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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but are there any electric cars that are lighter on software? e.g. some or all of a physical key, no touch screens, no over-the-air updates, etc?

Something for people who sympathise with [0]

> Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.

> Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize

[0] https://twitter.com/ppathole/status/1116670170980859905?lang...

View on HN

It reads like a telephone (gone through India?) mod of that version I am more familiar with:

>Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.[0]

[Security technicians: (takes a deep swig of whiskey) I wish I had been born in the Neolithic.]

[0]https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...

A big hammer, in case guns are hard to come by or you don't trust chemistry and complex mechanics.

people, you can just unplug it!

that's assuming the rat's nest of cables even permits access.

Some say there's a plug in the back of printers you can yank out too. I wouldn't know since I just refuse to own one at this point.

Isolated scissors then?

That engineer perspective accurately describes me, including the gun. Haha

Someday the finger will be pointed at us once enough attack vectors are introduced and exploited at once. And in general I distance myself from tech I can live without.

Good luck. Car manufacturers are dying to become service providers and shift buying revenue into recurring revenue. On top of that, a car that's mostly like a smartphone in terms of how you activate and think about its features is incredibly attractive for the carmakers. They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs (with the difference that in this case it makes a lot of sense from a user perspective too). You can't provide services or set prices this way if the car isn't "smart". If you wanna know more, check what Qualcomm's doing in automotive with the Snapdragon digital chassis concept.

> They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs.

This is not an Apple thing... For ages CPUs and I think GPUs, too, are basically the same thing between many different models.

Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.

In fairness, it also used to be the case that simply some of the cores were broken on a "dual core" processor. Because it was actually manufactured to be a quad core processor, but testing revealed that only 2 or 3 actually worked, so then it got sold as a dual core. :D

But the thing now with "pay to unlock more cores" is... interesting.

They'd probably love to turn that into a subscription, too.

Eh? That’s still the case. The cheaper M1 Pros and so on will generally have one or more defective disabled cores. So will many-cored Intel chips.

The "Golden Screwdriver" was supposedly a term from the heyday of the IBM Mainframe. (And one of the first links I found - a tesla discussion on HN 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 )

Wait… which manufacturers do you have in mind? Because I don’t think this apply to Intel or AMD or NVidia?

https://spacehop.com/what-is-binning/

This is an enormous stretch. Binning mostly allows manufacturers to avoid having to throw away ICs with certain defects, selling them instead as a different SKU (fewer cores, lower clock, worse power consumption etc).

I think Intel abused this at least once, back in the days when they had ridiculously good yields across the board, but let's not generalize in absence of evidence.

Binning is a lot of it, but what happens when they have more of the good bin than they want, for the market proportions they're targetting? They'd be fools not to either just sell the good as the bad, when nobody can tell (like when acheivable frequency is the difference), or more likely just make it bad then sell it.

> Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.

That's called binning, the unit goes through some testing and components that don't pass get shunted away (hardware or firmware) because they're known to behave incorrectly. Better that than throwing it into a trash.

Blow the fuse/hack the firmware and you can unlock these because the hardware is there, but it's likely that it doesn't operate entirely correctly (especially under duress), even though it may appear to work at first blush.

Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee:

https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918

Sometimes they will sell a perfectly functioning chip as a cut down version because they need to cater for that market segment. This market segmentation is nothing new and can be done in many ways, like permanently shaping the product before sale (HW) or using flexible licensing (SW). The problem with the "permanent" route is that when you sell such a cut down chip it usually stays cut down forever. So the only way to use the cut down features is to buy a chip that is fully unlocked. This is not only a waste of resources but also a waste of money to upgrade the entire chip.

A solid mechanism to enable/disable these features on demand would make the situation a lot better. You could pay just for the upgrade instead of the whole chip, either permanently or only when you need it and pay per use.

But the reality is that in practice this mechanism will probably not work to the advantage of the end user. It will focus entirely on the company's bottom line and open up new avenues for abuse. If your hardware is linked to a license and to the manufacturer forever, you'll never own it. Unless the legal framework enforces the rights of the consumer under threat of drastic fines for the manufacturer, we're just forgoing real ownership.

I think maybe this is how it started out, but it would be really flakey to match with consumer demand. If everyone is buying the cheaper (binned) option you may not have the volume (or demand from the pricey option to just bin more).

Price differences between SKUs are a tool manufacturers can adjust to try and shape demand to match their yield curves.

> set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs

Huh? it's not like you pay more for hardware that's always been present. You get exactly the same CPU from entry level M1 to fully specc'd M1. It's not like you could turn a M1 into a M1 Pro or a M1 Max by flicking a switch or blowing a fuse, because the hardware is just not there.

Compare that with BMW who builds and sells cars with heater seats that you software unlock, but the hardware is already there, which is ridiculous. At that point all cars could have it enabled and it would barely make a dent in the price as the uniform assembly line that produces economies of scale is already in place. This is what Mazda is doing, basically you have two, maybe three trim levels, sometimes only one, fully specc'd, and that's it.

It makes perfect sense for BMW, if indeed it's more expensive to make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized).

Thanks to JIT and JIS, just-in-sequence the 200 non-heated once actually are cheaper. They cannot be sold as Seats as a service, nor can they be re-sold with heated seats after their leasing period ended. So all the SaaS model has to do is geberating enough profit to off set the higher cost of heated seats installed but not paid for. After that the re-sale value, for BMW, is higher and this whole stunt is a net positive for BMW.

> make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized)

At that point you can spread the cost over 1000 instead of keep selling 800 at a higher price to cover for the 200. I also guess Pareto goes the other way (200 heated + 800 non-heated), which only makes it worse.

The fact that it doesn't make sense to the buyers should factor into whether it makese sense for the manufacturer. I would feel uncomfortable knowing I'm unnecessarily driving around a subsystem that's ultimately going to end up in the landfill unused. Unless I bite the bullet and agree to a recurring fee. Sure, many won't know or care, but then you're actively selecting for a less discerning clientele.

> I would feel uncomfortable knowing I'm unnecessarily driving around a subsystem that's ultimately going to end up in the landfill unused

Person from Minnesota drives their car down to Florida and sells it. Buyer has no need for the car's heated seats & steering wheel, so it goes unused. Are you saying this is a problem?

Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee:

https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918

Companies are really trying to take money from everything now...

Raspberry PIs have had a similar thing with VC-1 and MPEG-2 decoding requiring a small fee for about a decade now. In this case, to cover the patent licensing cost so as to not add it into the base hardware, but paying a fee to unlock features resident in the hardware is not new in computing. (I realize there are likely other/older ones I'm sure, but that was the first in my mind)

Raspberry probably isn't profiting from it though, they're legally obliged to do it, and they are also trying to make their hardware cheap as possible, so making it optional in a device like RPi makes sense.

I don't think the big players have the same intentions though.

Yes and even with MPEG-2 patent expired, they are still offering that https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ so not sure how that cost breaks down today.

IBM been doing that with their CPU's for a while. Current flavour of doing it is bannered under capacity on demand - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power8?topic=features-capacity-d...

In the field of physically-large CPUs I don't find this surprising. DEC 10's came in a wide range of models, and a KA10 variant for example could be field upgraded to a better variant, e.g. certain byte-access instructions added to extract bytes from 36-bit words, hardware floating point, and so on could be added. A technician would come and stick in some boards and wire-wrap them to the rest of the machine, and the machine's owner would pay for that. I only know of this with IBM and DEC but I would not be surprised if all the expensive machines were field-upgrade-able.

Sort of related. BMW has been doing something similar for some time. I bought a certified 2012 3 series back in 2013. New, the car had an optional package for something called Comfort and Convenience Package or something similar to that. It was mostly lighting - footwell ligting, door handles lights, some other stuff. That package was not purchased on the car I bought but all the actual lights were there and someone created a way to turn those things on using a bluetooth/OBDII connector and a laptop. I think the program was called BMW What App?? Not certain of that. Anyway, I added all the lighting stuff...

I hope people don't buy these subscriptions and auto manufacturers give up on them.

edit: words...

> auto manufacturers give up on them

Unlikely. 20+ years ago I was working for a manufacturer of high end office machines and they were doing the same thing. It's been popular for a long time, just now trickling down to consumer hardware.

The app is called Bimmercode ($50)

Yes the whole pay extra to unlock a feature that is already there is a big erk and whilst I can see both sides of the coin, it still has an edge too it that erks.

I shudder self driving cars and the prospect that companies would pay to nudge driver routes past their shops is perhaps another future concern, one in which would be a bit evil. Just as well some companies say they will do no evil, though non spring to mind thesedays.

Still, in tech the earliest type of paying to unlock a feature goes back to the 60's iirc and some storage drive that you would pay to upgrade and entailed an engineer comming out and flipping a dip switch to enable the extra capacity. Think it was some ICL kit, though was such a long time ago and never personaly experienced that beyond past down anicdotes.

Not only that, but perhaps they'll also be able to go in the direction of selling bare models so cheaply at a huge loss and make multipliers in profits from subjecting users to adtech, if they so chose.

We've seen how that goes with printers. Not good for end users (regardless of the printer being cheaper up front), and trashing the reputation of the company who pull that crap.

Look at HP. They used to be the go-to "reputable, always reliable" brand for printers. Heck, if you can still find the old Laserjet 4xxx series printers they're still good.

But HP in the last decade or so are on most people's shit list.

HP went to shit because they recognized how short-sighted and price-sensitive consumers are and changed how they sell things to account for it.

When people are shopping for an appliance, price is often the largest deciding factor. HP prices their inkjet printers low to lock in that sale. But in order to still earn a profit, they try to make money from the ink, so they lock down the firmware to block 3rd party ink.

People hate how expensive ink is, so they created Instant Ink, a subscription model. If you do a decent amount of printing, especially color printing, you'll actually save money. But it's widely misunderstood. You're not subscribing to ink, you're subscribing to printed pages. And so there are people writing nasty articles about HP because they'll pay $3 for their first month of Instant Ink, HP will send them an ink cartridge, they'll cancel their subscription, then have a Surprised Pikachu face when their printer then refuses to print with the Instant Ink cartridge, because for some reason they thought they owned the ink cartridge that they paid $3 for.

And of course, someone will take a picture of their printer refusing to print with the Instant Ink cartridge that they're no longer subscribed to and post it to /r/AssholeDesign.

And yet, none of this nonsense exists in the EU. You can take your empty cartridges to a lot of local shops and get them refilled.

And yet, HP still sell printers in the EU.

EU probably requires the allowance of 3rd party cartridges and refills by law.

In America, corporations run the government and the propaganda machine. They've convinced half the country that any restrictions on corporations are attacks on the Free Market™ (and your freedom!) and are a slippery slope to SOCIALISM!!.

Yeah. A whole bunch of other printer manufacturers would have picked up a lot of business, from the next time those people needed to buy a printer. eg "Anything other than HP".

Unfortunately, several of the other printer manufacturers seem to have copied HP's approach. With similar results.

The Epson EcoTank range (eg specifically refillable ink tanks) seems like a good idea, not that I've used them yet. :)

Point taken on the HP printers (and wow, re: "Instant Ink" mentioned by sibling; had to search it myself to believe it), but heck. Everyone seems hell-bent on trashing their reputations in my eyes (or at least earning my eye-roll), anyhow.

Moreover, I seem to recall reading here on HN a fair bit about smart refrigerators and Samsung smart TVs with ads, and I can't see those revenue models going away anytime soon.

Dymo recently trashed their entire business reputation (hopefully) pulling the same crap.

They even went to the point of modifying their Amazon listing for their old label printer, so it has all the good reviews for the old product, but selling the new crap DRM-locked garbage product.

So all the newer reviews are people complaining, but the star average is still high for the moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzSDJRC0F6c

I think so as well. Everyone wants to get on the subscription bandwagon and charge you from birth to death of the product. They also prefer lock in rather than standardization. Unfortunately although as engineers we think of this stuff, managers always tell us to STFU. However, eventually consumers will complain and the government will start regulating and making right to repair and other laws with enough rumbling from the public.

> charge you from birth to death, fullstop

Can you give any example of an unlockable feature on an M1 Mac?

Perhaps the confusion comes from the different mix of performance and efficiency cores on different Macs, but those are physically different. So for instance my M1 MBA has four performance and four efficiency cores, a compromise intended to give very long battery life.

Bollinger looked like they were targeting exactly this, but just checked and sadly looks like they have shifted to commercial platforms only (https://bollingermotors.com/looking-for-b1-b2/).

Volkswagen e-up!

No touch screen, only key ignition, no OTA. Spartan electric city car.

But discontinued

It was temporarily halted in 2020 but now is back in production.

According to here anyway,

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vw-plans-restart-sale...

The Skoda version (Citigo-e iV) is even more austere. Manual mirrors and rear windows with a lever like the little triangular windows of old. My guess is that the corners were cut to fit the lane assist system and keep the low price.

I hate lane assist, fails miserably where I live (country lanes). I believe its a requirement now, which is tedious. Its the first assistance feature I've actively disliked.

Very popular in Yorkshire.

Wow, I'd kill to get one of these in the states!

VW only offers the ID.4 here, which is a ridiculously huge car.

Not a car, but if you make an e-bike from a regular bike and a motor bought on aliexpress, you got yourself a simple electric vehicle that is

1/ extremely light on software and

2/ not controlled by a centralized corporation which will expose your whereabouts to the whole world in case of problems.

and 3) a massive fire risk.

Even actual brand name e-bikes regularly catch on fire, to a point where fire departments warn against them [1]. I would not even dare to build myself an e-bike from Aliexpress components - you have no idea at all how solid the battery protection systems are, how well-made the cells are or if they are outright forgeries, or how well the cells are matched to the battery protection system.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/electric-bikes/how-to-preven...

and 4) illegal in most countries

Not in Germany, so I'm confused what you're playing at.

Does it go faster than 25kph ?

Does the motor work if you're not actively pedaling ?

Does it make more than 250w ?

If you answered yes to any of these you need a valid driver's license, an insurance, a plate and mandatory helmet.

In london 90% of all deloveroo/uber eats is delivered with an illegal ebike, nobody cares.

It doesn't make it legal. Anyways, adults make their own decisions and pay the consequences, I'm not here to tell people what to do. Just keep in mind that e-bikes are very regulated in a lot of European countries.

If someone's wallmart bike with a 1200w aliexpress "push button" motor end up injuring/killing someone (due to undersized brakes, snapping chain, &c.) I'm sure a great deal of people will care about them

Well arguably the fault lies with Deliveroo because they profit from illegal activity, but pretend its not their employees. They know what is happening and tacitly encourage it.

If i understand bike law correctly, for offroad biking you can use anything, but ofcourae if you rig together something stupidly dangerous and cause an accident, a court will take dim view of it.

You're acting like these Walmart bikes with 1200w motors are commonplace, and sold in mass quantities. Most people aren't going to spend their time fitting this stuff on a regular-ass bike. These "kits" don't even bolt onto most bikes, and require some ingenuity to make them fit. What I'm saying is there's not enough of them out there for people to ever care about the issues you bring up.

I think you, and damn near every other person on the internet hand wringing about this kind of stuff, vastly, vastly over estimates the conversion rate between "shitty bike with more power than it probably should have breaks something" and "mows down some elderly lady"

And you're also over-estimating the number of people who will care when that conversion happens. Because odds are when someone does have a mechanical failure and mow down an elderly lady it will be preceded by a bunch of stupid decisions not having anything to do with that mechanical failure and contrary to what you may believe based on HN/Reddit/Twitter commentary, the general populace is well aware that you can't legislate away stupid.

And as others have said, there's a mechanical aptitude bar to entry for using those kits that make them less common than you're implying they are.

> I would not even dare to build myself an e-bike from Aliexpress components

Then don't. Nobody's forcing you. I built several, have ridden 12000+ km, am still alive and could not be happier or feel more free.

This mainly depends on buying a reputable Battery

The main risk is burning down you house, if the bike is kept in a separate shed or bike storage, then it is minimised

Dont forget that sone people store petrol in their House , and its legal.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries are a much lower fire risk. Lithium polymer batteries are basically a single BMS bug away from a fire at all times

I'm converting a 1970 jaguar to Tesla power.

All modern cars have far too much tech in them. I don't know how people are happy having sim cards installed in their cars tracking their every movement. Tesla is even worse it has a camera inside the car collecting data..

>I'm converting a 1970 jaguar to Tesla power.

Out of curiosity, do you plan to document this process online? Either while you're doing it or afterwards?

Yup, I'd be curious too! Jaguar is in an interesting choice of conversion too.

Which model?

XJ6 series 1

https://live.staticflickr.com/6040/6282846492_2b9f48fdbd_b.j...

I wouldn't say it's 'light on software' in an absolute sense, but the Kia Niro EV/PHEV has an 'average' amount of gadget and doodad bs compared to a full 'Tesla' amount. About the same as any other new car. I was recently looking for an EV that wasn't a Tesla and was actually available to purchase in the first half of 2022 and it was literally the only one I could find.

I've rented a VW E-Up once that was pretty low tech despite being fully electric. Physical key that has to be inserted next to the steering wheel to start the car (but can lock/unlock the doors like a normal fob), classic car radio without touch screen, minimalist dashboard buttons. To start the car, you even have to turn the key farther just like you would on a classical ignition. I think it's designed for people who are used to combustion engines.

According to the dashboard, it's range should be about 500km. It is quite small however.

The Dacia Spring is like that, but it's also a but weak has a bit engine, but its also dirt cheap.

The electric conversion kits are starting to look appealing and will probably be the only way to go for a electric drivers car without the bloatware.

I really want to see more electric conversion kits for existing cars, I must admit. It seems like such a waste to throw away what is in many cases a perfectly good chassis/geartrain/body/etc just because you want to change the ICE engine and fuel tank for an electric motor and a battery pack.

Under the cover, modern vehicles have been migrating to CAN Bus etc anyway, so when everything from door switches to marker lights are just i/o devices. There's less wiring, almost no fusebox, and the computers know more about what's wrong.

The only difference in UX is going to be what's on a touch menu and what's on a hard control.

I don't know much about the space so let me know if I'm wrong, but from my point of view there's still a world of difference between all devices working on a packet network (that's simply efficient) and having ten cameras filming surveilling everyone around me continuously and executable code being pushed to my vehicle over an always-on connection that I have no control over. And then on top of all that is tactile controls so you don't need to avert your eyes or pause podcasts to adjust the windscreen wipers.

> an always-on connection that I have no control over

Has anybody tried disabling the LTE antenna (or whatever it uses) on a Tesla for privacy/security reasons? I'm sure hoping the car still drives fine without it, but can it be done without utterly voiding the warranty etc.?

I'm sure you can come to a safe stop, and there have to be provisions for when not in mobile range because that does happen on occasion, but long term I wonder what it does for warranty or various features that might have (known or even unknown to tesla) dependencies on being online. I also seem to remember reading about a time lock, i.e. needing to be online every x time, but not sure.

Its not that "modern" vehicles migrate to CAN. CAN was introduced in 1990 with the Mercedes S class. Since then everybody adopted CAN. At least with OBD-II, which is mandatory in many countries around the world, every car has CAN these days.

Since about 2000 modern cars have integrated further technologies beginning with LIN to replace simple IO wires in the doors and alike.

At the higher end side we hade Byteflight, Flexray, TTP/C and now Automotive Ethernet based on BroadReach.

While I've had a vehicle with CANbus and no documented fusebox (BMW R1200S), that was probably because it used self-resetting fuses. CAN doesn't remove the need for fuses to protect the wiring, and they don't seem to be going away.

I'm really hoping that the semiconductor shortage forces auto manufacturers to go this route.

The shortage is almost over, it's back to business as usual.

Any sources on this? I'd like to sleep better at night.

No. Plenty of parts that were previously available without lead time are now quoted for 2024.

And many are not.

Of course (it's a shortage, not a complete inavailability), but that there are much more components with long lead times than before makes it decidedly not business as usual.

I basically want one of these, full scale that I can drive - [0]

[0] - https://www.associatedelectrics.com/teamassociated/cars_and_...

Highly unlikely to find a new one as EuroNCAP and company have started to dock stars for missing active safety features (AEB, lane assist,sleepiness detection, etc.) and low stars are a sales killer. Soon they may even be required by law.

Renault Zoe is relatively low-tech, and it has failed EuroNCAP.

Most EVs outside of Tesla are kind of like that. Physical key, no over-the-air update, etc.

Granted, they have a touchscreen, but it's just to control the navigation if you use it.

VW e-golf... you can find them for ~10k used and they are just a regular basic (but high quality) car that happens to have an electric drivetrain. The downside is they have slightly less range than newer EVs. I leased one and was really impressed overall, and wish I had bought out the lease.

wrt

> "lighter on software" AND "no OTA"

the so called "RED directive" in the EU mandates OTA for any consumer IoT device as of 2024. After that it'll be illegal to sell a connected coffee-maker without also shipping upgrades for any security vulns. While this is specific for IoT the connected vehicle regulation (anything non-consumer or even safety critical) would require even stricter legislation & defenses in place.

The first few generations of the MG ZS EV was basically just a "dumb" car, but electric. It was replace with a new model in 2022, which has some more smarts.

The car I have has all analog gauges etc. It does have a touch screen, but only for controlling the infotainment system. No OTA.

Doubtful ... you may as well get a classic or just plain old car and convert it to an EV.

BMW i3. No OTA updates. No touchscreen. Very limited telemetry (GPS location transmission can be turned off). Electronic key with a physical key backup.

Renault Twizy. However is not a full size or speed car.

I really like my Bolt. Has a touchscreen (and carplay/auto) but it is a pretty no-frills kind of vehicle, esp. with a lower trim level

I used to have an electric Smart Car and it didn’t have any of those things. It was a lot of fun but not a vehicle for everyone admittedly.

I'm no expert, but I think your best bet might be electrifying something old enough to not already have any of these problems.

Dacia Spring is relatively low-tech

It’s all I want. I want my car now, with an electric motor, that’s all.

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