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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

An electric motor is way simpler than an ICE. Even controlling it electronically to increase its performance, efficiency and response should be easily doable with simple MCU's. There's no reason we should accept electric cars with complex computers running complex unfixable proprietary software that only the vendor has access to the source code and is updated over-the-air without owner's consenting.

Cars may become the next walled garden.

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Become? They already are.

My neighbor has a brand new Audi e-tron. Something was borked with the system and it wouldn’t interface with any of the remote services. The dealer couldn’t even get into the thing to do anything about it. The solution was allowing it to sit, plugged in, for 72 hours so the system would restart itself and update from the mythical cloud.

Tesla’s have a similar reputation for being unrepairable by the shade tree mechanic. Check out Rich Rebuilds on YouTube. His entire channel is about fighting Tesla to get access to the tooling and information necessary to ‘own’ the second hand Tesla he bought from a salvage yard.

Another friend has a BMW that will literally refuse to drive if he doesn’t have it serviced at the specified intervals at the dealer.

These are all anecdotes about high end cars but it’s trickling down to everything. The walled gardens are already upon us.

Bear in mind, all of this is still possible, and an issue, on ICE based vehicles. Even my older (pre in dash screen) Mini will throw up fake check engine and engine failure warnings if you don't take it into an authorized dealer for service. All the warnings go away the moment you punch in the service code. Why didn't I take it in for scheduled service? Oh, the engine had to be replaced cause it split open. Figured since I was only 6,000 miles short of my 50k service check before I had the entire engine replaced that I could skip it as the mechanic already checked everything else out...

I should also point out that I can't even replace the CD Player/Stock Radio unit in the car with a more modern aftermarket part because the car's diagnostic system is built into it.

Yes. You read right. Without the stock radio, there is no longer anything to read the sensors.

Worrying about electrical cars being walled gardens is missing the forest for the slightly different trees.

Walled gardens? Sounds more like a prison cell with wheels.

> Another friend has a BMW that will literally refuse to drive if he doesn’t have it serviced at the specified intervals at the dealer.

On one hand this is a great solution to people ruining lease vehicles by not using the free maintenance they include...

But I'd love to know what model is doing this, sounds kind of absurd.

The furthest I've seen them go is letting the dealer know your service interval is coming so they can call you and schedule an appointment, but you can turn that off, and their intervals are extremely long (like 15k, almost triple what one would expect for most of their engines)

2021 BMW 330.

It is under lease and that is the idea but my understanding is that it continues even if or after the vehicle is purchased outright.

I own a used BMW that was previously a leased vehicle and I can confirm from direct experience that I was able to ignore the scheduled service notification and continue happily driving for thousands of miles with no issues. The car did nag me with a notification every time I started it up until I eventually brought it in, but I was fine with that.

It definitely won't by default, after the lease most Connected Drive features are disabled pending reactivation by the next owner

I still feel like something is missing though.

The truth is BMW stretches their service interval insanely long because they're giving "free" maintenance with leases

So if you drive any significant amount of time longer after the interval, there's a real chance of damaging the engine

But the liability issues of disabling a car remotely outside of asset recovery seem like something BMW would not want to mess with

Maybe it was an initial service? Some engines require an initial service immediately after break-in or suffer catastrophic damage, I could maybe see an exception in that case

Edit: I did find someone saying if you go 5k over the service limit, the car will not start immediately, flashing Service Required, but still allow starting normally from there

No one should be going 5k over a 15k interval when maintenance is free

How did you come to that conclusion?

This is what I was told by the friend who drives it. He could be wrong. I didn’t research it on my own.

> There's no reason we should accept electric cars with complex computers running complex unfixable proprietary software that only the vendor has access to the source code and is updated over-the-air without owner's consenting.

All the other systems in the car require sophisticated integrated computers and sensors - automatic breaking, cruise control, speed limiting, suspension management - it's not just about the motors. I'm not sure there's any way to put the genie back in the bottle?

There totally is. All of those sensors are pretty standard fair. If someone made an open source control unit that allowed a technician to calibrate these sensors there is no reason they cannot be universal. Or at least plug and play to a certain extent. Look at a MAF sensor: it's just a heating element and a temperature probe. If you could calibrate the resistance of the heating element to known temperature; the sensors themselves all behave the same.

Electric motors are a little different depending on specification but realistically the software could come prepared for any motor providing the end user sets it up.

Personally I've always wondered why cars have 3 or 4 LCD screens and I still have to see the dealer to find out why my check engine light came on. I'm one of those shade tree mechanics who would be able to handle the technical jargon.

If the screen told us the fault we would finally have come full circle. My 89 accord lxi's ECU had a blinking light (under the driver's seat) that communicated the detected fault. Yeah you needed a lookup chart but those were not very hard to find.

It would make total sense to have a semi-hidden menu that displayed all the info the computer has. The computer is already monitoring o2 sensors, injector performance, knocking, etc. Just expose that information. Why make us buy another device when the car already has the analytics built in?

Just to be clear external devices should absolutely still exist. It would just be nice, as a shade tree mechanic, to access the car's data directly.

There are regulatory reasons. In Germany all the functional parts of your car have to be certified, often for that specific vehicle and in combination with other parts. To a certain degree that's definitely necessary. I don't want people downloading bugged amateur software that will make the gas pedal stuck and drive into a crowd because they thought it would give them an additional 5 horsepower. This may sound foreign to the typical American who is allowed to drive around in a rusty mad-max vehicle with failing brakes and DIY body work that will impale any pedestrian unlucky enough to cross its path.

Germany is a comparatively small market. Engineers should not be forced to design to the lowest denominator. If anything Germany should be left behind to incentivize changing German regulations.

Regulations should enforce values with clear benefits. If the benefits are not clear then regulation is simply a barrier for entry instead.

> All of those sensors are pretty standard fair.

For example automatic speed limiting works off cameras that read speed limit signs. I really don’t think that’s an off-the-shelf standardised sensor. And standardising it would probably hold back how quickly they could innovate in it.

Automatic speed limit sign reading absolutely is an off-the-shell component, which you can get for example from Mobileye:

https://www.mobileye.com/us/fleets/technology/speed-limit-in...

We can make our own. PyImageSearch blog does this all the time.

The vast vast majority of car owners do not want to implement their own components using instructions from a blog. I can't believe that even needs saying. Most people want an integrated car and don't care about swappable sensors or access to engine data. I know I don't.

Open source exists so one person can build off the ideas of other people. This is how we get layers of abstraction that make computers approachable for the next person.

So one person makes the OCR component. Another makes the SBC to control it. Another makes the drivers for interfacing with sensors... ect.

Obviously this is too much work for one person. I think it's still worth it though. Maybe not to you, but then again you obviously don't care so you're free to go buy an off the shelf Chevy that you can never fix.

The difference is that my suspension management software will not auto-update. That bars posterior programmed obsolescence and forces the manufacturer to do it right the first time or they will have to face prosecution or expensive recalls.

It’s obvious you have no idea what you are taking about. Automobiles are already walled gardens, for obvious reasons. Electric drivetrains are mechanically more simple than ICE, but battery and range management software is very complex. And there is an enormous amount of software required for ADAS, safety, infotainment, cabin control etc.

No safety critical feature should depend on complex software. If I want my car do drive by itself, then it should be opt-in by an easily to disable or remove module.

You're a little late on that. Even airbag deployment software is now extremely complex. There's no way to reduce complexity without reducing functionality and (government mandated) safety. So you'll have to give up on that one.

ADAS could never be a “module”

It inherently demands large network of sensors and connections to all the control systems in the vehicle.

You should be a Boeing consultant ...

Newer cars have more electronics, but that's because electronics became cheap and software features are expected (some even legally required). EV isn't causing this, it's just correlated with cars being new.

ICE cars are already full of proprietary locked-down electronics. What drive train they use is irrelevant. For example, Renault, Peugeot, and Hyundai have cars in both EV and ICE versions, running basically the same software for both versions.

If you're alluding to things like self-driving, then EV has nothing to do with it either. For example, Uber's self-driving prototypes are ICE.

We could try to quantify the simplicity of an electric vs a combustion engine car. Let's count the number of different fluid systems in a regular car.

There's the fuel, engine oil, coolant, transmission oil, brake fluid, windshield washing liquid and air conditioning fluid. Battery acid we don't count as they are sealed nowadays, and you replace it as a unit.

I think an electric car needs battery coolant, I assume fixed ratio gear still has oil that needs changing. Then brake fluid, windshied washing liquid and air conditioning fluid are just the same as in a combustion car.

So I think we got rid of fuel and engine oil, they are the messiest and need most touch labor, but basically all the other was left intact. It's not an insignificant improvement, but there's still lots of maintenance targets left.

For the duration your average new car buyer, and to a greater extend, HNer (this isn't exactly the "put 200k on an Altima u bought new" crowd), will own any given car these things won't be issues or if they are they'll be under warranty.

Everyone circle jerks about how their new 4Runner will last a million miles but you scroll back through the Facebook timeline, see how often they're buying cars, and it becomes pretty clear the people saying these things don't expect that to happen under their ownership (and the stats the automakers pay people to analyze over confirm this). New vehicles don't often get sold to people who will own them to the point where the lower level systems start needing attention.

ICE specific systems are highly refined because they get copypasta'd with minor alterations between multiple products. The stupid HVAC flapper that's specific to your model so some engineer could get a bonus for re-using some existing blower assembly is what's tested less and breaks more. It's rarely the "A to B" bits of the vehicle that give the people who buy new vehicles issue (except when OEMs put unnecessary things in the critical path, like preventing you from taking it out of Park without the consent of the door switches and stuff like that). EVs aren't immune to that kind of stuff that dominates early life (unscheduled) maintenance costs.

Electric isn't a hands down winner yet though it appears to be on that path. If if were we'd see EV Tranit Connect and NV200s and other vehicles that are purchased strictly by the numbers flying off the shelves. But it's probably close and the reason we're not there yet is likely just developmental man hours, not anything fundamental.

There might now be motivation to deliver fully electric brake systems. They would have to be very reliable. A path to there could first be a small hydraulic pump for every wheel.

For AC and battery thermal management, having a fluid is more fundamental. Solid state heat engines have terrible efficiency currently.

Bikes have started using hydraulic disc brakes instead of cables, even when self service is much harder. Going the other way.

Yep, 100,000 miles for the gearbox oil change on a Tesla, 2 years for the brake fluid and 50,000 miles for the battery coolant.

The odd thing about the brake fluid change is that because of regenerative braking, the pads usually last a lot longer than the fluid does.

It's not maintenance free, but service every 2 years rather than every 3 months feels substantially different.

Another thing frequently mentioned: The regenerative braking system in an EV means that brakes will undergo less wear and tear.

I think you should try to quantify simplicity by the number of moving parts.

I foresee the day HNers will ask "How do I get a dumb (non-smart) car" just the same way people are asking for dumb tv's.

And just like the TV's, it will never be allowed to happen.

Sorry, but I don't want just anyone writing and modifying safety critical code. That stuff goes through very extensive testing, and for good reasons. I would not drive a car that was running software not written by specialized and trained individuals and with extensive testing.

Moreover, I don't want to be on a highway with people driving cars with code they modified. Ideally, we would have an model where the source for all of the components is visible, with customers able to make suggestions, but with the vendor responsible for all safety testing.

That is where you are today, any Joe on the road could have changed their own brakes, added a turbo to their engine, or made any number of safety modifications to their vehicle.

As someone involved in modified cars, these are very different things. There's only 1 real way to change your brakes. It's like LEGO, except with a couple of bolts and some metal pads.

Adding a turbo increases power (or fuel economy) but isn't going to cause your car to accelerate on it's own. Or lockup steering. Or push timing and blow holes in your engine sidewall. All that stuff is computer controlled in modern cars, and you bet your ass you can cause some extremely catastrophic failures just with poorly implemented software.

That's extremely different. Those parts are made by company's that work with car brands to make compliant parts. Changing the software is a totally different problem.

I don't know if they are that different. I met a biker once who told how he designed his own automatic speed-control. Asked him to see it. What he showed me was a lock on the gas. Seemed very dangerous to me. Also, another guy showed me a contraption he built himself for a stick car. He put a sensor on the stick and whenever the sensor detected his hand, a servo automatically pressed the clutch pedal. It also automatically slowly releases the clutch pedal when his hand was removed from the stick.

These are all electronic and/or mechanical systems and a mistake on its software or mechanical design may impact the safety of the vehicle. I got negatively impressed in both cases and told them that it was probably illegal.

But well, my car... I would love to be abe to have access to the code. Not that I want to check or modify it myself, but the fact the I know anyone can check. The same reason I like to use FLOSS on my own machine. Actually, for safety reasons, it makes sense for it to signed, but I wan to be able to access it. If it was in ROM, maybe I wouldn't care. If it needs a critical update, would not bother going for a recall. Actually I think forcing ROM for safety critical software would encourage developers to make it right at the first try since it would be way more expensive to fix it later; probably would make engineers design systems as simple as they possibly can.

The auto clutch I saw was similar to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2J6uQH-khY

>Those parts are made by company's that work with car brands to make compliant parts.

You have some written guarantee that Joe didn't zip tie some frozen hot dogs to his brake calipers so he could make dinner and stop his car? I don't.

I don't get why only Tesla should write engine software for their car, and completely lockout "Joe's all pro turbo" from doing the same. I can get a custom rom for my car now, so why can't I for the Tesla? I get it voids warranties, but not at all is a problem.

I can already see the repair-ability of electric cars getting as bad as some Apple hardware. Maybe someone should create an open design of a barebones electric car complete with RPi-based ECM or other open hardware/software. Or have a company do all the hard work as in a Pinephone equivalent of electric cars, a market I could see having some viability while leaving others free to tinker and modify to their needs. One configuration for 4wheel offroad truck, one for street car and so on.

Coincidentally, one reason I like to justify OSS is that when we buy things, we typically know how it works or can look under the hood and check things out as with cars but we can't do so with closed source programs. Why should we start to accept that it's ok that manufacturers think we shouldn't know how the things we buy works? The mechanical nature of cars has given them a more open legacy, well disregarding software, sensors and such, and I hope it continues.

The next step is to have cars always log their position in the cloud, so the government will know where you are, that you are driving within legal limits, how often you drive (and it won't be long until insurance companies will have access to it). I think this is going to be introduced EU wide.

edit (it's under guise of speed limiting): https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/mandatory-spe...

China will build simple and cheap ICE cars. They haven't development much in 20 years.

The only way VW will be able to make money is through 'servicing' cars.

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