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.
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.