Demand for the angular electric pickup has continued to falter in the first quarter, making room for a new king.
The Tesla Cybertruck has lost the top spot on the list of best-selling electric pickup trucks in the United States. After finishing 2024 as a best-seller, Tesla’s only pickup has fallen to second place in the first quarter of this year.
After the first three months, the Cybertruck had amassed 7,126 registrations. The Ford F-150 Lightning overtook it with 7,913 registrations, according to the most recent data from S&P Global Mobility. The Chevrolet Silverado EV finished the first quarter in third place, followed by the GMC Sierra EV, Rivian R1T and GMC Hummer EV.
You could run basic brushless motor and BMC firmware on a 99 cent 8 bit Atmel ATMega 328. That code requires almost nothing to run. It’s all the extra shit baked in that needs all sorts of processing power.
I also want a basic barebones infotainment-delete vehicle that just has power windows,locks,AC, cruise, and 4x4/awd. I don’t want some proprietary gps system or a dashboard where I have to hit 3 menu buttons on a screen I have to look at, just to change a setting (how my wife’s car operates and it’s a complete shit user experience).
Going a step further, one could, with a bit of difficulty, build the logic out of discrete parts (or packaged ICs) and have it simply work as an electromechanical device. Like things in cars used to.
Complexity and propriety make for good income when it comes to fixing your broken fancy stuff; there’s a good incentive to keep it that way. I praise the companies that make long lasting, well designed, and serviceable goods.
So what you’re saying is, there’s software.
Technically it’s not software, it’s firmware, because it’s a microcontroller that runs code directly.
To my point, you don’t need all the fancy bullshit that’s baked into the car, the actual control systems require very little compute power.
Firmware is just software. I’ve done this stuff, it’s all just software.
When it comes to writing code, perhaps. But specifically, I disagree on principle. There’s a big difference between Firmware embedded directly into ROM that requires nothing beyond the MCU to run, versus Software that requires both a host environment to compute it, host hardware to store and manipulate it, and IO peripherals to make it useful. Totally opposite ends of the OSI model.
All that comes down to abstraction. Lots of stuff has been implemented in bare metal without making the distinction. Every DOS program was almost entirely bare metal except for loading it into memory and some disk I/O.
Firmware is just a subtype of software.
ROM doesn’t really exist anymore except on some legacy stuff. Certainly not on the ATmega series you were talking about. At most, these things have fuses that can be intentionally burned out after flashing so they can’t be overwitten later.
Huh, That’s weird, the last time I checked, the 328P had 1024b of EEPROM.