Complex car electronics spark rise in breakdowns.

ontonixqcm

May 1

A recent march, 2024 article speaks of how:

"figures show that increasingly complicated electronics in cars have prompted a surge in expensive breakdowns."

And yet car manufacturers seem to ignore the fundemantal fact that high complexity is a path to guaranteed vulnerability and are constantly dreaming up increasingly complex and ambitious features that will only make matters worse. While pursuing progress in itself is not a sin, doing so without keeping an eye on how complex your products are becoming certainly is. This is because one is pushing the cost of one's inability to manage complexity on the shoulders of the customers, who, in turn, are forced to debug the products for their manufacturer. The loss in reputational terms can be immense and impossible to recover.

Complexity is physical characteristic of all systems - natural and manmade - meaning it can be measured and managed. Complexity is not a magical, intangible quantity. It is not about counting the parts. It is an attribute of a given system, as important as energy, and is deeply rooted in physics.

Today, it is possible to design things to be less complex without sacrificing performance

The technological bubble we are witnessing in the car industry today is reminiscent of other bubbles - just think of the 2008 housing market bubble. Yes, that was of a totally different nature, but if you study bubbles and their dynamics - as Ontonix does - you find out that they all share one common characteristic. Before they blow up, their complexity grows very quickly. In the 2008 crash, highly complex structured financial products have been introduced into the market. Two things happened. First of all, these products injected new dynamics and new interdependencies into the markets. Nobody understood the consequences. Second, Credit Rating Agencies had no experience in rating the riskiness of such complex and novel products, providing excessively optimistic verdicts as to their resilience to the market. The rest is history.

As for car manufacturers, they are pumping complexity into their products, thinking it can be done with impunity. However, Nature offers no free lunch. What this means is that complexity cannot grow indefinitely. Every system (product) has its own so-called critical complexity. The system is saturated with complexity and cannot take more. And,

close to critical complexity, any system becomes fragile, unpredictable, and able to deliver countless surprises in the form of failure modes one cannot even imagine

J. Gall's Laws of Systemantics describe the situation in a not so scientific manner but certainly every good engineer can confirm them to be true:

Le Chatelier's Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow in complexity, they tend to oppose their stated function.
A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it doesn't.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.): In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.
The Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem (F.F.T.): Complex systems usually operate in failure mode.
A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways.
The larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure.
As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions.
Colossal systems foster colossal errors.

There is no cure for high complexity but there is an antidote, a sort of insurance policy. It is called Quantitative Complexity Management. www.ontonix.com