> Google Automotive Services (GAS) is a collection of applications and services that automotive OEMs can choose to license and integrate into their in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. For details and access to latest version of GAS applications, reach out to your Google point of contact.
Perhaps a simpler approach would be to have standard ports and telemetry protocols on the infotainment system so that your old one could be replaced by a newer one a couple years down the (no pun intended) road. Even though a lot of infotainment systems these days run in VMs inside consolidated hardware, worst case scenario would be adding another box between the beefy compute box and the infotainment interface cables.
Kind of what we did with car stereos before they merged with the dash, but without any built-in human physical interface.
Could even be a secondary source of revenue for Volkswagen.
A lot of debate can be made about if 15 years is appropriate etc but this stated support period is a big improvement on the status quo and puts the ball in the court of other manufacturers to make similar commitments.
That is the usual support period for cars in Germany I'm aware of, and it includes, or should include everything. On the hardware side the awareness is there for much longer, but when it comes to the increasingly more complex software stacks -- especially in the central hub -- I wouldn't put a bet on proper support for this amount of time. Keep in mind we are talking Android here, other companies might use Linux, plus there is increasing pressure to do virtualization (i.e. dashboard + "infotainment" are effectively run on the same piece of hardware). Cars are getting more and more connected, which opens them up to all kinds of problems, which then requires security fixes and updates all along the way, which in turn means you have to provide organization + technical infrastructure for this amount of time (and pay for that, too). So this announcement, while it sounds "lightweight", is actually pretty heavy handed once you think about the consequences.
I'm not talking about the software support mentioned in this story. But 15 years is not good enough VW. The life of a vehicle is and should be more than 15 years. We need to think sustainably and move to platforms that supoort longer term life's. This wastefulness had got to stop and hardly anyone is doing anything about it. Everyone is waiting for someone else or the government to do something. No one really bloody cares.
My cars are around 25 and 40 years old. Calling 15 years a "lifetime" is a complete and utter joke, but I will be glad to contribute to the punchline: I now know to never buy one of their new vehicles. I wish that was the universal consequence of showing this kind of flagrant contempt for your customers, but I know that most consumers don't think about these kinds of issues
I disagree, it is factually true for a very high percentage of cars. I'm still searching for stats, but (unfortunately) I estimate that over 90% of cars are destroyed before 15 years.
But we're not talking talking about some niche, low-level, closed source OS, written exclusively for tiny footprint mobile devices with 200MHz CPUs and 256KB of RAM, like Symbian was, we're talking about a non-niche OS that has a sane and popular base (the Linux kernel) that's well documented, has an abundance of devs with experience, and quality tooling, running on powerful modern hardware. I'm sure it's possible to update it for 15 years.
The difference between developing for Symbian and developing for Android/Linux is not even night and day, but night on Earth and day on Saturn.
Microsoft updated Window XP for 12 whole years, and even longer for paying customers like governments and military. I'm sure they can do 15 years on Android Automotive.
https://source.android.com/docs/devices/automotive/start/wha...