Bedevilled by bugs on the road
By James Mackintosh
Published: June 16 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: June 16 2004 5:00
Easing into the soft leather of the £46,000 BMW 7-Series saloon's driving seat, there was not much to link it to the £13,000 Citroën Xsara Picasso. The practical plastic of the French family car cannot be compared to the expensive, wood-and-metal dashboard of the BMW, which has an engine almost twice as powerful.
But after just 10 minutes of driving the BMW's large screen began to flash with a red warning sign and it rapidly became clear that the two cars share a common problem: their electronics, or at least the software that controls them. Both, despite being brand new, failed within a few hours of being delivered for a test drive.
Neither difficulty was life-threatening - the Citroën's digital speedometer stuck at motorway speed even when the car was at a standstill, while the BMW's electronic suspension control packed up. But they show the trouble car companies, more used to fixing mechanical glitches, are having in getting to grips with software.
Thierry Morin, chairman and chief executive of Valeo, the parts supplier, says: "The electronics in the car bring six or seven times more faults than normal mechanical parts.
"You have something native in electronics: it is called a bug. The more pure electronic content that is in a car the more bugs there will be."
The problems have been most noticeable in the luxury cars that were the first to adopt complex electronics. Software controls are now used for everything from tuning the radio to controlling the fuel injection; and new technologies such as assisted parking and emergency braking also rely on advanced computing.
There is a clear danger to the brand image of luxury cars from their failure to cope with the change from mechanics to "mechatronics", the overlap between mechanics and electronics. Mercedes-Benz has already suffered a serious blow to its reputation for reliability after difficulties with its electronics caused an unusually high number of breakdowns, and other manufacturers are struggling to fix software bugs.
Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive of Volkswagen, says: "If you have a problem with your Volkswagen the likelihood that it was a software problem is very high. Software technology is not something that we as car manufacturers feel comfortable with."
The problem is threefold. First, the technology has not yet settled down. Manufacturers have had more than 100 years to get engines running smoothly, but only a few years to get to grips with the rapid growth of electronics in the car.
DaimlerChrysler, owner of Mercedes, estimates that in the past 35 years the software in a car has risen from an easily manageable 100 lines of code to 1m, and could hit 100m by 2010.
Second, carmakers failed to build up expertise in electronics and software development. The "car guys" in charge - many, including Mr Pischetsrieder, trained in mechanical engineering - overlooked the differences between software development, which typically takes less than 18 months from concept to launch, and vehicle development, which takes at least four years.
The supplier of each component was expected to build in the appropriate software, while an external system integrator typically had the job of ensuring they all worked correctly together.
Third, probably as a result of their lack of expertise, the carmakers allowed the networks linking the separate components to get too complex, making them impossible to test properly.
Harbans Dass, European sales and marketing director for the automotive division of Motorola, says this proliferation of different systems for different functions causes the biggest difficulties.
"The problems arose because when we connected all these systems together they were very complicated - as complicated as an aircraft," he says.
He calculates that a BMW 5-Series saloon has 500m permutations in the entertainment and information unit alone, making it impossible to test each combination. The 7-Series, which probably has more electronics than any car on the market, comes with 78 electronic control units, or computers - meaning it has to have a highly complex network to allow them to communicate.
The effect has been to bring to life the long-standing joke about the fight between General Motors and Microsoft. The tale is that Bill Gates compared the development speed of the computer industry to carmaking, saying: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." GM's response: "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?" The situation is not this bad, but drivers who find they have to reboot their satellite navigation or speedometer may well compare the reliability with Microsoft's Windows.
Michael Ganal, board member in charge of sales and marketing at BMW, says there is another problem for carmakers: as electronics and software become more important, suppliers control more of the vehicle.
"Ten years ago you bought ABS [brakes] and then you bought fuel injection and ended up with electronic islands in the car," he says. "Then you entered into system integration and you discovered that you did not control your car any more."
In an attempt to deal with all the issues, the manufacturers are frantically recruiting software engineers and banding together to create common standards.
BMW last year took on 300 new people in research and development, and this year is aiming to take on up to 500, mainly electronic and electrical engineers. It has also set up a new division, Car IT, to look at the future of computing in cars, and Mr Ganal accepts that improving control over electronics is "for BMW one of the most challenging tasks".
Mercedes, BMW's arch-rival, has adopted a more cautious approach to development to improve the dependability of its cars.
Hans-Joachim Schöpf, executive vice-president of development and engineering at Mercedes, says the company has stopped software development on new models earlier, to give more time for testing. "In the past the higher [electronic] content led to more breakdowns," he says. "But now we do have the means and the measures within our plans to prevent that."
The carmakers are also banding together to set standards for motor industry software, with the German manufacturers, since joined by Ford, PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota, setting up AutoSAR. They hope that standard software platforms will allow them to focus resources on reliability.
According to AutoSAR, "contemporary automotive electronic and electrical architecture has reached a level of complexity which requires a technological breakthrough in order to manage it satisfactorily and fulfil the heightened passenger and legal requirements."
Even before that breakthrough, there are already signs of progress. Mercedes improved dramatically in this year's benchmark study of quality in the US, carried out by J.D. Power, the consultants. It found that after 90 days of ownership the number of problems per 100 cars dropped from a high of 132 last year to 106 this year, moving the brand back into the top 10 for reliability.
Mr Dass - who estimates that 65 per cent of development effort now goes into software - says software has improved "immensely" over the past two years.
There is some evidence for this: electrical problems are the single biggest cause of complaint among drivers of five-year old cars surveyed by Consumer Reports, the US consumer group, but only the third-biggest for six-month old vehicles. But carmakers should not take comfort from this changeover; when the failures of electronic gadgets such as power sunroofs and CD players are added to the electrical problems, they remain by far the main source of complaint.
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