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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

The article tries to make this about EVs, but really this seems to be more about modern cars in general.

Even more general, consumer electronic products.

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.

It's especially problematic for cars to be consumer electronics products, because the lifetime of a car can easily be twenty or thirty years. That's not the expectation for most consumer electronics devices.

Well... they would love to sell you an new one every couple of years!

I know they would and a lot of people buy new cars at that frequency, but the old cars are going to keep getting used by somebody as long as they still function. If the infotainment system is dated and doesn't interoperate with the latest music file formats that's not the end of the world, but if the car has remotely-exploitable security flaws because it has an always-on network connection and the software hasn't been patched in years, that's a whole other problem.

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.

Which itself is kind of a problem, especially now that Moore's law has slowed down...

"You will own nothing, and be happy."

Exactly! The problem of "not being able to repair your car by yourself anymore" is already years old and worsened gradually over time. Ok, with "older" (non-Tesla) cars you don't have OTA updates, but you still have lots of electronics for which you need a specialized repair shop. In fact, I would be glad to receive free updates for my 5-year-old Ford Focus. Instead, I have to live with 5 year old maps on the built-in GPS, or go to a dealer and pay $$$ to have them updated.

They won't update your maps. They'll just put advertisements that you're forced to watch at loud volume before the car will permit you to start it.

You can update yourself, go to eBay, search Ford Sync 3 update, should cost about $40.

Just because most of the EVs are software heavy, it doesn't mean that all of them are.

The upcoming Dacia Spring EV is a perfect counter-example.

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