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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

You'll change your mind the first time you turn on the heat from across the parking lot while sipping coffee in the ski lodge, or need to check the charge status while eating lunch, or point stuff out on the satellite imagery on the live map.

I know it's easy to imagine that the product you think is "a car" is finished, but product categories evolve. People want their devices to do different things today than they did 20 years ago, and next year will be more changes. Connectivity isn't going away, the market has spoken.

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All this is possible without integrating the software into the vehicle itself, making it brickable.

Reliability and repairability going down is not "evolution" in any sense.

And the market hasn't really said anything when those things have been pushed into consumers without much choice. Saying "the market has spoken" in this case is like saying the market has spoken when someone claims that slapping a fruit logo is enough to sell computers. Turns out the choice of which car to buy is non-binary, it's not "internet connected" vs "non internet connected".

> All this is possible without integrating the software into the vehicle itself, making it brickable.

Sure. And Ford messed up. But the request upthread wasn't for a vehicle with robust software update semantics, it was for a vehicle without connectivity. That's not going to sell well.

I feel it's not completely impossible to design a system that is properly partitioned, such that an update failure to the seat heating software doesn't brick the car. Updates to core systems should be rare in the extreme.

I would say part of the problem is that they want the option of updating seat heating software, rather than actually properly testing the up and down buttons and the thermostat.

That's an extreme example, but: definitely.

Having an interface to turn seat heating on/off if simple stuff. Having the upgradeability, DRM, the subscription thing, and circumvention protection is significantly more complicated.

Tesla does it well with their real time gateway mechanism isolating entertainment software from crucial vehicle driving software.

Sure, it's the market that has spoken..

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

My car does this and more, so perhaps I chose my words unwisely. (I live in a van I have pretty much full remote control of save actual driving, I'm out right now and I just turned on my espresso machine so it's preheated when I get home). I don't mind connectivity, I mind having to trust other idiots, I'm happy to trust this idiot. I want to be able to approve every change. It's MY car.

I want to have the final say about what happens with the things I own. I want to be able to rely on them.

>the market has spoken.

In the sense that a market is made up of buyers and sellers, and the sellers have decided to offer no other option yes.

I think the issue is more of the design and ownership of these things. No one wants an update bricking their car. I doubt a lot of people here would object to a discrete subsystem where you could poll charge status, turn on heating etc.

You can buy many vehicles today dating all the way back to the turn of the last century. Here's some listings for steam cars if you insist on no electronics whatsoever https://www.steamcarnetwork.com/for-sale

Whatever your line is in the sand for tech integration, you have many great options from before that point.

This answer is like Microsoft saying the 1990s that "abacus exist, so we're not really a monopoly".

People want modern cars, modern TVs and modern computers. They don't want a steam engine. But modern doesn't mean "crap that the manufacturer can brick remotely".

Except you're proposing a false dichotomy of no tech, and complete tech integration.

Would you also propose a calculator as a valid alternative to a locked down tablet/phone/pc that you can't install your own software on?

I don't understand where you are trying to go with this - steam cars have the same primary feature as any other vehicle - longitudinal and lateral control to traverse asphalt bands across the country. They can be retrofitted with any modern convenience feature as that stuff does not need to be integrated into the propulsion system. The same can be said of any other vehicle made between then and now. Of course, nobody has retrofit an early 1900s vehicle with 12 impact sensors and multistage airbags, and no modern manufacturer has offered a steam powerplant, because nobody actually wants this. Products are sold on features, not principles. In the US, you can (and people do) build just about anything and drive it legally on the road, so if not a single person has created (whatever it is several people in this thread think should exist), it would be preposterous to think a manufacturer would do it.

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