Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NicoJuicy | Hacker News Reader

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Most things that break are electrical, not mechanical. The mechanics of reliable machines are taught in school and are widely available + relatively easy to repair.

And I'm speaking from growing up in a village with the highest agricultural % of population in Belgium. Which my family is also pretty involved with ( my dad is a veterinarian for farm animals, my uncle has ~40 tractors)

Also: a cousin with a garage, some friends who work at a big manufacturer and another cousin who with worked there.

My background influenced my opinion, not a unfunded comment like yours. I am curious what your background is, it's far from reality up here.

Mechanical parts are becoming a selling point. Just no manufacturer realizes it yet, because of "subscription access", lol.

I'd actually buy a mechanical environmental-friendly car. Not some electrical car that needs an overpriced official garage to work on. I want the guy I know, to work on my car. Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced.

And I'm not alone:

https://tractorhacking.github.io/

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-f...

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/kzp7ny/tractor-hackin...

On a personal note, it means I'm abandoning Mercedes-Benz for my next car or have a lease from work.

Ps. All newcomers try full-electric cars. Which have a lot of breaking parts.

Let me introduce you to the lada 4x4(previously known as the lada niva all over the ex-soviet countries).

https://www.lada.ru/en/cars/4x4/3dv/about.html

it hasn't changed much, it's still serviceable with a hammer and a couple of pulleys and wrenches. Not sure if it's available in Belgium(it is in eastern europe) and it sure as hell isn't as comfy as a BMW or a MB, but it's cheap to buy and maintain.

lol it also has a reputation for being super unreliable

I don't understand why this comment unvoted :-) Basically "never breaks/reliable" and "easy to fix/repairable" is orthogonal things. Lada Niva (4x4) as basically all Ladaa is really easy to fix, but not reliable. If you are riding Lada you have to have toolbox and be ready to perform small repairs weekly, if not daily. But every repair is easy, spare parts are cheap and available (at least in Russia in time of Lada popularity). Modern car: basically visit dealer once per year, something rarely breaks, but if they do, car not fixable w/o expensive special tools

Ladas are basically workhorse tanks. Garage 54 on YouTube has put them through all sorts of torture and they take it and ask for more, I wish they were easier to get here in the United States as I'd love to have one.

Garage 54 English (dubbed) channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCydCOEgfcXAQnkRaLCTsAQ

Garage 54 Russian channel (has more videos) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBByzLy3MGJT8UMVLYLScNg

> Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced.

This is exactly my point.

Imagine that you are selling cars. If you sell a reliable, easy to fix car, you don't get any recurring revenue. But you need to make as much money as the competition who sells less reliable cars, and more because you can't cut corners. So your upfront cost is higher.

The competition, which sells less reliable cars, can ask much less upfront, and offset this by some recurring revenue from fixing it periodically at licensed mechanic shops that pass a cut to the manufacturer.

This is very much like inkjet printers are sold at a loss, and the money is made on selling the ink which is regularly needed. But with cars (tractors, etc) the manufacturer sells maintenance / spare parts.

In this way, the manufacturers of service-intensive machines credit the buyer initially, but then more than make it up in the "interest" payments.

This is sad dynamics, but I don't see an easy way out of it.

I hope there exists a large enough segment of consumers who distinctly prefer the more expensive, more reliable; from your words, you seem to belong to it. But I'm not sure such consumers are a majority.

The manufacturer of the more reliable car can win by offering a warranty and/or "discounted" repairs. That way, even a naïve customer who doesn't expect the manufacturer to make a reliable car will be incented to buy it anyway. Of course, this will only work if building a more reliable car really is more efficient than doing constant repairs on a less-reliable one. IOW, it actually leads to properly-aligned incentives all around.

After years of dealing with manufactures that find any possible way to weasel out of honoring their warranties, I don't place any credence in them whatsoever. I don't even consider warranty when making a purchase, just reputation for quality, which takes time to build; time most startups don't have to start showing a profit.

A warranty is utterly worthless if there's no company to back it up. Would you trust a brand-new company to be around for 10 years if they offered a warranty that long?

For cars, at least, "discounted" repairs are pretty much impossible in the USA: manufacturers aren't allowed to own the service shops here, by law. The service has to be done by independent dealers. Of course, the manufacturer could heavily subsidize this service (by paying most of the cost directly to the dealer), but that's going to take away all their profits.

> I'd actually buy a mechanical environmental-friendly car.

I agree. In fact an electric car could be simple. Just because it has an electric motor doesn't mean it has to have a computer too.

It has to have a computer, the way your ICE car has a computer, or maybe the way your washing machine or a microwave has a computer (they all do).

It should serve the driver, and be low-profile and unobtrusive.

Does my washer really have a computer? Electric control board, certainly, but the timers are all mechanical. What is there to compute?

It's a hell of a lot cheaper to throw in a micro-controller than use mechanical timers etc. At bulk, an MCU based control board should cost you single digit dollars.

There's fairly complex compute that happens in the battery cooling, motor cooling power train etc in a Tesla that gives it the acceleration and range to compete with ICE cars. The early 1900s electric cars that were more akin to what you describe never had the range, power or acceleration to compete.

If we're lucky we'll see plug and play standardization for things like batteries, charging components and engines where the chassis and ux parts of the car can be all different but everyone can essentially have a corolla or civic to fit their price point.

I should also add that i mostly just want a car, i don't need it to drive for me, I think the telsa's could be very very simple if they dropped all the self driving stuff. I know they won't but it would be cool to buy a crate telsa engine and battery pack for a rolling chassis without the infotainment system.

Realistically it does have to have a computer, but not necessarily a visible one. Power motor control is tricky - it requires monitoring the phase angle between the drive currents and the motor position, as well as things like overcurrent protection and the ability to switch to regenerative braking. Oh and you'll want traction control in there because the torque is highest at zero RPM, unlike petrol motors.

Even electric scooter size motors will have smart controllers. They're a big market for microcontrollers, e.g. TI: http://www.ti.com/solution/dc-input-bldc-motor-drive

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