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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

In a decade every electrical appliance will have a chip linking it to a central controller much as cars work now. Sensors allow the automotive computer to minutely control every detail of the car's functions. In the same way, house functions will become more efficient and automated.

I am not at all a fan of this future, but it is coming on fast. Those of us opposed will be like people now stubbornly driving older, less complex autos.

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Yup. My 1987 Toyota pickup contains no digital computer whatsoever. It's so mechanically simple. I'm pretty sure I could do or have done any major repair (e.g., full transmission replacement, major engine overhaul) for less money than the cost to replace a just-out-of-warranty computer module in a newer vehicle. I realize that computers enable better fuel efficiency, but I just don't see how all that added complexity is worth it in a gasoline-powered vehicle. I'll willingly part with it only when all-electric becomes economically viable.

If it has a carburetor it isn't mechanically simple.

lol. when i bought my first motorcycle, i explicitly avoided any motorcycle with a carburetor and only looked at fuel injected engines. there's no point in not having FI.

and modern cars aren't just mechanically "complex" for the sake of being complex. they are safer in crashes, safer when driving, more comfortable, and are some of the most reliable machines we make. you basically change the oil often and tires every now and then, and that's your maintenance. i drove my last car for 13 years and well over a 100,000 miles (not a lot really), and yet basically zero problems with that maintenance. that's pretty insane reliability for something used everyday.

You either have no computer but rather complex mechanical things (carburetor, mechanical ignition) or you have computers and quite simple mechanical things (EFI, Electronic Ignition). The computers actually make the car more reliable because there are fewer mechanical things to tweak, tune and fix.

I have nothing against FI, but on my previous motorcycle I could (and did) take apart the carburetor, fix whatever needed to be fixed (old sealings in my case) and put it back, just by reading some stuff on the internet. It is not something very complex.

I don't think I could do anything like that with my current fuel injected bike. But then again, I never needed to, because it is objectively more reliable.

There is a lot of charm in a computer-free car or bike, but I think most of the aversion people have to electronics is due to the fact that vehicles went through an "uncanny valley" of computerization, where reliability was not substantially better than previous models, yet repairability was substantially worse. I would say we've bridge that already.

The reason computers are increasingly used in cars is that they make the car cheaper. High-precision, high-durability mechanical parts are expensive.

Go shop for a decent motorcycle chain, compare it to the cost of a Raspberry Pi. Removing a complex mechanical part and replacing it with a simpler computer-controller part is a no-brainer.

I hear you... commoditization of connected hardware makes this future a real possibility, and yet it hasn't gained consumer traction and it does add real cost to the products. $3-5 of hardware cost + thousands of hours of software adds $30+ of cost to the consumer on most devices. Thats a lot

When that changes I'm still not sure it'll happen. There needs to be a consumer demand and today there isn't.

City buses already need to be pulled over and rebooted periodically.

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