a gorilla to fly it, but primary flight controls continue work, even with a total failure of all electrical and hydraulic systems.
I'm still stunned by Captain Haynes's grace under pressure:
Sioux City Approach: "United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway."
Haynes: "[laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"
"The contamination caused what is known as a hard alpha inclusion, where a contaminant particle in a metal alloy causes the metal around it to become brittle. The brittle titanium around the impurity then cracked during forging and fell out during final machining, leaving a cavity with microscopic cracks at the edges. For the next 18 years, the crack grew slightly each time the engine was powered up and brought to operating temperature. Eventually, the crack broke open, causing the disk to fail."
The cybertruck steer by wire IIRC has dual redundant everything including power supplies (the redundant one is powered by a DC-DC converter from the HV battery)
Multi-version approaches to developing software aren't as good at reducing common-mode failures as many people expect[1].
[1] J. C. Knight and N. G. Leveson, “An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming,” IIEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. SE-12, no. 1, pp. 96–109, Jan. 1986, doi: 10.1109/TSE.1986.6312924.
All the electrical steering columns designs I've seen have used redundant sensors (often groups of them) specifically for that reason. The physical steering wheel to the shaft is still a SPOF, but it's also a "dumb" part where the only failure cases are mechanical. Eliminating failures there is straightforward engineering.
Yeah, I should have spent an extra 10 seconds thinking of the problem here and I'd have realised you can have multiple sensors going to different software on one steering column...
> I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase.
Indeed, the risk is far too large to ignore.
I will never own a car that has steer-by-wire or braking-by-wire. Those are two controls that absolutely must have a mechanical linkage that cannot be altered by software. Other things I can handle, but if all goes haywire, I must be able to steer and brake.
You might need to stop dealing with cars made recently then. While steer-by-wire isn't so common, the number of cars with entirely digital drive-by-wire throttles would likely bother you.
Honda: "all Honda models use Drive-by-Wire technology" (for the accelerator pedal).
While throttle/acceleration isn't steering, if you're uncomfortable with the underlying concept of a potentiometer and a microcontroller and a small motor on the other end being used to control a vehicle and consider it unproven technology, then you'd need to avoid most new cars in order to be logically consistent.
Well, at some point you won't have a choice. The government is going to ban ICE vehicles, tax the existing ones, and all the electrics will be everything by wire.
I for one cannot wait for my nuclear powered steering mechanism. The reactor is of course used to generate steam pressure to actuate the steering arms, the car is powered by normal batteries.
Not steer-by-"wire" exactly but in the 1970s and 1980s Citroën had cars with "DIRAVI" steering. In normal operation there was no direct mechanical link between the steering wheel and road wheels. The whole thing was a big hydraulic servo, with "resistance" applied to the steering wheel using a heart-shaped cam, a big spring, and a small hydraulic piston that had progressively more pressure behind it based on road speed.
If you let the steering wheel go it would spring back to the middle even with the car at a standstill because of the resistance cam.
If it lost hydraulic pressure while you were driving there was still generally enough in the system to allow you to pull over safely, and you could drive for much longer distances if you could cope with about a quarter of a turn of "play" in the steering wheel. With no pressure at all, turning the steering wheel would move the shuttle valve in the steering controller until it bottomed out and then the linkage would just turn the pinion on the steering rack, which was normally used for servo feedback. Uncomfortable, but acceptable for "get off the road" situations.
The hydraulic system also worked the self-levelling suspension, the fully-powered braking system (similar to the WABCO systems on a lot of more modern vehicles), and on some manual gearbox models the clutch.
Not really "drive by wire", because it's not electronic, but it really is a system where the steering rack could be fully decoupled from the steering wheel.
You are being downvoted and the replies so far aren't helping you understand why your statement is very wrong.
"Steer by wire" means there is nothing but copper signal wires between your steering wheel and the front wheels. Your steering wheel is essentially a video game controller.
This has nothing to do with the car's mode of propulsion though, and both EVs and ICE cars can have steer by wire controls. So far, it's only the cybertruck that has this paradigm, all other EV's all have normal power steering.
For normal power steering systems there are two types: hydraulic and electric. Both types have a solid steel shaft between your steering wheel and the front wheels. You can remove the engine/motor completely, and you'll still be able to steer the car. The hydraulic or electric motor merely helps you turn the wheel, nothing more. Hydraulic is being phased out for electric in both EVs and ICE vehicles.
Steer shafts are being phased out. Electronic power steering has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Manufacturers want fully electric, fully autonomous cars. If the computer is driving the car 99% of the time, they'll argue that having a steering shaft is totally unnecessary.
For whatever reason, manufacturers aren't trying to make fully autonomous ICE vehicles.
Driving forces could be interpreted as wrong, but they’re probably correct about orders and outcome:
Step 1 is policy/goal for California [1].
Step 2 decades old policy in Europe (and recently canceled in Canada?), as vehicle carbon tax. There’s also EV tax credits of course, which are practically identical, from the purchasing perspective - “If I buy ice, I pay this much more in taxes”.
I’ve really enjoyed it on mine. Steer by wire enables progressive steering. Having to turn the wheel over and over in other cars to maneuver in parking lots seems laughably primitive now in comparison.
I think there are only a couple of cars that are steer-by-wire.
The Infinity Q50, QX50, QX55 and QX60 (with backup that connects upon electric failure).
Without backup, but triple redundancy, can be found in the Tesla Cybertruck. But I'd take that redundancy with a grain of salt as they don't have the best track record telling you the truth.
That said, I really with companies would go back to the good old hydraulic steering. I don't need self-parking. But self-parking needs at least electric steering (with our without steering column).
