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Comment by christoph | Hacker News Reader

The average person does virtually no regular maintenance / checking of their car, even basics like tyre pressures and oil levels not being checked regularly, happy to leave as much as they possibly can for an annual check at the garage. There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing.

Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something fails.

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Very soon, cars won't really let you do anything without ID/phone number/paired phone/key serial number, gps lock, a full working complement of vehicle sensors, and a network connection to report all of the above in realtime to people you don't know (who are of course obligated to provide all of that data to military intelligence at any time, without a warrant or probable cause).

There isn't really an issue with that sort of lack-of-maintenance stuff where we're headed. It won't be long until cars either totally refuse to operate in extreme circumstances (due to manufacturer liability), or fall back to some impossible-to-ignore state like Tesla's "limp mode". Tire pressure/oil life being good examples of easily-detectable liability issues that no sane manufacturer would let slide.

The current state of affairs is simply because remote monitoring was expensive/infeasible. Most vehicles today ship with an always-on cellular modem in them.

Even my little 4K pocket gimbal camera won't operate without phoning home to "activate", same for all the drones sold by the same company. Flying cars would be sending telemetry from all local sensor measurements to HQ at pretty much all times.

crushingly depressing, tbh

> There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing.

...or can't afford the basic maintenance

In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car.

Note, that's not a put down on said people. I think it's a shame such situations exist. But, if you can't afford to pay for insurance/gas/maintenance, then you can't afford the vehicle.

But, regarding flying cars: I absolutely do not want more people operating airborne spinny death machines capable of destroying considering we've already established many people don't/can't perform basic maintenance on a much simpler and safer mode of transportation. It wouldn't go well.

> In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car.

Or they know it isn’t worth fixing.

I had an engine light on for about 20000km, and sold the vehicle like that, because it wasn’t worth fixing. One competent mechanic talked me into trying to fix it before I tried to sell it, and that wasted $1000.

Another friend had an engine light on, and the workshop said that happened with that model sometimes and it wasn’t worth fixing.

Both of us could afford to fix the vehicles. That said, if an oil light comes on I stop the vehicle immediately.

That’s a dangerous mindset unless you’re actively pulling the check engine codes daily or more frequently. That one light represents many possible codes, and in all cars I’ve seen it’s on or off instead of, say, on and brighter.

The check engine light is a UI problem. LCDs are cheap now, it should be able to display the real problem. At least with a numeric code on the panel that you can look up in the owner's manual.

Where exactly do you live? In the US it's not common to have more than an aesthetic checkover of a car during inspection. There's not necessarily any reason to clear those lights, and in general you can avoid fixing relatively expensive things that do not prevent the car from running outright.

Contrast to my understanding of Germany's system, where your car must be aesthetically pleasing to the inspector.

Im confused. Most US states if not all require emissions testing at each inspection. Break lights or engine lights are automatic fails. Suffucient tire tred, working wipers etc.

I've never heard of an engine light being a fail, even with emissions test. You could still pass despite whatever the dash says.

But, what some people have been talking about makes sense now. If you get a bad manufacturer who lights up the dash for everything then they're forcing you to spend money.

Except for lots of people cars are also necessary

The number of people who need cars to survive is far greater than the number of people who can afford to fix every nuisance fault. So long as it can keep rolling and comply with whatever minimum safety requirements actually get enforced, people will run it.

> Imagine that scenario with tons of metal that could fall out of the sky when something fails.

Hmm, this has different meaning with last weekends context of an engine cover hitting a yard.

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