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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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