When Tail Lights Lose Touch with Reality
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
This is a component the vehicle won't operate without?
Tesla showed that there was room for someone to make a different type of car than the rest of the automakers; and they still haven't figured out how to copy that.
I wonder if there's room for someone to make strictly mechanical, old school cars. No tracking, no electronics (maybe the ignition system but better go diesel anyhow), no fancy. It's either running or you can see the reason why it isn't. The same school of design old tractors used.
First, your auto makers are losing the design and engineering knowledge to produce anything like a mechanical car. Take the basic things that went "electronic" long ago, like fuel injection. Do you think anyone knows how to make good carburetors, or has sources for the design files or a good way to stamp them out on the assembly line by now?
Secondly, you'll need a repair infrastructure. By now, the dudes who know how to repair mechanical cars and parts are a legacy breed, a niche market. Every repair shop needs OBD-II connections, hardware and software necessary to interface to the car's ECUs and do the diagnostics and settings tweaks necessary. Mechanics today are increasingly just computer programmers who can also swap out some hardware when the computer tells them to. They're not going to understand a carburetor even if the manufacturer does. It would be too expensive to keep that infrastructure around, in general.
Yeah it's a good dream to have 100% mechanical cars. I would say that farm equipment is probably a different proposition, because enough farmers are mechanically inclined that they could do repairs "at home" without any mechanics, so that's a viable market segment. But if I'm driving a car around a city and some warning light comes on, I'll want to drive/tow it into the nearest repair shop, and they'd better have equipment and expertise to get me back on the road ASAP.
As Tesla and other advanced EVs increase in market share, you're only going to see an increase in the "software developer" breed of auto mechanic, and necessarily a decrease in the mechanically-inclined ones. It's just the way of the world.