Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Speaking of engine maintainability, there was a fun thread on big marine engines on Reddit a little while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/5wr5...

>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.

Same with airplane engines.

Basically anything that's used in industry has a maintenance schedule. Here[1] is what Ingersoll Rand (basically the "go to" in pneumatics re: heavy industry) provides even with their $250 impact wrenches. Simple oiling, greasing via zerk fittings and air filter swap time-tables, but indicative of their corporate culture. Whether it's an entry-level air gun or a $150k two-stage compressor you're provisioning, that culture of meticulous documentation and proper servicing is just a part of their (and most maritime, mining, heavy industry, etc) culture. "Modern Diesel Technology: Preventive Maintenance and Inspection" is a pretty interesting read, if, uh, you're into that stuff haha.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/XTd3wx7.png

This is fascinating to me, considering modern printers are almost so disposable you could have a real conversation about throwing them out rather than buying new ink. I wonder when cars will get to the point that by the time you have to do any sort of maintenance at all (other than charging), they're off to the junkyard.

I saw a slickdeals post the other day about a 2-pack of inkjet printers for $33 (actually, found it: 2x Canon Pixma MG2522 printer/scanner/copiers).

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.

Cars are no longer built to the same degree of metal because in the old design the passenger cabin was the weakest part of the car, meaning you were far more likely to be killed in a crash.

As an aside--do you enjoy the oiling process? A little bit here or there could be a fun maintenance task. 500+? That just sounds tedious and not really fun for a hobby...

With five machines to maintain, it's become a nuisance, but it's only about two hours if there are no problems. It's restoring old, rusted, or damaged machines that's hard. One machine took weeks of work. I do it to make this steampunk telegraph office possible.[1] (Plug: This goes operational tomorrow morning at the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention in San Jose. People text in messages and they're delivered by messengers.)

[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314

I'd recommend a read of The Practicing Mind to see how it might be different.

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.

Thanks for the recommendation--this is actually something I've wanted to learn more about as I struggle to get past the early stages of learning guitar.

> 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.

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 PC by tinkering with it, all you're doing is hurting yourself.

If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people.

That's FUD and a bit of a straw man. No one is debating whether or not you should be able to personally tinker with your car (electric or otherwise) because that's going to be possible regardless of compatibility of parts. You're perfectly welcome to go attempt to to swap your engine and fail horribly right now on your 20 year old gas guzzler or 20 years from now on your high tech electric car. That's not a reason to keep parts from being interchangeable across cars/manufacturers.

The biggest argument against interoperability is speed of change. Telsa, the leader in electric vehicles, makes a lot of their own components and algorithms. Standardization in fast moving areas slows down the pace of change. We are at the dawning of the electric car age and even earlier in the self-driving car age.

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).

Automotive SW is quite mature. The kind of information you're sending to the different control ECU's in the car are quite small and simplistic. I see no reason why you could not implement dynamic and state-of-the-art algorithms on the image recognition part and push the comparably small result output on the control bus.

Standards enable alternatives to spring up, so long as they interface properly. That helps with both innovation and competition.

> If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people.

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).

So, I gather you have never worked in an auto shop then.

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'm not talking about things like mucking with the brakes. I'm talking about things like what the parent comment said:

> I say this as someone currently writing firmware for cars and wondering why this does not happen.

> currently you plug a GPU card, an incredibly sofisticated piece of technology in your PC, and it mostly just works.

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...

> 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?

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.

Most people don't want to work on their cars, true. I question whether the new, more complex cars are truly "more reliable" (how are we measuring and over what period of time? Compared to cars from when?) or that the average person is "delighted" that independent mechanics can service less and less of their cars.

I sold my last car about 4 years ago, I don't expect I'll ever own one again. I think this will become the norm, especially if populations keep moving to cities and self driving cars become common.

> if populations keep moving to cities

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.

Yeah, if anything, for American cities all the evidence points to increased suburban sprawl with no end in sight. People too poor to own a car and pre-baby professionals may not need cars, but the rest of the American population generally does and chooses to do so.

In a very different sense, cars do use shared parts and communication mechanisms such as canbus to decrease integration difficulty and cost.

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.

I completely agree. Another major factor the article missed is price.. you can buy a computer for $5 to $4000. Cars at at a much much higher range and therefore consumers have less desire to tinker / potentially break / buy new parts / upgrade / etc.

(Although, I do not know how expensive PCs were back in the day)

Machrone's Law held from about 1985 through 2001:

"The computer you really want costs $5000."

And it's worth noting that:

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.

Start with a top-of-the-line CPU and the nicest available motherboard in a soundproof case. Max the RAM. Add a fancy graphics card, a big fast drive and a pair of giant spinning disks, a big ultra-high-res monitor, and the input devices that you really want. Buy new, brand name, and not on a special sale. Et voila, one $5000 desktop machine.

(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.)

If anything I think it's the opposite. It's not like you're just going to turn around and buy a new car every couple of weeks.

Arguments like this are the reason why things are becoming more locked down DRM riddled trash with no real concept of ownership. Why the internet is getting more and more siloed and full of walled gardens.

Because it's easier that way and you don't really need to tinker.