The Best Thing That Can Happen to Electric Cars Is What Happened to 1990s PCs
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
Modern cars are incredibly sophisticated devices with many different computer systems running a lot of code. They all run real time OSes, which are quite distinct from an operating system like Windows. They have to do their functions correctly 100% of the time. Now cars are getting tons and tons of sensors. RADAR, LIDAR, visual cameras, etc., all running sophisticated algorithms.
There are massive safety reasons (not just to yourself, but to your fellow man) to not tinkering with these systems.
I know a lot of car guys lament that it's harder to work on a car today, but your average consumer is delighted by this. Cars are much more reliable today than they were before. Most people don't want the freedom to work on a car that constantly needs to be worked on because it is always breaking. They want something that is reliable and with minimal maintenance just works every single day.
Cars are also much safer, with much more robust safety technology. I'm a fan of Jalopnik, and I like to stay up on the latest in car technology, but my interest is from an average user standpoint.
Electric cars with self-driving technology is really exciting. I'm excited for this future. I'm going to support it. I don't need a car to tinker with for my everyday needs, nor do the vast majority of people. If I want a car to tinker with, I'll get a project car for track use.
Right. I restore antique Teletype machines from the 1930s and 1940s as a hobby. Those are totally maintainable. Everything is attached with screws and locknuts, and you can remove and replace any part. There's a 200 page manual of adjustments. They require annual oiling with over 500 oiling points. Most take one drop of oil, but there are several oil fill points. In heavy use, there's an annual cleaning, which involves partial disassembly and a soak in a cleaning bath in a repair shop. I've restored five of these machines to full operation. Some are almost a century old.
(Plug: some of those machines will be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose CA, tomorrow through Sunday.)
Imagine trying to sell a printer today that required regular oiling. That would not be acceptable, even if it increased the life of the printer by a factor of 5.
Teletype Corporation recognized this with the Teletype Model 33, the yellow plastic thing that powered 1970s minicomputers. Those were rated for one year of continuous operation un-oiled, three years if regularly oiled. Few people oiled them. They wore out much faster than the older heavy-duty machines. Today, it's easier to restore a Model 15 Teletype from 1930 than a Model 33 from 1970. The 33 will have worn out parts, some plastic. The Model 15 won't; it's all hardened steel and cast iron.
There are heavy trucks built that way, but cars? No.
>They burn approximately 200-300 litres of oil a week and have a capacity of about 1200 ltrs in the sump. Main oil filters are done every 20,000 hours or sooner if the differential pressure across them increases above 1 bar but there is no oil change schedule for them. Each engine is 33 years old and all have between 92,000 and 98,000 running hours.
>The warranty will be indefinite as long as you stick to the maintenance schedule. It's not like a car engine, almost every part with the exception of the crankshaft, entablature, bedplate and general items like pipework etc have all been replaced at some point according to the maintenance plan. Pistons are changed out every 40k hours, bearings, heads, liners etc all have their own lifetime too.
I get the impression that this kind of deal comes up pretty often too. If that kind of price can be achieved reliably, it does make more sense to just buy new printers (until you have 3). Apparently, they remember the IDs of 2 previous cartridges. With a third cartridge, you can refill the old ones and reuse them.
A tedious task can easily be therapeutic if you go in with a "beginner's mind". It's kind of meditative, being present in the moment through the whole task.
While that is true, PC's were very sophisticated back in the day also. We're at a different level of sofistication currently, but I feel like that sophistication can be abstracted away. After all, currently you plug a GPU card, an incredibly sofisticated piece of technology in your PC, and it mostly just works. Why sould it not be the same for cars? I say this as someone currently writing firmware for cars and wondering why this does not happen. Mechanical complexity is one reason, but once that goes away, what's to stop us then? Maybe just the power of habbit.
If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people.
Standards tend to either work well with mature areas or in areas where people need to pool resources together either for money or legal reasons (see codec standards).
People tinker with ICE cars all the time, to the point of slotting full-size V8s in four-pot engine compartments. Componentisation makes standardisation possible, and control logic is generally done through fuzzy feedback loops, not hardcoded values, that's why I can swap whole brake lines, discs and pads and still have ABS/ESP work properly as long as I stay within reasonable tolerances. Also, I fail to see how swapping an electric engine with another would affect an entirely separate and purposefully isolated component such as LIDAR given proper design.
I see the point of Jalopnik here, there is an long run opportunity to be had, like we went from the C64/Apple II era to the modern Intel/AMD platform where you can pop in a GPU/sound card/screen/whatevs and have it just work in an instant because we standardised stuff and are provided with relevant information (such as TDP) allowing responsible tinkerers to do safe things. Hell we standardised stuff so much that external GPUs happens to be a thing basically out of thin air.
The very architecture of electric cars makes things such as upgrading the engine or battery pack a much more approachable affair that currently is, possibly even as easy as swapping alloys or tires, pending proper regulation (which could be much easier to achieve due to the tech's inherent simplicity compared to ICE engines and a proper standardisation effort, as well as certified compliance by entities like TÜV).
It's not that rare nowadays, but the idea of a 'dry' shop is not an industry standard, per se. There are better 1/4 odds (pulled out of my ass, I have no hard stats here, just 'experience') that the last guy that worked on your brakes was on some sort of drug that's a bit 'tougher' than Tylenol. Ok, not just your brakes, but the brakes of every other driver in the fleet have the same odds.
I mean, do what you want on your own time, fine. But it don't stop at the garage doors, not by a long shot. 'Crank' is called that because it was hidden in the crank shafts of the Hell's Angels, back in the day. Here's and article on trying to keep a 'dry' shop: http://www.bodyshopbusiness.com/illegal-substances-and-their... Note the date here, not 1990, but 2015.
Still, you don't hear of too many problems with the brakes.
If you, rightly, have a problem with this, then push for local politicians to require licensing for technicians. California has a voluntary program: the BAR. https://www.bar.ca.gov/Industry/Getting_Licensed.html . Most independent shops have been pushing for these to be requirements for decades, but the dealers and AAMCO type folks have stalled them forever too, not hard to figure out why.
> I say this as someone currently writing firmware for cars and wondering why this does not happen.
First of all, when it comes to self-driving technology (where GPU-like devices are being used today), "mostly" is nowhere near good enough.
Secondly, do you really expect drivers (the software kind, not the meat-sack kind) and hardware to have any better results in a car than in a PC? Imagine the future where you upgrade your car's processors, but the new drivers conflict with the drivers for your airbag sensors. So now you have to upgrade those drivers as well to wait for a path from NVidia.
Sorry, this sounds nice in theory, but I don't think it's workable at this level. Batteries and motor wiring? Maybe, but packaging restrictions would take away a lot of designers freedom to design...
A modern car is a series of different PC's connected by a CAN BUS. It's much easyer to standardise comm protocols and CAN messages than a whole PC stack. And yet, currently, there is no such common standard. I see no reason why CAN modules could not be plug&play.
There is a common SW stack standard, AUTOSAR, but it's, most of the time not firggin working or the implementation is incompatible with other implementations.
Auto industry SW is a shithole of inneficiency.
I don't think that this has really happened that much. More young professionals want to go live in the city but mostly they've displaced others, and there seems to be more suburban home-buying happening in that group.
Besides that, it's only a handful of American cities with really robust public transportation.
While I agree that it is not necessary for parts to connect to each other via standard mechanisms, I think the compatibility trend will increase over time. More and more parts will use standardized interfaces to each other, especially in terms of electronics, just to decrease costs.
(Although, I do not know how expensive PCs were back in the day)
"The computer you really want costs $5000."
1. Those are non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and
2. While Machrone's Law was a reasonably accurate observation, in the early days it was pretty easy to get to that number just by adding a 5MB hard drive to your IBM PC. By later in that stretch, you could still get up to $5K (and probably could today) but that's with configuring almost every state of the art option/add-on you can think of.
(If you put it together over the course of a year, buying reputable reliable parts on the best sales, it might be a $2500-$3000 machine, yes.)
Because it's easier that way and you don't really need to tinker.
Good luck with that, and it has nothing to do with safety since even safety can be standardized: there are no chances one can stick a HP cartridge into an Epson printer; cars are no different. The tap based economics we live in is based exactly on the opposite: find a potential source of revenue, then once you have got/patented/bought it, close it behind a faucet and start asking money to open it. Openness would destroy that practice, and the legal system in every "western" country fights to enforce this exact behaviour. Also, being called a communist after decades of well crafted negative propaganda doesn't help.
There's no market for that capability in cars. Some heavy trucks do have it; you can buy some heavy trucks and put in a Cummins or Caterpillar Diesel engine. But for smaller cars, it's not worth the headaches.
Powertrain switches are not impossible. A routine student exercise in serious automotive schools is to put an engine and transmission from one car into another car, making the necessary parts. Stanford and Renovo put an electric powertrain into a DeLorean and made it capable of autonomous drifting.[1]
Even in PCs, there's no market for that. 80% of desktop PCs are never opened during their operating life, and the fraction for laptops is probably lower.
This is true, but printers are among the most poorly standardized items of PC hardware. There is a very good chance that you can remove a motherboard, processor, RAM stick, hard drive, graphics card, power supply, fan, or case from one computer manufacturer and use it with another.
And while I agree that our economic system isn't helping in several ways, IBM PC standardization happened much closer in time to the red scare than anything EV related.
I hope legislators don't derail me.
I've seen a good amount of destroyed audio equipment resulting from the owner failing to do compatibility research beyond verifying that two components could be connected together. "What's an ohm? Do I need one of those?"
I've seen people get the most baffled faces from not being able to pass a high bandwidth signal through the hundreds of feet of hilariously thin uncertified HDMI cable that they just ran through their walls. "But the box said high speed!"
Interchangeable batteries in cars would mean that drivers are only one el cheapo Amazon third party generic out-of-spec "compatible" battery away from stopping at a red light next to a moving bomb.
When I read "interchangeable batteries" I imagine a pretty simple procedure: open hatch, pop out old battery, put in new battery, close hatch.
When I read "install car parts" I imagine a procedure at least an order of magnitude more difficult requiring knowledge and experience working on automobiles.
Changing batteries is a task nearly all people have done at least once by the time they start driving. If changing the batteries in your car is as easy as changing the AAs in your Game Boy then I imagine many people would be willing to do it without thinking twice.
I mean, you know, it's not the same size and doesn't serve the same purpose, but today people's cars have batteries in them and you can walk into Sears and buy one. I assume the battery for an EV is huge and not conveniently located though.
I spent a year in Japan and the contrast between Japan in the US as far as the average age/condition of cars you see on the road is quite striking.
If this is the first modular computer, why was all that hardware on the shelves in the first place?
This was in contrast to minicomputers and other similar systems (and mainframes of course), where the manufacturers pretty much designed and built everything (including the OS) and made it as difficult as possible for third-parties to play.
The IBM PC was a new design so third-parties had to redesign products for it in some cases but it wasn't some sort of never-been-seen-before approach.
Although to argue with the article, while cheap and modular PCs were great for the consumer, they weren't great for the producers, ultimately leading to IBM itself exiting the PC market due to low margins. So I doubt Tesla et al, want to go down that route.
Exactly, this article is naive silliness in the extreme that fails to understand what drove standardization in the first place, and also fails to recognize the current state in the PC industry.
As you said, the current trend is in the opposite direction. Open-architecture computers are mostly dead; you only still see them with hobbyist-built desktop PCs with ATX, miniITX etc. motherboards, which are a small fraction of the market now. SFF computers from places like Dell are mostly proprietary (the motherboards and chassis and power supplies are, the hard drives and memory are not). You can't swap a power supply from a SFF Dell to a SFF HP; even if the electrical connection is the same (doubtful, but it could be rigged up), the physical size just isn't compatible. Desktops are a niche industry now; most PCs sold these days are laptops, and those are highly proprietary, though they may use some standardized components like memory and WiFi cards.
What drove standardization in the early 90s was the "rise of the clones": the IBM PC and its successors proved to be a good design that ran a lot of desirable software and had easily copied BIOS plus handy expansion slots, and a bunch of copycats jumped in, making compatible versions. IBM tried to kill them but failed, thankfully, and suddenly all kinds of companies were making parts for them and whole IBM-compatible computers. All the interfaces that IBM chose became standards. It didn't last though: for example, the standard floppy disks were the ones IBM chose (360k & 1.2MB 5.25", 720k & 1.44MB 3.5" later), however by the early-mid 90s when IBM tried to push to 2.88MB, no one jumped on board because they had stopped following IBM, and the industry couldn't agree on a single standard for the now-too-small 1.44MB floppies, and that's why were were stuck with those through the mid-2000s until MS finally stopped requiring them for drivers. There were a bunch of attempts at making replacements: 21MB "flopticals", 100MB Zip disks, LS-120, etc., but they were all proprietary and the industry couldn't or wouldn't choose one as an actual standard, so none of them became really ubiquitous to the point where you could expect any random recent PC to have a drive for it. Eventually the matter was settled by CD-Rs, which had their own problems (large size, and not re-writeable, until the CD-RWs).
What drives standardization these days is separation of component makers from their customers, and also sheer inertia, and sometimes efforts by large companies (like Intel) to drive standardization to improve the industry which benefits themselves. Intel drove the standardization of USB and also SATA, for instance, as well as the now-decrepit ATX standard (they also tried to push the BTX standard which didn't go anywhere). But this doesn't extend to things like the form factors of power supplies, which are different once you leave ATX-land, or worse things like laptop power supplies, which are completely all over the map (different connectors, different voltages, etc.). So where you have a small number of vendors selling a component to a large number of vendors, you get standards, as we see with hard drives (both mechanical and SSD), because that makes it easier for the component makers, but for many other things (like laptop power supplies) you don't.
The idea that an electric car would have interchangeable, industry-standard parts is a pipe dream. EVs aren't that different from ICE cars; it's only the powertrain that's really different. And we haven't seen much standarization in ICE cars between automakers, only within automaker lines. So you can frequently exchange brake parts between different models from a make (because it's easier for their engineering staff to reuse designs, and easier for their suppliers too), but you can't exchange them between brands that much unless maybe they're sharing suppliers.
From what I've seen from several decades observing the PC industry, standardization is hard: competing companies rarely want to sit down together and choose standards, so they don't unless they have a really good reason, such as a critical component maker forces it on them because the component maker doesn't want to have dozens of different versions for all their customers, unless the customers are willing to pay extra for that (which they usually aren't).
1. For many people, their automobile is their primary mode of transportation. Tinkering with it and potentially making it unavailable for use is not something many will risk.
2. There is a clear difference in tooling requirements between popping in a shiny 14.4k model (90s era, after all) and swapping out a piece of drive train.
3. Component cost
You'd be surprised at how easy it is to swap out weird and wonderful drivetrain parts [0]. People put water-cooled drivetrains into vehicles that were originally air-cooled. People put GM V8s into foreign cars that only ever had small V6s or inline 6s.
There's a burgeoning industry in creating swap kits for putting EV drivetrains into cars as well [1]. It's mostly settling on standardized components.
[0] http://www.engineswapdepot.com/ [1] http://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40
Corvette engine in a Miata (https://www.flyinmiata.com/V8/)
Venture out into more rural environs, on the other hand, and you'll see what an enterprising individual can do with a large air compressor, some air tools, and a stick welder.
No, many won't risk that. But there are any number of things that many people won't do. Car people are full of stories about staying up all night to reassemble the engine so they could get to work the next day.
Remember when car stereos used to be a standard size (DIN chassis), and you could easily swap in new hardware? That went away with the advent of nav systems.
Stuff is now too intertwined to be standardized.
Weight and therefore efficiency is at a premium for EVs so deep vertical integration will probably be preferred method of assembly.
We see where Tesla is going with that, and I guarantee others are considering the same approach. And to a degree, it makes some sense. Of course "owning a car" is a concept that is deeply engrained in American culture and society. So those who grew up with that will likely lament or fight its loss. Even people like myself who understand the massive benefits to the environment, safety, traffic, economy etc. will still miss the feel of driving down a windy mountain road.
But those who will grow up in a world of self-driving cars? They largely won't care. That time will be freed up for being on their mobile devices, chatting with friends, sleeping, or doing whatever else it is they would do with that time back.
Depending on how our economy goes, it could also make less and less sense to own as has been the trend for a bit now. If you live in a dense urban area, there's a decent chance today that you already decided to forego owning a car in favor of public transit, car sharing services, or ride sharing like Uber/Lyft because of the costs.
So in a world where reliable, well-paying employment is harder to come by, and cost of living increases are outpacing wage increases, owning a car might just not be as much of a necessity.
That of course brings its own set of issues when everything becomes a subscription or on-demand services with regards to lock-in, privacy, monopolies, etc., but that's another debate.
What we have today with tech advancents, build-out of infrastructure and acceptance of the technology seems to have little impact on that "kit" approach.
I think a better analogy might be the Pre-War Automobile Coach-builder. The body was made by a different company than the drive train. Economies of scale and the demand for cars changed that.
A new class of Automobile could arise if a company could farm styling out to a famous house; Ghia for example, build a body from that design, and have an opportunity to provide interior fitment and design to the degree of Bentley and Rolls Royce, or down-spectrum toward Kia and Suzuki.
In any case, we're likely to see eddies like Water-cooled, UV-reactive power converters and fiberglass monstrosities as seen at a 1970's Autorama.
Cars are two orders of magnitude more expensive than PCs, and are not surfing Moore's law.
I can't image Tesla, GM or anyone else getting on board with the idea though. Much less extending it to include other parts.
How is this different from a car today? If you go to replace the brakes and you do it wrong it would be unsafe too.
http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-progr...
The cost of which might depend heavily upon the cost and serviceability of the service provider's fleet.
If your market doesn't mind riding around in automotive version of a no-name PC, the Lego approach might work very well.
There's a big difference between the drivetrain in a Tesla and a Leaf.
Even if there weren't, I don't agree with the premise. The basic ICE engine and drivetrain in a car is not a differentiator either, at least as far as normal "family" cars are concerned.
Expensive parts are usually expensive for a good reason. Typical reasons are: time consuming to build; tiny market, so costs are spread over a small number of orders; materials are expensive and cost of mistakes is high; overhead is high because of the loans on expensive machinery and supplies & power to keep them running; combinations of the above!
Having talked to people in the automotive supply industry, it's a low-margin, cutthroat way to make money. Not a whole lot of people getting rich making auto parts. At least not in the lower tiers.
Or become big heavy unwieldy pieces of plastic loaded with stickers and coming with a large tech spec sheet?