You don't ever own an electric vehicle
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> Cars now use an ETC (electronic throttle control) managed by a computer, as is just about everything else on engines these days. Naturally, this makes vehicles more difficult to repair, not to mention the glaring “right to repair” issue growing by the day when everything runs on a chip.
It isn't more difficult because anyone is conspiring against you. Maybe it's more difficult because electricity is invisible, the techniques require new knowledge, or you're not familiar with it. Go get some CAN bus debugging equipment, plug it into your high-speed CAN bus, move the accelerator pedal, and you'll see the CAN messages.
Although, there's usually no debugging necessary for your accelerator pedal, because you no longer need to lubricate your accelerator cable; bits don't require lubrication.
From an engineering perspective, it is very convenient (and reliable) to have everything in the car just sit on a communication bus and write software to do the logic, rather than have dedicated wires or mechanical connections.
I recently started driving a drive-by-wire vehicle. A while ago I had an issue where the engine dropped to a near-idle (on the freeway) and the pedal was effectively non-operative. The diagnostics said the computer wasn't getting the expected results from moving the throttle body, so it went into some kind of safe mode.
Now, there are plenty of ways that drive-by-cable could fail, but in this case I was slightly resentful because I could have mitigated the computer's loss of senses with my own.
Furthermore, because the law surrounding creative works is extremely strict, any repair that might touch something that could be construed to be DRM protecting the manufacturer's software becomes legally dicey. You also can't tell anyone how to break that DRM, no matter how justifiable repair is. So if you somehow figure out how to reserialize new parts onto a locked-down vehicle, you're probably allowed to do that; but you can't legally sell that knowledge onto other repair shops.
Nobody would have to do any of that BS if it was illegal for that DRM to exist under Magnuson-Moss to begin with.
I'm still waiting for an example of where DRM stops a normal repair
The example of DRM stopping normal repair is serialized parts: lots of vehicles, farm equipment, and phones are designed to refuse to work if you swap certain parts on them. The only way you are supposed to be able to swap parts is to pay the manufacturer's branded repair firms to make the swap for you, and then send some kind of signature to the computer in that vehicle that says the repair was authorized. Bypassing these schemes requires tampering with DRM code, which trips DMCA 1201. Yes, it may be legally unenforceable, but to get there requires a decade's worth of expensive litigation to prove that something that was legal before you put a computer in a car should be legal after you put a computer in a car. And even then you almost certainly can't distribute the tools you made to do what should be a legal repair because those tools might be used by someone else to pirate the ECU firmware or something.
The simple way to protect consumers ability to fix products is to simply require manufacturers to provide the information to do it.
But, I still don't think this is an IP law issue. IP law should not be a weapon used to prevent you from repairing your devices -- but neither should anything else. If you only change IP law, companies are just going to find a different way to prevent you from mucking with their stuff.
There's a reason we call this "right to repair" and not "right to make an attempt to do hacky DRM workarounds"
The current discussion is about fixing cars. But the right to repair is a problem for everything with a computer in it.
You could take the title of this article and replace "an electric vehicle" just about any electronic device most people would own.
https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...
I imagine insurance companies will eventually have clauses that prevent this.
It's a small victory for the future of the species.
I do know that I can’t remember the last time I drove a car with a bad idle, which is much more than anyone who lived in 80s can say.
Also: throttle by wire permits simpler cruise control integrations, better fuel economy and also facilitates the operation of safety systems like traction/stability control - so it’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison.
It was such a large inconvenience the replacement cable is still sitting in the box behind the seat.
You can, actually, and its fairly commonly done[0]. Mapping pedal to throttle position is trivial, as is intercepting and modifying the pedal output signal. Its also not that hard to rip out the throttle body and replace it with a programmable unit. Imo new cars aren't so much harder to fix and modify as they are different to fix and modify.[1]
As Socrates rise from his grave and say: “The cars now love luxury; they have bad throttle control, contempt for steering; they show disrespect for elders and love economy in place of horsepower. Cars are now tyrants, not the servants of their drivers. They no longer rise when the key turns. They contradict their owners, turn off at stoplights, gobble up electricity at the plug, beep incessantly, and tyrannize their seatbelts.”
[0]Pedal boosters or pedal tuners. [1]Not excusing the myriad of insipid design choices, of course.
For me this is the crux of the matter. As the person in the driver's seat, I demand that I be the ultimate arbiter of what the motor(s) and wheels ought to do, regardless of what any set of sensors and/or set of computer programs thinks is going on.
I once had a car refuse to release the emergency brakes when it was time to disembark a ferry because the firmware misinterpreted the natural rocking of the vessel (and hence the car itself) as some kind of suspension fault. It left me more than "slightly resentful." I was absolutely furious at being stuck in a really rotten situation where my car was actively causing problems for those around me (people behind me had to drive off the ferry) and wouldn't even let itself go into a mode where it could be pushed off. The dealership's service center simply said, "Uh, sorry. Your brakes are locked. You can't override it. You need to get it towed in."
I don't care if the car thinks it's keeping you from rolling off a 500-foot cliff. If I say, "No, release the brakes, I mean it," the car had better do exactly as I tell it.
However more rececnt trends see OEMs trying to prevent you from doing this kind of thing, in the same way that Apple, John Deere, and others try to prevent you from repairing or modifying or repairing your own hardware. This makes me very sad, because the future should be a utopia for people who whish to repair or modify their own hardware and instead we head towards dystopia, for no good reason!
Technology changes and you can either learn it or not.
Specialization of labor does make everything more complicated, but I'm glad I'm not having to grow my own vegetables or pump my own well water, despite the fact that I have no clue how modern farming or water treatment work. I suspect transportation will continue to become more specialized just like everything else.
Case in point, I have a former high school friend who runs a farm that’s about 50 acres as his primary business - without major machinery. They have quads and pickup trucks, but most applications where one would use a tractor are now done with animal power.
The result? It’s actually cheaper to operate as grass is cheaper than diesel. He’s not getting rich, but makes as decent living.
An electric car, for all intents and purposes should be substantially easier to repair, diagnose, and work on, but manufacturers are doing things like using proprietary signaling protocols, locking out third party parts, and putting complex software in the place of simple and reliable hardware. Electric cars aren’t new, they’ve been around since the 90s and it was perfectly possible to create one without the “smart” nonsense we are seeing today. My car doesn’t need to report my location to a database or have a manufacturer kill-switch and it doesn’t make one a Luddite for feeling that way.
The 1890s, to be precise...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Parker_Electric_ca...
That's not the main problem with newer cars. The problem is that much of the required knowledge is intentionally kept proprietary so there is no way for regular people to fix it regardless of how much they want to learn it.
Only a tiny sliver of people need to understand how CAN actually works. Most Average-Joes just need to know how to connect (which is often done just via plugging into the OBD2 port, giving a keyed connector with power, ground, and at least one CAN bus).
As a hobby, I sell a low-volume device for a niche vehicle that works exactly this way. I assure that almost none of my users have any idea how a computer works, let alone anything physical on the CAN bus or what an MCP2515 or 120 ohm resistor is.
Sure, diagnosing and repairing a problems like the throttle control example is more difficult and expensive today than it was in the '70s. But cars are also so much more reliable today that the frequency of these repairs is considerably lower.
I have a 2009 Toyota Matrix that I have owned for 12 years now. It has nearly 140,000 miles on it. Last month, the vehicle finally had to get a repair of a non wear item (failing O2 sensor), which cost me $300. In 1975, how many cars could be expected to last 13 years and 140,000 miles before needing a single repair?
What's said about EVs can be as much true about ICE powered cars, the computer controlled nature is the same for both.
I appreciate my 1982 Range Rover more every day so. Besides a treadful fuel consumption. After all it is running on 3 fuses, perfect for an electricity and electeonics idiot like me.
This really isn't true. Cars all the way up to the mid 2000's are very easy to work on and repair. I have always done all of my own repairs. Domestic cars even today are still easy to work on. Yes you need a diagnostic tool to do some more advanced diagnosing. A $300 Autel will do most things, an $800 Autel will do nearly everything. Yes it is an expense but it can pay for itself in one repair when you factor in labor costs at a mechanic. And that Autel will continue to work for all of your repairs the next 5+ years.
You need to buy $300+ worth of mechanical tools to work on your 1982 Range Rover.
You need to buy $300+ electronic tool to work on a modern car.
I would say German cars from the ~2010's up are out of reach for the average person to repair, they are using fiber optic networks and complicated engine management systems. But everything else is really isn't that difficult if you have a basic (High School Level) understanding of how electricity and computer networks work.
Some power tools help, again those do other things as well.
If you cannot do most of the repairs on an old car yourself, they are unaffordable. Garages, if you one willing to work on them, charge around 100 bucks per hour where I live.
My problem is, despite being an industrial engineer, I seem to have a blind spot for electrics and electronics. Mechanics are much easier. The main reason I will never switch to eletronic fuel injection, I can rebuild the carbs in the desert and can calibrate them. EFi goes over my horizon so.
Was it emission control stuff? Computer controlled fuel injection?
Definitely was a different era when you could rotate the distributor to advance/retard the timing.
The Ford Model-T was obviously much simpler than modern cars, but it also didn't have airbags that needed to be replaced after a fender bender. That doesn't make the new cars inferior to the Model T. Just different.
The more complex engineering brings benefits; some of the benefits are worth the added complexity, but others are not. (Not to mention it, "worth it" to whom... the customer, manufacturer, or society as a whole...)
Of course, the engine was a two-cylinder that had maybe 25 parts to it, the rebuild process only needed a crescent wrench, a screwdriver, and some gasket making chemicals, and was so simple that 2 pictures told you all of the information you needed to succeed.
That was indeed the case in the 80s and 90s, when the fleet consisted mostly of eastern block made shitboxes, in which you never knew what would happen first: the engine fail completely or rust eat a hole in the floor.
Vehicles being hostile to their owners is not unique to electric propulsion, just like goods and services being hostile to consumers is not unique to transportation. It's a society-wide thing and it's about locking people in and reducing uncondoned behavior. It's about subjugating people.
"your car exploded? well you didnt use a triple certified dealership for your last oil change so you cant hold us accountable for that. says so in the contract."
now obviously if a car had that level of danger.. you wouldnt even be able to get the oil change done anywhere but the dealership. and in modern times where we try to hold companies responsible for everything we possibly can, it makes sense that anytime there is a remote possibility of liability, they attempt to gate the customer out of it completely.
i feel like the general population has either grown to be, or always has been, so indifferent towards subtle legal differences that we continue broadening the strokes of liability which is causing us to lose the power to do many basic things ourselves as a trade off for avoiding any personal responsibility tied to the consequences of doing those things improperly.
This is interesting to me. Do conflicts of interest with both of your respective employers come up?
I do not think lawyers literally encouraged it, I just think that they are expensive and going proprietary helps avoid issues.
What's your take, though? Genuinely interested. It is widespread across the entire industry, so there appears to be an industry-related driving factor for it
Some designs are inherently harder to diagnose and repair though, even with access to OEM tools and parts. I reject the notion that being harder to repair is automatically bad, only when it is an intentional business decision to create vendor lock-in and not an engineering decision made to improve the quality of the product.
Electronics vastly simplify many many systems. Back when say trip odometers where fairly simple mechanical devices they where also yet another system that would eventually break. Building mechanical systems that can handle heavy vibration, large temperature swings, long lifespan, etc while being light, cheap, and easy to repair is difficult.
Unfortunately electronics just makes stuff less intuitive. The sensor can sit anywhere as long as it connects to the CAN bus so you don’t always have an easy to trace mechanical linkage etc etc.
It depends where you are, how well the car was designed, budget probably, luck
Meanwhile breaking 100k miles without issue seems to be a 50/50 shot on several models.
Look at fleet vehicles like taxis and police cars.
The difficulty level of fixing 90% or more of computer issues would best be categorized as EASY to VERY EASY and yet people are paid mid-5 to 6 figures to do them because of the same phenomenon.
Most people, when their car stopped going forward when they press the go pedal would have a panic attack and call a tow truck. Being the kind of person who has the knowledge to identify the issue, trace it to its origin, and to craft a kludge strong enough to resolve the issue saved you a tow and a repair fee, but you can't assume that because it's easy for you it would also be easy for anyone else.
I guess I'm just saying what we've all heard before, knowledge is power. Fixing your own car, or your own computer, or your own home is at some level knowledge work. Having the knowledge without the ability to use it is frustrating, so most people won't put the effort in to learn the knowledge until they have a use for it, and most of the time they won't have a use for it until it is too late to gain the knowledge.
Reliable cars don't necessarily have to be entirely electronic.
In 1975, they built things to be serviceable because they expected regular maintenance. Obviously if you neglect the maintenance you are going to have severe problems, but many people just didn't care about maintenance and drove them into the ground.
Now, they design for a certain lifetime without maintanence, after which it becomes prohibitively difficult/expensive or impossible to repair. This increases the perception of reliability especially given a population who won't do periodic maintenance.
If you look at the "survivor" vehicles that are old and ultra-high mileage, one thing that stands out is the owner(s) adhered strictly to the manufacturer's specified maintenance intervals.
I noticed at one point that I stopped seeing broken down cars. Sure, I’ll see accidents sometimes, but I cannot remember the last time I saw someone pulled over with an overheated car, something smoking, or just not running for whatever reason.
My main concern is long-term maintainability for imported vehicles by me personally. Even though I'm a software and electronics nerd, I still don't have all the things necessary to maintain a modern vehicle, nor do I want to be re-manufacturing PCBs or replacing surface mount components. So once any one of the dozens to hundreds of boards goes bad, you have to find a replacement, and you also have to hope that the of EEPROM is in the right state for your car in regards to error codes and calibration so that you can actually use it.
One example from a 2012 Toyota Crown, replacing some trim on the steering wheel tweaked one of the sensors out of calibration. During recalibration, part of the radar braking system failed to calibrate. The car is perfectly fine in 99.9% of parameters, but the computer has disabled every computer assist system and put others in limp mode until this one can be calibrated. No traction control, stability control, cruise control, ABS, magnetic suspension, all stopped. The car handles like a truck now. That's a tough problem to solve, and a really annoying one too, since the car would work at 100% capacity if only this sensor would calibrate. Dealer can't fix it, importers can't fix it, I can't fix it.
Contrasted to more rudimentary cars, I can pretty much fabricate or repair any part I need to as time goes on. As fewer shops will work on these cars as well, I pretty much need to be self-sufficient, so simpler is better.
So it's not about reliability, but maintainability, every car will fail eventually. Not everyone lives in the middle of a city with a dealership nearby, and in my experience not even dealers can get some of these parts anymore. I can't even get parts for a 2007 BMW from my dealer anymore.
I would say that some repairs are _easier_ now. The computer can tell you about many issues it knows about. You can see if a cylinder is misfiring. Or if the O2 sensor is bad. Etc. Just have to plug in a reader. It would be great to have some standardization and open documentation on this. But it beats dismantling stuff and trying to figure out by trial or error (or by listening to sounds)
Was this really just until the late 80s? I’m pretty sure I had cars with a traditional throttle cable with model years in the 90s or later.
Mazda Miata (MX-5) had it in the NB model (until 2005) too.
I even briefly considered doing so after reading a favorable review of the Comma2's driving algorithm by Consumer Reports, but decided too much could go wrong with messing with my car's throttle wiring.
- Reporting features for brake, gas, steering inputs, a la SNMP
- Computer assisted brake, with a backup linkage
- Fully electronic gas pedal, with a speed sensing cruise control
- Electric/electronic power steering, using a torque/relative deflection sensor
These features are case-by-case:
- Command based "write" access for brake/gas/steering
- Absolute steering position sensor
So a lot of older cars require special spliced cables to fake analog readouts or nonstandard digital links to retrofit a self drive, and newer cars still needs to be purchased with those input features enabled as well.
Want to link into any car in the last 5 years can-bus for anything beyond simple air-fuel mixture issues? You can't. You can't even reliably go to a mechanic down the road, as they don't carry the 500k a year license from GM for the proprietary OBD2 scanner.
This problem is 10 fold with electric cars, and 100 fold with Tesla or boutique EV manus.
Huh, I guess I was just imagining it when I plugged into the OBD-II port on my 2020 Ford and reprogrammed a bunch of engine and transmission parameters to improve performance. I certainly didn't have any proprietary Ford software or hardware.
I am particularly thinking about John Deere. Although not specific to Electric vehicles.
There are some boutique companies, and even some oems [2] that provide software to retune your engine but I have no experience, nor desire, to do that kind of tinkering.
1-https://www.amazon.com/Scanner-FORScan-Adapter-ELMconfig-Dia...
I don't have the expertise to set up all the parameters on my own, but I'm very happy with the tune they provided.
You can't do that with a generic OBD-II compliant tool and Ford's OEM firmware.
In your example, have you since taken it to ford and told them you did this? Better not, as you've broken your warranty and they will see this and report that to you.They will put this information on record, and you now have a nightmare selling the vehicle.
Again, and your example is a good one, ICU vehicles and manufacturers are at least addressable/self repairable. This is not the case so much for electric.
I understand having idiot lights for idiots, and sure, do that on the dash, but please give end users any way to get some actual info. It’s the “door ajar” when the vehicle knows which door but doesn’t disambiguate to the user. It’s bad design, or malicious design to boost dealer profits.
Steering angle: 0 degrees
LF wheel speed: 305 rpm
RF wheel speed: 293 rpm
LR wheel speed: 302 rpm
RR wheel speed: 285 rpm
In this case, it may be possible for the car to determine that you probably have some incorrect pressures, but it may not know exactly which tire(s) is/are wrong. Nor does it know what the pressures are.
In fact, your example looks more like one overinflated (or perhaps overheated) tire --- RR.
You still don’t know for sure that it needs inflated, because:
1. setting tire pressures incorrectly is not uncommon
2. That button is user accessible and might be pressed inadvertently or by someone who didn’t set the tires correctly
3. If all tires change in pressure at the same time, it would be undetectable
This is why these systems generally tell you to “check” your tires, rather than inflate a specific one. If they made that assumption, your car could be telling you to inflate an already overinflated tire.
There are many cars with tpms in the wheel that still won’t tell you what wheel it is or what’s the pressure, so I still much rather have no sensor to deal with trading the “inconvenience” of checking the tires once the light comes on, which is what you would do anyway.
I was explaining why the engineering of the system dictates the information that the interface provides.
It also perfectly calculates distance to empty in miles/kilometers.
2021-2023: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/electrical/other-electrica...
2015-2020: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/electrical/other-electrica...
2013-2014: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/electrical/other-electrica...
I don’t care what pressures the tires have as long as they are good. If I stop to inflate one, I check all of them anyway, with a real gauge. But that’s just me, I know.
The transponder in each tire just shouts out its serial number and pressure on 315mhz and then sleeps for a random amount of time. The car counts how many times it has heard the various serial numbers, and assumes the top four most frequently heard serial numbers are its own tires (as opposed to those on the car next to it).
It is sort of stupidly easy to gather location data from TPMS sensors. If I ran a major criminal gang I'd track the cop cars this way. 315mhz is almost VHF, it goes a long way. One receiver per city block should do it. Covering your turf would be easy.
That's one of the revelations from Snowden files. Us govt does this!
Other vehicles actually know which is which without being told. I'm not sure exactly how this is done, but I'm guessing/vaguely recall hearing they do this by using multiple receivers.
As for tracking from a distance - these sensors have very low output power, and a lot of their signal is blocked by the metal wheel. It can somewhat be done but you'll need more than one receiver per block if you want 100% coverage.
Sources: worked as a tire shop technician for a while, messed around with SDR, read a lot online. Also: https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-09111...
It's always been this way.
Mine was $150 and came with Honda support. Other manufacturers can be downloaded for $50.
Uhhh, except I have an OBD-II adapter in mine[0] and combined with an Android app[1] can see in detail basically everything about the car, including individual battery voltages inside the cell pack?
You can now monitor a piece of data you have no means whatsoever to adress outside of the tesla ecosystem. which is thrice fold not an issue with "open-er source" ICU vehicles because: 1. no concern for this battery (obvious I guess) 2. you can bring it to the mechanic down the street, 3. You can do it yourself with parts you source with a warranty that the dealer does not care about.
If your battery "starts to go", do you think you can go anywhere besides Tesla, and that they will not first charge you for a diagnostic using their license ODB2 software? Your diagnostic using a non licensed odb2 scanner and....android app will not allow them to bypass the diagnostic you will certainly have to have done by them, because of their insurance/warranty process requiring licensed equipment. ICU manufacturers DO pull the same shit, but you can at least bring the car to a cheaper mechanic who is hopefully footing the bill of the tooling/license.
Say you ARE Able to perform work outside of Tesla, better not tell Tesla that, or your vehicle will be blacklisted.
isn't that the way every industry intersecting with IT behaves, and isn't there always someone else fighting to open it up, so https://github.com/iDoka/awesome-canbus A curated list of awesome tools, hardware and resources for CAN bus
Late 80s? No, that's at least a decade off. OBD2 wasn't even made mandatory in the US until 1996. That's when things started to go off the rails.
A highly complex interconnected message bus has hundreds of bugs (guaranteed) and many unpredictable failure modes. Also diagnostics is potentially impossible if the manufacturer hides the details.
Simpler is always better.
After finding a good shoulder on which to beach my LTD and popping the hood, I found the problem: the socket side of the ball-and-socket throttle cable linkage had broken and would no longer hold together. Looking in my (voluminous undergrad compsci-student) trunk for a solution, my eyes landed on the -shiny- beigy PC tower, specifically the floppy drive. A couple strands of the disused 34-pin floppy cable well tied proved to be strong but flexible enough to hold that joint together and get me back to school.
Despite my college having a robust automotive program (which I even had a suitemate in), I never replaced the part and that hack held until I got rid of the car 10 years later (though I kept the other 30-odd strands of the cable in the glove box just in case).
While nostalgic, don’t read this as supportive because today I’m far more likely to find a CANBUS interface in my trunk than a floppy cable.
Good times.
Fun to drive! But it required a lot more maintenance than new cars today.
As a safety feature the car went into limp mode, limited it’s rpm and performance to less than about 40% of power and threw all the Christmas lights it could at the dash, error codes and idrive warnings.
I limped the car home and did a fault code reset from my laptop with the pirated bmw dealer software via a bluetooth-obdc2 dongle and it was fine after that.
Of course the problem continued under strenuous driving conditions. I could’ve replaced the pedal assembly but meh, it was always a good reminder to back off a bit in my 1800kg car.
It's a running joke on BMW forums, if someone throws that code most responses ask if they were driving fast and hit a pothole since that's a pretty consistent trigger.
There was often a combination of about 3-4 errors that would occur when it went into limp mode. To this day I’m not actually sure if replacing the pedal would’ve fixed it and I think off memory, it was a 220$ experiment to find out.
(On another note, make sure you’ve got the gearbox upgrade software if you haven’t already)
Nothing in the passage you quote indicates this is a conspiracy, merely a change.
Maybe it's more difficult because electricity is invisible, the techniques require new knowledge, or you're not familiar with it.
Or maybe it's as the article suggests - complex electronic machinery creates the possibility, not the necessity, of an manufacturer sealing everything from being repaired by individuals.
Is it beyond comprehension that a new technology can give many advantages and offers a number of problems? That people who criticize completely sealed systems aren't always "back to the good old days" Luddites (notably, even the historical Luddites didn't conform to what Luddite has come to mean now).
Maybe the car you were taking about is in the metaverse though?
edit:
Perhaps far more importantly, the concept of features as a service has suddenly caught the eyes of vehicle manufacturers, see Toyota latest debacle with deactivated remote starters. The more digital control they have....
This is really a question of when. People are rightly assessing the sale/lease of software by the second in the very near future. Imagine driving down the highway on the first of the month and your pedal deactivates because you forgot to update an expired credit card autopayment.
Future's looking bright, can't wait to get my toilet on CANbus
There already were airflow/pressure and throttle position sensors and idle control servo in the throttle body unless you mean carb antique.
Removing direct mechanical linkage decouples raw air flap control movement from driver intend (/1), allows things like dynamic throttle response, rev matching, better cruise control, better fuel efficiency by precise control over fuel/air mixture, lower emissions, and simplifies throttle body by removing a ton of mechanical junk.
/1 If you really think you need that in your life try flying older helicopters where You the pilot must act as an engine governor because thats how it worked in the 60s and thanks to insane aviation safety regulations everything got frozen in time with 1060s designs being still manufactured up to 2010.
Skoda at least (I expect all of the newer VWs, Audis, Seats, ...) use the built in mobile uplink to gather massive amounts of data about usage, e.g. how often the car is "pushed hard", or driven dangerously. Nobody knows exactly how they will use that, maybe to limit guarantees? - but if the cars is yours and yours only, this shouldn't matter, right? It shouldn't happen in the first place. Well, not anymore I guess.
The manufacturers will not limit these possibilities to a certain drive-train technology - why should they? It is also not limited to "newer companies", all of them will do it. Further, if the customer likes these models, the manufacturers (and increasingly more of them) will expand their offering.
Heck, the majority of cars on the street where I live are not legally owned anyway, they are all leased and people like that a lot.
Why wouldn't it matter? About 10 years ago, a friend bought a brand new VW Polo and after 2000km ended up with warped brake discs. When he went to the VW dealer to have them replaced under warranty, the dealer refused, claiming that the warrant only covers stuff like engine and bodywork and not consumable parts like brake discs, and also that brake discs should not warp under normal usage, which is one of the conditions of the warranty to be valid, and since they are warped, the dealer claimed that the owner mush have been driving his car outside of the normal usage specs the car is rated for and under which the warranty applies. I guess that telemetry will help manufacturers validate or invalidate warranty claims.
Laughs in GDPR
Sorry, is several million Euros in fines this year, a billion over its lifetime not toothy enough for you? They're going after big players, tiny companies, even individuals.
From personal experience, getting access to data about me is usually fast, demanding they delete it appears to work, and my own complaints to the national regulatory body have resulted in me getting my own way.
GDPR is great.
> They're going after big players
Don't you see the oxymoron in here? A billion is a non-event for a single one of the big players making their money on stalking, and you're saying that a billion over its lifetime (4 years) across all companies is toothy? Come on.
> my own complaints to the national regulatory body have resulted in me getting my own way.
I'm glad it works for you, and I guess you must live in a country where the regulator isn't completely useless. In my case, in the UK with the ICO, the best I managed to get out of them is a few letters which the company promptly ignored just like they ignored my own query, and this non-resolution still required significant admin work for me (just so they don't have an excuse to close your complaint on a technicality - despite being handed evidence of a GDPR breach).
I have a feeling this will be one of those one-sided advantages, the manufacturer will review the telemetry and only use the data if it assists them in denying a warranty claim.
You could have stopped there. After this point, there's really no more to be said.
Really? Because if I buy a brand new car and end up with warped brake discs after just 2000km, and the dealer refuses to fix it under warranty, I will raise hell regardless of what technicality the dealer/manufacturer will uses to justify not fixing it.
Warping is generally caused not by the rotor warping/bending so much as uneven wear or brake material deposits. This most frequently happens because the system is driven beyond design limits and overheated to the point that the pad material bonds with the rotor. It is also possible that this is a factory related issue and not overheating, but presumably this would have been noted on the test drive, and not after 2,000 km of gas.
If I'm the dealer, I ask myself which is more likely: 1. that my delivery inspection mechanic and the customer failed to notice a braking system issue at the time of sale, or 2. that a customer with a new car took it out and pushed it to the limits?
That said, ruined in 2000km is ridiculous, certainly a manufacturing defect.
That's laughable. I have to replace rotors on a semi-regular basis. It's absolutely normal if you drive your car hard even on the street.
He turned out to be right: I only recently replaced the rotors at 150,000 miles whereas at 100,000 miles, my Saturn and Ford had already had at least one rotor replacement. Since a lot of people will get a new car before the old one hits 100k, they may think of rotors as something that never needs replacing.
OTOH: those Nissan rotors were an absolute bitch to get off by that point. I was wearing hearing protection while wailing away at them with a 5lb hammer for at least 10 minutes each before they came loose.
It's not the cars that are becoming less car-person centric that's the root of the so-called problem. It's the people themselves that are becoming less car-centric. As we continue to have more and more people in cities (growth outside large cities is basically nil) we need cars less and less. That means ultimately that we care very little about cars. We lease them to get rid of them as soon as possible, we want the least amount of trouble versus the easiest trouble to fix, etc.
It's not the cars, it's the people.
Cars now use an ETC (electronic throttle control) managed by a computer, as is just about everything else on engines these days. Naturally, this makes vehicles more difficult to repair...
Citation needed. Might be more expensive, but swapping out the broken module the OBD reader told you to swap is probably not going to be that hard. The actual module is probably under the dash near the pedal, but that's probably the extent of the difficulty. And that's assuming that you ever need to replace it. You'll probably sell the car first. Throttle cables, OTOH...
As technology in our cars continues to advance, repairability and maintenance are becoming a real issue. Just ask any old-school mechanic
No, you go ask any old-school mechanic, because this old-school mechanic who quit professionally turning wrenches in the '90s sez "hurray!" to our electronically-controlled low-maintenance overlords. Because I'd rather not spend another evening replacing a set of ignition points so that I can get to work in the morning. We drive our vehicles until the wheels fall off, but for those that lease a vehicle for three years, my guess is you're not doing jack maintenance-wise before the lease is up (you will have to change oil on an ICE).
What happens when your fancy electric vehicle stops getting software updates.
Ooooooh, scary question! It'll be just like TFA's phone example: hackers will hack my car!!11! No, wait...I know the answer to this one because our Nissan Leaf quit getting updates when the 3G was shut off, and I've not taken it back to the dealer in several years. And the answer is...nothing happens. I mean, what's the assumed answer to what the author must think to be a rhetorical question?
Tesla essentially made the first electric car people wanted to drive. It did that with a clear inspiration from the smartphone world, hiding and locking away all the ugly internals with a slick touchscreen interface. Of course other manufacturers are going to follow the most successful player, but at the same time they don't want to alienate their already established (ICE) consumer base and its network of dealers and mechanics.
Electric cars are a clean slate and they can afford to be bold with anti-features, Tesla have shown that they can get away with it.
Where are you going to get that replacement module (which is entirely proprietary) after the dealer is no longer selling them?
When the throttle cable on my 1950s car snaps I can simply get a new cable from a thousand places. A cable is a cable.
A hundred years from now, I confidently bet that there will be a lot more still-running cars from the 1950s-1990s than any newer ones because the newer ones become quickly impossible to fix as soon as the factory and dealer stop carrying those model-specific propietary parts.
The cars from the 50s were incredible polluters. Part of the reason we even have emission standards was because of how much NOx and unburnt fuel came out the tailpipe. When the last one bites the dust I'll miss it as much as I miss a stage coach.
With your specific example, nothing happened, which is the best case scenario, yes?
The problem is the potential for inconvenience and disaster is there. I do not look forward to the day when my auto manufacturer forgets to renew a domain name and all of a sudden every single car by that maker cannot start its engine because it can't connect to HQ.
It's a contrived example, sure, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
- Loads of aftermarket conversions of existing cars to EVs are done by third parties using a wide range of components from OEMs, custom built stuff, or scrapped EVs. E.g. Tesla batteries have a high value for this. Not that hard apparently.
- There are companies providing aftermarket upgrades to Teslas and other EVs to e.g. install custom batteries. For example, Our Next Energy (One) has installed their batteries in Teslas and other vehicles: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/05/our-next-energy-tests-i.... So, it's not true you are dependent on the OEM for this. Same with many older EVs that are still servicable. E.g. the original Nissan Leaf from twelve years ago can be equipped with after market battery replacements.
- Tesla recently urged owners of older models to come in to replace their 3G modules with 4G replacements to keep the over the air updates and other online stuff going. The cars work fine without that but obviously lose some functionality as 3G networks are being shut down.
- ICE vehicles are similarly software intensive. It's just that most vendors are a bit behind on update procedures and the update procedure generally sucks. They're busy switching to EVs instead of developing new ICE vehicles, so there's a lot of effectively unsupported software in the field that will never get serviced even if it is full of bugs. Which is of course common because most car manufacturers aren't very good at creating software. It's not a problem if the car keeps on running.
- Lots of things are software intensive these days. This is not unique to EVs. Why single those out?
Tesla does need to have approved vendors at some point, but I definitely understand their logic in blocking access.
Very much this. The description in the article sounds like owning a laptop vs a desktop pc. People don't care that they can't upgrade their car if they're just going to get a new one every three years anyway that has better features and twice the range. It's not how I buy cars, but the majority of car buyers don't buy cars like I buy cars.
They're been doing it for decades at this point. Which part of it aren't they good at?
I'm not in the automotive industry, but the code I write has to conform to MISRA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Industry_Software_Reliab...) guidelines. I think they've learned a few things by now.
How do you expect automotive to not suck when the rest of the software world delights in it?
http://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRUB...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449559
"In a nutshell, the team led by Barr Group found: “a systematic software malfunction in the Main CPU that opens the throttle without operator action and continues to properly control fuel injection and ignition” that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe."
And the black box could fail to record any braking input in such cases.
That's not good! People died! And you would have a hard time convincing a jury that the driver was not at fault, if not for the thorough independent code review.
And that's the safety critical stuff, now imagine all the code for the infotainment systems.
Right now the price point of EVs is in the Luxury segment, and these people have never cared about the long term aspects of car ownership. Old cars are low status cars, so they unload them.
The drivetrain cost of EVs is probably under ICE in Tesla (they aren't pricing them like that, they are milking the market right now), and probably will in main auto in a few years, and it will plummet from there as economies of scale hit the OEM component makers. EVs are just batteries, 1-4 motors, and a control. system. Brakes for extra stopping power over regenerative braking if you want.
So the lower end will start to blossom in the next few years.
A lot of right to repair is to keep it under warranty. That's a legit antitrust concern between everyman mechanic and the auto makers. After warranty, if there's enough cars, there will be people that can fix them. And again, it's less components.
Who cares?
Cars don't normally get updates after they leave the factory, unless you take them to a dealership - usually because there's a recall. Tesla is changing this, and expect other companies to follow suit.
But there's really zero reason why this is going to be confined to electric vehicles. The engine literally makes no difference. It was historically easier on EVs because, given that the engine is not always rotating, belts were not feasible. So they had electric steering (and other things like electric climate control). Regenerative breaking meant that you had to delegate braking action to the computer too.
However, ICE vehicles already use an ECU, so engine is already software based. Then, we have ABS and lane assist (and adaptive cruise control, etc) which means that some computer can control the throttle, brakes and steering too.
Other features like infotainment are completely orthogonal to the drive train.
> For now, we’ll continue to buy cars that are increasingly more difficult and costly to repair
Seems like the author hasn't bought an ICE vehicle recently. They are all more difficult to repair. Even things like replacing the infotainment system are no longer feasible since it's all integrated.
This article sounds like FUD against EVs.
Anyone that realizes these cars are a security nightmare? Wifi and cellular on a car! Brilliant!
The fact that ransomware hasn't yet hit cars is as shocking as it is inevitable. Russia literally disabled all ViaSat phones before invading. Telsas literally download firmware at will when a centralized server tells them to!
Edit: actually, looks like the attacks are already underway! https://fortune.com/2021/03/19/russian-pleads-guilty-ransomw...
No they don't, you're prompted to download software updates, they aren't automatic.
But ofc that’s just one remote attack avenue.
Let's look at washing machines: (or any other appliance) If you buy a washing machine there is limited incentive for the manufacturer to make it repairable or easy to dismantle and recycle the parts. Also for the owners there are incentives to run it as long as they can, while new, resource (energy, water, ...) efficient replacements will come out.
If you turn this around and make it a rental system where you buy 1000 runs or so the producer for one is incentived to make sure they have as little service cases as possible, so the machine has to be robust enough for that. And then when taking it back they have an interest to recycle the parts as good as they can since it's suddenly their problem and people get new or refurbished machines regularly which reduces resource usage.
Switching to such a model ain't easy, but interesting to me nonetheless.
The problem with rental system is user now has less incentive to treat rented item well. But overall I think it still leads to less production and less resource usage.
The manufacturer could make a cost/benefit-analysis, concluding that building a machine that lasts approx. these 1000 runs but no longer, and paying for recycling afterwards is cheaper than building something that lasts and is recyclable.
Also, replacing it every ~200 cycles with just another cheaply built throwaway-machine could also become a viable business model. Why should the manufacturer care, if it becomes cheaper?
You could also make the manufacturer pay for recycling anyway - which is the case in the EU for several device classes IIRC, no need for a rental model to establish that. For some devices this means that the manufacturer has to take it back when you are done with it. The problem of course is that this is directly paid for by the customer - and by itself does not change anything.
But my argument is that it wouldn't for the rental model either.
For example the lint filter could have a sensor and owner could be punished if they didn't clean that :)
Machines wear unevenly and maintenance could prolong the lifespan considerably.
Another problem: the Global South is a huge user of second hard stuff (car, phones, everything).
"smart" devices kill the second hand market on purpose, to prevent reuse, leading to way more consumption and pollution.
Never trust market forces to solve environmental problems.
Note that this is not exclusive to cars. Presonus did this to me when I purchased a StudioLive rack mixer. The previous owner had access to the “free” DSP programs it has built-in to do various effects like compression in the device itself. When he switched the registration to me, those were disabled and I’d have to pay to unlock them, because as Presonus said, they were only free as a promo offer to the initial purchaser and non-transferable, despite other parts of the licensed software being transferable. To add insult, that pack of DSP plugins that run in this thing are the ONLY available plugins, so it’s not like I can get some open-source or third-party ones.
I dislike them so much after this whole interaction that I won’t ever buy their stuff again and will repeat this story to anyone who will listen. I didn’t pay for the plug-in pack a second time, because I refuse to give them more money. I just got an external compressor instead.
Anyway, total BS IMO for manufacturers to disable functionality that the hardware had when new when it changes hands.
I drive a 20 year old car, my local government is pushing for me to buy a newer one "cos emissions". Which is ridiculous - I drive it infrequently enough that the cost of just making the body of a new car and nothing else would outweigh the savings.
The endgame seems to basically be that I move out of the city, which would be a massive own goal emissions/energy wise because it's far more costly for me to bop around on my own land miles away from services than it is for me to use my car once or twice a week whilst taking public transport most of the time. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Even trashing your working ICE car to buy an EV is a net negative if your car is still running fine. Unless you drive a _lot_, the least polluting car you can get is the one you already have. And that's not even talking about the energy sources used to produce the energy to charge the EV....
What we're witnessing is the last creation of capitalism, aka "green capitalism", but it's still about mindlessly consuming, you just get to feel good about it regardless of the reality.
> For example, a typical medium sized family car will create around 24 tonnes of CO2 during its life cycle, while an electric vehicle (EV) will produce around 18 tonnes over its life. For a battery EV, 46% of its total carbon footprint is generated at the factory, before it has travelled a single mile.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
My car has 100g/km CO2 emissions. I'd need to drive 10000km or 6500mi to emit a ton of carbon.
But that's like, loads. I use the car for occasional 10-20 mile drives to DIY stores or whatever. I'd need to do that every day for a year to even get close to 1t.
For a new car we're talking 10x that, at minimum.
Is anyone really advocating for 'trashing' working vehicles? I thought we proved how dumb that was back in '08...
Seals fail, emissions management devices wear out, fluids start to leak, it's terrible. Constant repairs with uncertain outcome. It's worse for cars.
There's always a scenario where an old car is a perfectly fine alternative, but there are lots of situations where the older car is less safe and emits substantially more than a newer alternative.
"Cash 4 Clunkers" was a disgrace, but mobility and ease of access to transportation are a public good and a utility that should be easily available to all, not just those people who can afford a newer car or people who've got a low mileage volvo 240 in the garage for when they want to go camping.
For CO2 absolutely, but for local air quality it makes sense for us all to run out and buy EVs as quickly as possible.
At least in London, air pollution has been a major concern for some time now.
The same goes for buying items made of recycled materials, a more power-efficient computer, and so forth. That's great - if you actually need the new item. If you are getting the replacement solely for environmental reasons you have to consider the impact of producing the new item and disposing of the old one before making that call.
The CFD manufacture and disposal cost are sunken costs - you shouldn't include those in most calculations.
Counter-intuitively for high use situations, the longer the CFD has left to live the more obvious it is to change it sooner to save $ and the environment.
Assuming ① cost in dollars is proportional to environmental cost (edit: for both electricity and LED bulb), ② electricity costs $0.10 per kWh, ③ LED bulbs live as long as CFD bulbs, ④ LED bulb uses 7W whereas CFD uses 14W for the same lumen output, then if CFD has 5000 hours left, you can save $3.50 of electricity. If cost of LED is reasonably less than $3.50, it is obvious it makes sense to replace CFD with LED.
If the bulb would never need to be replaced (examples: very low usage; you are moving out soon; or house is going to be demolished before bulb is replaced) then it may make sense to leave a CFD in place.
The price of the LED is an investment with a payback period, so if you can't afford it or you have better returns for that investment elsewhere then you shouldn't replace the CFD.
If your electricity comes from your own renewables, then the calculation is different again. Although note that in most countries nearly 100% of your reduced electricity usage will result in a nearly 100% reduction in non-renewables like gas or coal (even if your country is say 80% renewables). Marginal generation and usage matters.
If you can find a better source than your professor, I would be interested.
Yes but the manufacture and disposal of the LED aren't yet. The calculation you want is whether running the inefficient CFL ends up being better than the energy used in the whole supply chain of manufacturing and shipping the LED bulb.
Switching means spending led_rate + 2 supply_chain costs while keeping your old bulbs means cfl_rate + 1 supply_chain. I'd put money that the latter being better for the environment.
Edit: To the person who downvoted me but didn't reply do tell how literally throwing away a 10W CFL and replacing it with a 6W LED is better for the environment than just using the CFL until it breaks and then buying an LED.
I didn't downvote you (can't downvote replies). I generally downvote people who comment about downvotes (even edits), since it is against HN guidelines. If you get downvotes, the value is in wondering to yourself: why. Not that the person who originally downvoted you is unlikely to reread your comment.
I deserve downvotes for this comment for mentioning downvoting, and perhaps because I went off-topic.
Edit: also IMHO worrying excessively about karma makes for unhealthy conversations.
Companies feel the need to not just earn money when they sell their product, but earn to even more over its whole lifetime. This refocuses their goal into providing products that regularly need some attention, which only they can provide, instead of creating the best product they can before it is sold, and let the customer and third-parties maintain it if necessary.
Then there's issues like that one with early versions of the Model S that had a flash chip that wore out prematurely. Tesla's "put everything on one big motherboard" approach is good for reliability and manufacturing because there aren't any connectors to deal with, but it (generally) means you have to replace the whole thing if something breaks.
The upcoming Dacia Spring EV is a perfect counter-example.
I really would like to get a Tesla, but besides the manufacturing issues (like large gaps between the panels) the IP and data issues are really putting me off.
- Car is always online, gets OTA updates, GPS is always running
- Cameras inside of the car
- Tesla can remotely downgrade or deactivate the car
- Independent mechanics can't repair many things
I understand they needed to completely redo the platform to take advantage of the EV characteristics (e.g. you need space below to put the battery, you can design the car around the lower center of mass, you don't need an engine bay, ...). But I think they should have kept the Golf name and the interior concept (mechanical switches etc.) when switching to the new platform. After all, you buy a VW (here in Europe at least) if you want a no-nonsense, slightly boring, solid car and are willing to pay a little bit more. It's like an understated status symbol.
Drawbacks are: really hot climates will mess up the battery due to lack of active cooling. Really cold climates require the cold weather package for the battery warmer. Nissan doesn't really have a good story when the battery needs replacement - but maybe third party shops will by then.
If you do have QuickCharging, it uses ChaDeMo, which is dying. But it's still commonplace and will be for a while.
Other than that, I don't think about maintenance (maybe tire rotation and cabin filter?). No need to think when the next oil change is due. Registration renewal doesn't require a smog check. No OTA updates (both a blessing and a curse). It works as a normal vehicle for all intents and purposes, minus gas stations.
Battery replacement is technically quite easy. The main issue is the availability (or lack thereof) of replacement batteries.
Modern EVs have quite a lot of "smart" software functionality just like modern ICE cars. Both modern ICE and EVs have complex ECUs that may need proprietary equipment to service. Most are a lot less smartphone-like than Tesla though.
Our old Kia Soul EV is just like Kia Soul... but EV.
We're now upgrading to Hyundai Ioniq 5, which is a small iteration towards "smartness" compared to the Kia. You can remotely check charging status and start the heater/cooler from your phone, so it is connected and always online I guess. There are OTA updates, but only for infotainment, not for drivetrain like with Tesla. No camera inside the car. I seriously doubt Hyundai will do remote downgrades or deactivations. I don't know of any issues for independent mechanics.
A car that requires a subscription or an account to use all of its features. Or a car that requires me to use a big touchscreen while driving.
I do like all kinds of modern conveniences, like lane assist or semi-autonomous driving on the autobahn/freeway. I like it when the media center is smart and can play Spotify and show me a list of radio channels with pictures and so on.
I don't like it when the media center or the GPS is too deeply integrated into the car, I've had too many cars where the radio became outdated quickly. Ideally, you should be able to buy the car and the media center separately like in the olden days, but I think that ship has sailed.
What I don't like is car makers using DRM and other tech to extract more money from me. Cars are ridiculously overpriced anyway (First, cars loose a lot of value the moment you leave the dealership. Second, the dealerships are able to give crazy discounts on the list price.)
That's Tesla and Tesla copycats. Most EVs are not like that.
> A car that requires a subscription or an account to use all of its features
Bunch of ICE vehicles have this sort of thing now.
It's not fully disconnected, but I basically feel like it's my car. I don't pay for any subscriptions (OnStar and XM are both available), and software updates are possible OTA but not required. No cameras (as far as I know) anywhere besides the backup cam.
I'm not sure how repairable the electronics are as luckily I've never needed any non-warranty work done. There was an issue with the hands-free mics and I took it in to a local dealer and they just replaced a module under warranty.
On the downside, it's a city car. Gets 260 miles of range, but fast charge rates are outdated (55kw max) and make road tripping harder than a more modern EV.
Re. panel gaps and build quality, yes, the outside build/paint quality is about average (the seats are _very_ nice) but this is not why I bought a Tesla. I wanted the next generation vehicle tech and a car that can really go without making a fuss. Had I wanted absolutely even panel gaps, I would have bought a German or Japanese gas car.
Re. OTA updates, my 3+ year old car feels it was bought this year because of OTA updates. I have no desire to acquire a new model because the newer model will practically be identical to mine, apart from the mileage.
[edit:typos]
While it's a massive advantage for Tesla, that's a bit too harsh and highly dependent on where you live.
Note that over 90% of all trips even in the US are well within the range of modern EVs.
I'm interested because I've had similar questions myself. I'd like to buy an electric car but hate touch screen controls, telemetry, and being forced to rely on the manufacturer for repairs. So far I don't know of any EVs that come without those design issues.
The 500e is virtually identical to the ICE version of the car, with a very hacked up looking shifter filler panel with buttons to control the motor and charger jack inside the gas filler door. The main downside with the compliance car life is they are all very short range, generally 50-100 miles. Also now that the program is shut down you don't get the rebate anymore so they are all discontinued (but readily available used).
There is no DRM on the Bosch SMG system, I have an android app and bluetooth adapter that lets you view all of the CAN messages, and many people online have successfully rebuilt their batteries with more modern cells to increase the range.
He was able to rescue the existing deep discharged battery in his car, but the steps would be roughly the same to replace a submodule (readily available from totals cars).
There are also people looking into replacing the individual prismatic cells (the 500e is built with 63AHr samsung SDI cells, and there are now 120AHr cells available in the same form factor) but so far the only success story is from an outfit in Europe building custom packs out of banks of cylindrical cells https://www.fiat500owners.com/threads/upgrading-battery-for-...
I also own a new electric vehicle connected to the internet that updates itself once in a while. I know various non-official garages in my area that can fix it when it’s out of warranty. I guess if I remove the modem, it will simply stop updating automatically, and I will lose a few features like the smartphone app, like my other car.
The new one is a Tesla model y.
Our evil overlords want to make every tool, every convenience, every means of existence require a wifi connection, a smartphone, a web browser, a username and password, and -- most importantly -- a hefty, relentlessly increasing monthly fee.
If they ever get neural implants into us, you'll pay $10 a month to shit.
Your second point is valid, a lot of stuff is shipped with stuff that isn't useful for end consumer or even anti consumer outright. The solution to this is to push for right to repair laws, patent reform, open source, etc and not decry modern technology altogether.
Updates were not necessary.
If you want to understand and be able to modify everything about your transportation then ride a bicycle (not electric of course!)
Personally, I think the system was much more "capitalistic" and a lot less limiting when you just needed general tools and knowledge to repair stuff in an entire category (cars, electrical household machines, etc.). I'd really like to see where this is going to end up a hundred years from now. I don't think all the long-term implications of this trend are really clear at this point yet. A more complex society may have to live with less freedom for individuals and compensate elsewhere. Even if at least some of current complexity is purposefully made for the purpose to create artificial restrictions, there may also be benefits that I'm unable to see from my low vantage point. Maybe in the future it offers manufacturers options to create really useful value on top of such restrictions, I don't know yet.
There are manufacturers out there, like Surly and Rivendell, who still make bikes that are easy to maintain yourself. Touring bikes are usually a good bet. Mountain bikes and gravel bikes from 5 years ago, too, but top-of-the line models used for competitions in both sports are increasingly moving toward tomfoolery like electronic shifters.
You get that by speccing good, but not top-end uber-fancy parts and building 26" wheels with solid, but easily replaceable parts. And a good saddle.
As for the other ends of that spectrum, I'm going to paraphrase a quote I heard about GM cars years ago: a Walmart bike will run like shit longer than a bike with electronic shifting will run at all.
If you don't buy anything with electronics, the worst you'll have to deal with are hydraulic brakes. Which have been on cars for how many decades?
You've been able to get them on bikes for 20 years, and motorcycles (which have similar packaging and space/routing constraints to bicycles) far longer. They just aren't that hard to work on. At the risk of getting into no true Scotsman territory, are there any decent bike shops that can't fix them? Fifteen years ago, I'd forgive a shop that couldn't deal with them. It's table stakes now.
On your car, i also like old cars, because you can bring it to every mechanic, or do it yourself. I like the basic car, and hope EV's will come that are also simple and build like Lego, so you can easy switch some (electronic) parts.
Who need large displays, self driven cars, and other gadgets. A vehicle is just a useful thing to bring you from A to B on a save way, we dont need distraction from all the expensive gadgets, just safety and comfort.
Just keep cars simple please.
Most consumers will buy the cheaper Y if it provides the same day-to-day value as the more expensive but repairable Y.
Right to repair is a much greater proportion of pining for the "good ol' days" than anything. When the complexity and manufacturing maturity were not that high, increasing complexity usually meant reducing reliability.
The idea that products can deliver greater sophistication, comfort and efficiency without adding complexity is preposterous. At some point the complexity becomes so high that it's not safe for a non-expert to work on it.
Imagine a customer bricking a $30,000 car because they wanted to repair it. Who would they blame? Themselves? "Well they shouldn't have made it this way!"
When my current, modest petrol vehicle becomes to cost inefficient to look after, I'm not going to bother getting another one. I live in a major city with good public transport so will leverage that, ride my bike and hire a car if I need one.
The book was prescient in many ways.
They could have titled this clickbait article “The demand for EV mechanics is very high”.
The jump from hard to repair to you don’t own your vehicle is asinine. By this logic, I don’t own my TV, MacBook, Car door opener, Bluetooth headphones, or my Hot Pockets either. Hot Pockets are nearly impossible to put back together once opened.
The battery is the most expensive part in the car, no way manufacturers would put them in and not expose them through software just to sell at a lower price point. That's just not how the world works.
Tesla, as well as every other long term lithium battery producer limits the amount you can use to protect the longetivity of the battery. Their company wouldn't do so well if after 3 years reports of severely degraded batteries started coming out.
It still supports the article's point, but it's a lot less malicious. You don't get to decide how much to drain your battery because Tesla has a reputation to maintain.
That is literally what Tesla did in Canada:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/40153/heres-why-tesla-still-se...
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...
And while this does have some extra benefit in terms of battery lifetime, it's fucked up that you wouldn't be able to choose the % charge on batteries that you supposedly own.
Maybe in 10+ years if large EV trucks have options for no internet/cellular network connection and no touch screens I might get one. They have a lot of bugs to work out and competition to create.
This is the point where we in Europe smugly point to the GDPR.
Squeezing on one side inflates the other side.
The problem is that technology as a force amplifier is getting better and better. At some point it gives the 1% enough power and artificial smarts to enslave the 99% indefinitely. When people in history have overthrown slavery, the masters couldn't stop all transportation in the country (minus bicycles) with the push of a button. That's where we are headed here. Same with the cash-less society and so on.
That's what they want you to believe. When the platform is controlled by the corporates, without any regulation, 99% of the individuals don't matter.
We are entering the own-nothing-be-happy era of human history, and there's not a God-damn thing you can do about it because market forces are prevailing against you.
An example is computing. General purpose computing for the masses is moribund. The fundamental reason has little to do with the greed of OEMs (though that is very much a thing). It has a lot to do with the fact that end users don't want to be sysadmins. So they delegate the maintenance of their machine to the vendor. To keep costs down and the experience smooth, those vendors have an interest in restricting what can be run on their machines, and monitoring the machines' use to find problems (and run a side business selling that info to advertisers... the machines themselves are so low-margin, if not negative-margin that residual income for their use is a MUST to satisfy shareholders).
And so it's becoming the same for cars. People these days don't want to be responsible for a cars' maintenance, they just want to pay a sum for a few years' use of the car. Accepting that the vendor will take care of maintenance, as well as whatever restrictions the vendor chooses to implement, is still a win for the consumer. Therefore this model will dominate in the marketplace, and the option of owning your car outright will be like the option of owning a non-smart TV: not worth the money for manufacturers.
It's perfectly possible for ICE car manufacturers also to start adopting this "expansion pack for cars" model
If it flies, fucks, or floats: rent it.
This was in a story about never buying a boat because it's a giant money pit for maintenance. I'd imagine it would include cars if that was possible, which is finally becoming a reality.
I believe renting should be the default and ownership is the alternative for people who need it (like pickup trucks for work and maybe commuters).
For the rest, it depends on how much you're going to use it. A boat or a plane (or an RV), you're likely to use less than you project you will at the time you're thinking of buying one, so it's easy to get suckered into buying something that you won't use enough to justify owning. But you probably know fairly accurately how much you use a car, unless you just made a significant lifestyle change.
And I suspect that most people who own cars use them much more heavily than you suspect when you say that renting should be the default.
EVs existed before connectivity and none of the issues cited in the article were in those early versions. Similarly, connected non electric cars have the same problem. See BMW which built cars with heated seats but required you to give them extra money to activate them, all the examples with John Deer, connected range rovers that you could remote open, etc.
I'm not shocked by the fact that companies like Toyota and co. will try to leverage random small features like remote open or remote diagnostics that require connection to start charging you monthly. Subscription economy is the shitty way the world is moving to, and any industry that didn't pivot there yet is getting very jealous.
As he himself acknowledges in the article, this is really a problem that's emerging more and more in all modern vehicles.
Lots of welders here too. I can definitely see in my future doing this and putting 40-50Kwh and some high torque motors on the wheels. There are apparently some books on amazon for this shit too.
https://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Electric-Vehicle-Third/dp/...
There was a similar but more general thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30144101
Ended up writing a book about it and probably made a whole lot of money.
It's an especially cruel form of vendor lock-in and has caused me to reevaluate the selection criteria for the next vehicle I purchase.
I want the simplest EV possible.
[1] https://www.stellantis.com/en/investors/events/strategic-pla...
However, it need not be harder than it should be if manufacturers are not hostile towards 3rd part repair. That’s job of the government to mandate it. Most manufacturers want control over their processes to ensure, in the least, the repair is done right and it won’t end up as bad press and reputation damage due to someone else’s screw ups.
EVs are in their infancy. So don’t expect perfection just yet. Give it a few decades and regulation will catch up.
It's just a charger, an inverter, battery, and drive unit (motor). Apparently the electric brake assist off the prius is plug and play due to how failover mode works when disconnected from a main computer. I suspect a lot of older cars will end up repowered by an electric motor simply because people love the car, not the engine, nor the endless tinkering to keep it running acceptably, and all the oil and grease involved.
At some point, I think there will be a greater demand for right-to-repair form of ownership where you can fix (by yourself) or bring your vehicle to another company which will have some knowledge in how to resolve your vehicle's issue.
Author makes a nice point though about future of EVs where convenience of renting or on demand lease of vehicles become the norm.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/19/a-recent-aptera-video-g...
Software is eating the electronic things and mechanical things remaining. Now it’s AI and the connected things doing it again.
Also cars are cheaper, more efficient, more reliable use less materials, are way safer, etc.
But yes I wonder what will happen in 20 years with those high tech vehicle, but imagine the tech we will have in 20 years. Every car will be electric, self driving and cheap. Solar energy will be cheap and everywhere.
My first 2 cars, I could work on. They were old, easy to fix and didn't require special tools. My 2006 Yaris has a pressurized diesel system I can't mess with. So that needs specialist knowledge.
Also my phone need a certain level of complexity "my" car have NO REASON to from my own personal perspective: I do not need a connected car. I do not need a car where the OEM have the control and I have not. Such choice for cars are made for the sake of OEM, of surveillance capitalism, not for end users.
Also I do my best NOT using "my phone" exactly because of the crappy crap it is, I'll do my best to be desktop-bound, FLOSS desktop, I can't do much for UEFI and other fw crap, but at least they are less invasive and untrustable that Android/iOS.
For me, for cars and social evolution in general there is only one option: a big push from the people that mandate open hardware and free software making surveillance so heavily punished that no one have interest to steer in that direction.
My heating system can kill me and my family. I trust the engineer to do a good job. That's no different to my car. My 2006 Yaris has a computer that could cause the engine to explode. The engineers where my car is serviced have must trust.
But truly, in either of those cases my ownership is beholden to others. I don't truly own it without support from others. Your FLOSS desktop will receive updates from people you don't know.
So the difference here is trust. I completely agree with the social evolution statement; that is inevitable.
I agree with your trust issue but I think we already trust technology companies for many parts of our lives.
The difference is, in some places, it is not possible to own a new car.
One of those places is the USA, where you miss out on a lot if you don't have access to a car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8McUViPbh6M
P.S. just look at the new Koenigsegg electric motor. So much potential.
If you see “vehicle” and automatically think “car”, consider why that might be.
I'd also point out that the traffic holding up your bus is mostly cars :) so if enough people can be persuaded to shift to the denser form of transport (buses), those buses would waste less time in traffic — and so would the fewer people using cars out of necessity, and emergency services and so on.
Disclaimer: I'm an idiot, these are my random thoughts on the subject, I'm not an expert in lcd reliability, but have designed many products with LCD in them, or that were LCD displays themselves.
LCDs are solid state, but are still incredibly complex pieces of engineering. Early on in Teslas life there is a famous story about them using consumer grade (not automotive) in their cars because the latter simply wasn't available. This highlights an important difference between automotive applications and others. Automotive component specs are more stringent on vibration and thermL requirements than say consumer products or medical devices. It gets really hot inside the cabin of a car, also really cold. This thermal cycling, and vibration is hell on things that are sensitive to thermal shock like things made of composted of many different materials (glass, plastic, epoxy, clear conductive magic stuff, etc) which is exactly what a LCD screen is.
On the other hand, buttons are dead simple. Many are 3 or 4 parts, all super reliable and with great quality control.
Another way to think about it, is a plastic piece with two copper contacts, a spring (often molded into one of the plastic parts directly), and a plastic housing more complex or less reliable than the amazing complex beast that is a LCD display.
(I suppose EVs can, in some limited ways, be harder to repair than combustion cars, but that's like 10% of the point of the article maximum.)
Electricity is one of the fundamental forces. Using an element like hydrogen will never be as efficient.
To beat electricity, you may be able to do it by controlling one of the other fundamental forces such as gravity.
This is fine. Gasoline has horrendous losses too.
The problem is that the most economical way of making hydrogen is by using fossil fuels(natural gas). Just burn the natural gas instead.
I'm not sure what "horrendous" losses you're referring to, but I assume you mean losses due to inefficiency in combustion. That's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the fact that hydrogen does not occur in its combustible form on Earth. You can't just refine it by purifying something that comes out of the ground, the way gasoline is refined from crude oil. You have to produce it by some process that basically reverses the chemical reaction that will take place when you burn it. And since the chemical reaction of burning produces a large amount of energy (otherwise you wouldn't use it to do things like power cars), reversing that reaction requires a large amount of energy (which is why steam reforming, as the article you reference says, is strongly endothermic). All that is in addition to the thermodynamic losses that will occur during combustion when you burn the fuel.
I sure own my Porsche EV.
I don't have the daily thrills/hassles of the constant OTA updates, because they don't do them except for the radio.
Not concerned about repairability when the designs are so simple there's almost nothing to break...plus it has a good warranty.