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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Automakers should make cars with less chips. Touchscreen controls, licenses to accept, firmwares to update, tracking to spy on you and Internet-attached locks to crack are abominable. I want a car as analog as possible without loosing much of the engine efficiency.

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I think even all the "analog" stuff in modern cars uses chips.

A modern engine wouldn't work without chips.

LEDs won't work without chips.

Automatic AC won't work without chips.

ABS, ESP, etc. are all based on microcontrollers as well.

Not even the speedometer needle is actually analog anymore, it's all digital now.

For me only the engine is essential. I don't care about LEDs, AC, ABS, ESP or whatever. All I need is moving wheels, steering wheel (not necessary with amplifier), brakes (don't care about ABS). Heater at winter. Everything else is optional and can break. All I care about is to get to home alive when I need to ride 300 km without a single car around me. Whether my cars works or not might be live or death.

Though I don't think that chips are root of all evil. You can easily have analog systems failing. I think that engine chips just should be very reliable, may be even duplicated. We have vehicles on Mars, surely we could get reliable vehicles on Earth.

And, of course, I don't care about reliability of those second-class systems. They're not essential and car works without them. They could be made with chip or whatever, it does not really matter.

> For me only the engine is essential

Modern engines heavily utilize chips. Solenoid valves everywhere. Also your steering, brakes would need some sort of chip.

Going back to carburetors, vacuum lines, and choke valves? I can't even imagine what that would do to air quality around us. If you remember cars in the 1970s, it was awful.

I think it would be cool if I could use my laptop to adjust EFI like I can on a carb. (without having to crack the ECU or whatever)

I've never seen an ECU you couldn't tune with a laptop. It's a hell of a lot easier to dial in a modern engine than it was when you had to try to find the best combination of jets, needles, and springs.

You usually need more than the electronic equivalent of a screwdriver though, right? Maybe I'm mistaken. I was under the impression you would typically need something like a Cobb port.

If you can access them, I certainly imagine the efi profiles are much more tuneable.

Yes, it's usually a fair amount of work, on most modern ECUs there is some form of signature based protection which will require an exploit chain to bypass, and then the need to write either software patches to enable introspection into the parameters necessary to tune, or to reverse engineer the protections on the factory calibration protocols if they were left in production builds. This is all possible with the electronic equivalent of a screwdriver, a Raspberry Pi, but requires a lot of reverse-engineering effort and understanding.

Well, a screwdriver doesn't require a lot of effort or understanding :) just a little bit

> ESP, etc.

I tried to parse this for way too long. The ESP32 and ESP8266 are chips themselves.

I need to raise my head out the weeds.

Sure, but I suspect reducing unnecessary automation will lead to using noticeably fewer chips.

People have different preferences, but I think many, like me, would prefer a simple heater on/off and a linear stronger/weaker selection over a full climate control that auto-selects whether to run a heater or an AC and how much. My 2c.

If chips are super scarce, that might be where we're headed.

Call it SoC, or CoC?

The lowest trim lines of many cars still have exactly what you’re describing.

Sure, but digital electronics are programmable and it's also possible to use programmable analog stuff for many things.

So it's certainly possible to use a few standard electronic parts, with 2nd,3rd sources to implement most of the electronics, and be easily protected from supply disruptions.

> Not even the speedometer needle is actually analog anymore, it's all digital now.

And that's a petty.

On the contrary, my first car still had an analog speedometer. It really sucked when it failed because the failure mode was that it turned decidedly non-linear past about 50 mph indicated. The first time I drove it after the failure I hadn't driven it in probably a couple months and I was driving it at night without any traffic around. I wound up getting pulled over on the highway and the indicated speed was off by 15 mph.

At least with a digital speedometer almost every failure mode is going to be obvious and not some subtle accuracy degradation. Part of the supposed rationale for police almost always not enforcing the speed limit until a good margin over is because of the historic inaccuracies of speedometers. Nowadays assuming someone hasn't modified some gear ratio or fitted the wrong size tires you can more or less be assured that the speedometer will be quite accurate.

On my manual transmission car you can pretty reasonably guess your current speed based on the gear you’re in and on the engine sound, at least I can do that from 0 to approximately 80-90 km/h (after which everything becomes too noisy, I need the speedometer). Failing that one can always follow the flow of traffic in order to remain on the safe side of the law.

>At least with a digital speedometer almost every failure mode is going to be obvious and not some subtle accuracy degradation.

What makes you think that? Bit flips aren't always obvious.

Computers in automobiles have done wonders for their emissions, their efficiency, and yes their reliability.

I suspect that you don't want fewer chips in those aspects, but would prefer a more analog user interface.

Automakers should make cars with less chips.

Automakers should make cars that are still usable when non-critical components fail. Chips aren't the problem; too many points of failure is the problem.

In an engine, there critical parts are the rpm sensor and fuel supply / ignition. Failure of one of them means an engine not running.

Now on top of that you have emissions regulations which force you to run an engine with 100% functional emission systems. To ensure it, the automakers are limiting the engine performance to force the user to repair, which is a major source of annoyance for the user. Moreover regulations require ABS and ESP on every vehicle.

So even if automakers would do such a car, it would not pass the homologation phase due to these regulations which can only be achieved with chips.

Africa needs an African carmaker, or import from Russia or other non regulated markets

Custom electric conversions seem great (see e.g. Zero EV's MX-5 on YouTube). Not analog, but not "smart" either. No internet-connected computers, only the necessary microcontrollers.

Here is a list of automotive products offered by Renesas:

https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/automotive-products

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