Comment by uticus
8 hours ago
> Turns out that actual cars don’t have individual cables. Instead they have these big “looms”, which bundle many cables from a nearby area into a single harness. This is the reason why I could not find the individual cable earlier. They simply don’t manufacture it.
Typical setup for cars (and lawn mowers). As a software guy my first instinct is, computing power is cheap enough, seems like a CAT5-like thing running between all components would do it. Speaking as a software guy - meaning I'm probably missing a lot of the big picture. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to safety-check a mechanical lockout that physically opens a circuit, than something running on software.
I read somewhere that the reason they don't typically use IT networking cables / tech is because normal IT infrastructure is a lot less strict with things like packet loss. It's actually not a huge deal to drop packets here and there, especially if any given component is at capacity. But in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all.
That said, I'm sure there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper. And I think they did something like that with CyberTruck.
> ...in a car, some devices are super chatty and you can't be dropping packets much at all....there's gotta be a better way to solve it with less copper.
I know CAN is a thing for a while now, and in the aviation world they have ethernet-derived standards like AFDX etc. But for some reason cables abound.
Meh, even in the IT industry cables abound.
Cars are moving towards something like that, mostly because copper is expensive and there are miles and miles of it in even a basic car these days