dcmdon
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- Don
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So to take your analogy one step further, lets say you had a laptop that was continually pinging some resource on the network trying to connect. If it didn't eventually stop it would run its battery down.A few years ago when I was not real happy with where I was working (lots of agency politics) a friend know of my automotive experience - and my network experience, including firewalls, routers, servers, fiber optics and more. He suggested I'd fit right in as a Mercedes tech. He figured it would be an almost sideways move in a way.
Security is one reason -
getting to the thing you want to talk to and not have other things respond is another. Maybe Dave can correct me, but I view it a bit like ports on a network. If you want to talk to a VPN server you hit that server's IP address - but that IP address may be shared with other services, so you hit it with these posts and protocols - IPSec — Ports 500 UDP and 4500 UDP, there's layer 2 tunneling protocol (L2TP), lots of fun stuff. A router on the edge is set up to direct any traffic coming in destined for that IP address using those protocols and ports to that server. They go no place else. If you have a Mickysoft network you can watch all of the communication going on with a sniffer and see what responds and what doesn't respond based on the traffic received or seen.
I could see some of this working like a VPN - tunneling through the network and encrypting the traffic being sent, decrypted by the other end because it has the encryption key that was set up establishing the connection.
It would seem to me that it would be easy to add logic that said if battery voltage is < X, then shut down the head unit and prevent it from trying to connect until battery voltage is > Y.
So again, I'm not saying electronics are fragile.
I'm saying that the way they are implemented in the Jeep (and possibly other modern cars) is fragile.
The double battery situation is another example. When the JL shipped if the aux battery was dead but the primary was fine, the truck wouldn't start. It was immobilized for no other reason than bad software design. Eventually a firmware update fixed that.
Software design has to anticipate component failure and include work arounds in the case of all anticipated failures.
If A fails we run at full capacity but show a "Service vehicle now" indicator.
If B fails we go into limp mode.
If C fails we shut the whole thing down.
If D fails we go into limp but don't allow a restart.
Its not the hardware. It seems to be shitty software that causes this fragility.
I don't claim to even begin to understand the interdependencies between systems on modern cars. But it would seem that with good system design and good software, a modern car could be MORE robust than an older car simply because there are redundant sensors or secondary ways to derive the same values.
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