Aftermarket considerations

I would like us to give some more and explicit thought to aftermarket
considerations for Gen2 and underlying VSS. Before raising an issue
figured we can talk about it more, we did touch on it at the F2F but
should go further.

VSS is extensible so there is already some consideration but we are not
doing much to address pushing additional signals up to the Gen2 service
in the vehicle for any custom control units or sensors added to the
vehicle.

Not a straight forward topic as on one hand there is the question about
whether an OEM would even want to support this. They may rather a car's
control units stay the same. CAN et al should be replaced at some point
with signed messages if not an encrypted network instead of open
broadcast which would make it more difficult to allow for aftermarket
devices. Along those lines I could see why from a security perspective
why an OEM would be hesitant to support aftermarket in vehicle networks
or expose to applications in a Gen2 service. 

On the other hand in North America at least there is 'right to repair'
laws that allow people to modify their vehicles. W3C has a strong
accessibility activity, the Web Accessibility Initiative. We had some
join us in the past as they are excited about the advances in
transportation. Having been in accessibility equipped vehicles on
several occasions, they are generally highly customized - aftermarket.
Besides any pertinent legislation like possibly the Americans
Disability Act (ADA), we should also consider the trend to usage based
models instead of individual ownership. Vehicles will have different
capabilities for different demographics and those will in many cases be
aftermarket customization.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/

There are also simpler aftermarket use cases such as tire replacement.
Tire pressure monitoring systems (tpms) was a simple start but tire
manufacturers are now working on additional sensors, in many cases
tuned to be brand specific being able to do various things such as read
vibrations. The raw data could be analyzed in-vehicle via Gen2 and used
to determine if for instance a tire is imbalanced, out of alignment (if
not used instruct the car to auto-tune), wearing unevenly and due for
rotation or reaching its wear marker. Those cheap little tpms are
likely to be replaced and paired with tires as they are installed.

VSS extensibility including at leaf level that we heard about will help
but we need to think about it in Gen2 as well. This could be related to
service discovery.

Gen2 is meant to support other things besides vehicle signals such as
notifications and media. For media there will obviously be changes to
media services and libraries over time.

-- 
Ted Guild <ted@w3.org>
W3C Automotive Lead
http://www.w3.org