Drive by Ethernet?

I read last week that BMW has been researching the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) over standard Ethernet (Cisco) to network automotive controllers (‘BMW brings Internet protocol under the hood’, EETimes).

The motivation for the research is that at present, a number of different networking technologies (including CAN, LIN, MOST and FlexRay)
are used in automotive applications, and these are optimized for
different types of application, but the lack of standardization results
in complexity and cost.

So, I was expecting the article to say that BMW had found Ethernet
to be suitable for non-critical applications, but not well-suited to
critical systems.

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