A lot of people in car forums are super upset about this and angry with their specific automaker. But of course, it is happening to all of them that haven't moved off of 3G.
A few years back I got a handful of letters about getting my Nissan LEAF's radio updated from 2g to 3g. They wanted to charge me $200 USD for it. I didn't bother and it's ended up resulting in very little change for me - Mostly features I didn't really use.
It's nice to know what just a few years later I'd be facing the same problem again.
In the Leaf's case, anyone with your VIN (ie anyone who can walk up to you car and look through the windshield) could turn on your car's AC over the internet and run the battery down. Whoops.
I've been told that on my Subaru, if I subscribe to the services that need it, they will do the upgrade for free. But if I don't subscribe, they won't do it at all. I'm fine with that, I am unreasonably against subscriptions, lol.
This reminds me of all the 90s luxury cars with analog cellular phones integrated into the center consoles quickly becoming useless in the 2000s. Except worse considering how much these systems are integrated into some cars.
Not to be dumb - but I don't want my car to have cellular connectivity, so this opens up more car purchase options for me once 3G goes dark. Granted, that's a tiny influx of new customers, but still, there's at least 1 new customer as result of their decision to still use 3G.
In the EU new cars now are mandated to have an automatic way to call the emergency services after a crash, I wonder if the governments have a clause about what would happen if 3G is turned off (I guess they're not planning to do that for a while yet).
If I were in power and I genuinely cared about saving the planet, I'd figure out how to make cars without this auto-emergency-dial system more expensive to insure; that way, people would look at newer cars more favorabily, and I'd incentivize electric cars as well. But hey, luckily the car lobby is still pretty strong in the France and Germany!
Why use such an indirect and backwards method? If you were in power, you could just tax non-green cars, rather than promote cars that become useless in 5 years when technology moves on.
It's a balance between doing what you want and screwing people hard enough to get voted out or violently deposed (transition mechanism depends on the system of government in question).
Sure, but second point is that it's dumb to assume "smart" or "connected" cars are more green. If they are being obsoleted much faster than "dumb" cars, then whether or not they are electric makes little difference in the grand scheme of things.
3G has been mainstream in the US since the mid 2000s. Granted it depends on when you purchase your car, but getting almost 20 years out of the technology is pretty good. Most cars will be scrap after that long. I'm not sure where you came up with 5 years.
Did you miss that cars are still being made that are 3g-only? And I’d be willing to bet that cars didn’t have 3g modems until long after 3g was first available.
> At least in vehicle infotainment systems, we test 911 functionality EXTENSIVELY. It's a major part of call testing, because dialing 911 overrides all sorts of lockouts and exercises code paths that aren't otherwise well-covered by testing.
When I worked at Motorola doing mobile infrastructure, you couldn't even merge your code into a release candidate branch unless it was tested against emergency calls, for all the reasons you listed (plus more).
We used giant attenuators screwed on to the antenna plugs because everything had to be running at full power to ensure that it was as life-like as possible. Every once in a while, though, someone didn't screw the attenuator on tight enough and the emergency call would be picked up on the real mobile network and the fire department would show up in our parking lot.
That reminds me of a visit to the Berlin Zoo about 15 years ago. Some teenagers were harassing a leopard. Once it had had enough, it projectile-peed through the bars, right on to them.
The author seems to know about submarines, so let's give him (?) the benefit of the doubt... But without knowing the cause of the accident, the author is calling for a specific change. This seems problematic. Perhaps there is a very good reason that the computer system performs like this.
Also, if you have the computer checking everything, then those 5 people that are supposed to be redundantly computing the navigation plan are highly likely to be less diligent. Human nature and all. Isn't that likely to result in a worse outcome?
> Also, if you have the computer checking everything, then those 5 people that are supposed to be redundantly computing the navigation plan are highly likely to be less diligent. Human nature and all. Isn't that likely to result in a worse outcome?
I'm not sure I've even seen a situation in practice where an additional safety check made the situation worse. Those same people that shirk their duties and half-ass their job under the assumption the computer will just find the problems generally make a plethora of other mistakes if a computer isn't there to double check.
Computer verification of work, usually done by applying rules and heuristics, is useful and when done well, and roughly analogous to an additional human checker IMO. If policies and expectations are set right, it's a better outcome.
This may or may not follow for the initial calculation being done by computer and then checked by a human. Some of the competitiveness of people to make sure they do the job well and don't need fixes from a computer/human checker go right out the window and perhaps that does lead to complacency.
> Also, if you have the computer checking everything, then those 5 people that are supposed to be redundantly computing the navigation plan are highly likely to be less diligent.
This is surprisingly easy to fix. If the computer notices before the human, call that a failure. Say, if the computer spots terrain higher than the current depth within X radius (that wasn't intentionally planned for), that's a failure.
I assume the military already has a regime in place to handle "you dun goofed". You can string failsafes after goofed but before the wall.
> Those same people that shirk their duties and half-ass their job under the assumption the computer will just find the problems generally make a plethora of other mistakes if a computer isn't there to double check.
If they half-ass, but follow the computer fixes, maybe nobody knows they were half-assing. If they half-ass and other people fix it, their half-assing is known and remediations are available.
It's pretty easy to have the computer log and/or notify about failures. Presumably if a person is double checking and notices repeated failures, they would be expected to notify superiors that there's a problem somewhere. I'm not sure why we would assume the computer would do any less.
There is a specific reason for the system performing like that... a development process that lets somebody in a far off office choose software components for financial/political/office politics reasons, wires together separate programs doing each task that are developed separately with barely any integration testing until it's too damn late to fix anything, and a whole host of other "our team is going to do this part using X" bullshit that winds up with the overall system looking like somebody tried to use Legos in one part, Lincoln logs in another, pottery cast clay elsewhere, and has three different interconnection schemes because each level of bureaucracy involved mandated a different buzzword when it got to review things two to five years after the last level saw it.
At least, that's what it looked like when I saw it in '98. It doesn't sound like it's gotten any better.
>>>At least, that's what it looked like when I saw it in '98. It doesn't sound like it's gotten any better.
It's 10x worse now. Now there are half-a-dozen different browser-based apps that all do the same thing, and that's BEFORE you mention the AI data fusion initiatives people want to integrate.
Everything about this hilarious and terrifying. It's hilarious and terrifying that they couldn't drive a $3 billion nuclear submarine without crashing it. That the navigation software on the sub is so bad that there is a website about it describing how its navigation software takes "minutes" to zoom in and out of maps. That if the sub were to be equipped with smarter and smarter autopilot software, the humans operators would eventually forget how to pilot the sub themselves the way that commercial airline pilots keep forgetting how to fly.
> That if the sub were to be equipped with smarter and smarter autopilot software, the humans operators would eventually forget how to pilot the sub themselves the way that commercial airline pilots keep forgetting how to fly.
Well the lack of situational awareness with EFIS (glass cockpit) systems is a known issue. Pilots tend to 'switch off' because of the low workload and then when something goes wrong they're not aware of the situation because they haven't been following along.
This has contributed so some incidents such as the AF 447 crash where the pilots were basically unaware of the actual situation of the plane and flew it straight into the ground (well, sea).
I can understand the Navy wants its crews to be more involved for that reason (and perhaps also because the enemy might deliberately instill confusion by messing with navaids etc), but I think there should be at least a warning if you try to do something that's known to be stupid.
I think you're identifying one of the strongest argument against my claims. Automated, or computer assisted, reviews will only increase error rate because humans will assume that computers took care of it all.
You're probably on to something. When radar was first rolled out to all Navy ships to assist navigation (post WWII), accident rates actually increased.
My hunch is that Sailors drove ships riskier thinking that radar would save them. A bit like the findings of seat-belt safety laws: no impact on fatalities.
But I'm not agitating for full-blown computer reviews. It just feels like the software should have the computing capabilities of Excel lol
It's a tradeoff. Trusting computers too much gets you into trouble (loss of navigation skills, over reliance on a potentially faulty system), but having to do things manually and depending on discipline also doesn't scale. You need to maintain enough discipline (validate the computer's results) but still have a better source than "Well, myself and three others looked at this chart for an hour and couldn't find anything above 350FT".
Discipline works until time pressure causes discipline to relax, and then the loosened discipline becomes the norm (normalization of deviance). There is no reliable way to restore discipline (in a timely fashion) after that happens, and then a collision would become inevitable. If you only rely on discipline, you're bound to fail. If you have means of relieving the reliance on discipline and don't use them, you're making a tragic mistake.
Fair enough. Perhaps something like doing checks after the plans have been manually computed, and then errors/warnings are flagged and used for evaluations and training. But then again, how is the culture of the Navy? Would such data be used exclusively to punish people?
It's been years since I read Eisenhower's biography, but my recollection is that within the military a lot of the aid to Russia was seen as a terrible idea and many felt that the British tricked the US into giving that aid in a secret three-way meeting in North Africa.
Nope, incorrect. Lend Lease was criticized that it wasn't really lending gear, since there was a high expectation that it wasn't coming back.
I don't know of any large scale thoughts that Britain tricked the US into entering initial aid attempts. The US was heavily into anti Axis attempts early in the war.
They don't have old equipment they can use? Is it stuck on a boat or something?
I ordered a snowmaking machine from a place in Connecticut this summer and got it a few weeks later, right on time. Once the humidity drops enough to make some snow, I'll have a nice sledding hill in the back yard. Can't wait!
I have an Audi - the button to turn it off and on is at the tip of the turn signal stalk. You can toggle it with your pinky without removing your hands from the steering wheel or eyes from the road.
I also have a Subaru - turning it off or on requires three levels of menu navigation, and you have to use the center console touch screen.
I suppose they do their testing and validation in drastically different environments!
https://www.toyota.com/audio-multimedia/support/3g-faq/
https://lexus2.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10537/~/...
https://www.subaru.com/3g-network-retirement.html?SIE=9ad00c...
Etc. https://autobala.com/how-3g-shutdown-in-2022-will-ruin-your-...
Amazing that Honda have current cars affected.