Let's put the car in your phone!

Today high-end cars have extremely complex E/E architectures -- with 50--100 electronic control units (ECUs), connected by communication buses like CAN, FlexRay and Ethernet. They are used to run several (control) applications with many million lines of code. We propose a radically new architecture where all these applications are instead run on a mobile phone being carried by the driver. The car now has a considerably simpler architecture with few or no ECUs, using RF links to connect sensors and actuators to the mobile phone with a powerful multicore processor. We discuss the advantages and challenges and describe a small prototype implementation with an adaptive cruise control application.