I was reading over on DevTopic today about how 100 Million Lines of Code is pretty common in cars today. We have come a really long way since 1977 when the first micro-chip was introduced in to the Oldsmobile Toronado, but what I really want to share with you guys is what I found at the end of the post. I laughed out loud, when I read this because believe it or not this is starting to happen in cars and it has nothing to do with Microsoft. Just the ever growing source code base that runs modern cars, and the ever growing chance for one of those lines to have a bug it in.
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
- For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
- Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
- Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
- Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
- Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but would run on only five percent of the roads.
- The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
- The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
- Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
- Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
- You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
Believe it or not #1 from above is happening to a friend of mine on his 5 Series BMW. And well we are all accepting #10 as a great feature on new cars. In fact my new 2009 Acura TL, that I just bought, has a button like the one pictured below.
Isn't it ironic how we laughed at these 10 statments a number of years ago?