When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?

While I don't doubt your enthusiasm, I don't want my car experience to feel like Arch Linux. I want something I treat like an appliance or utility to just work.

How far can you go with these modifications before the vehicle is no longer street legal? I suspect that even minimal changes might cause an issue there?

for e-bikes at least, it seems that Bosch e-bikes use AES encryption between their controller and the battery, to prevent third-party batteries, perhaps you have knowledge about this, or how it could be possible to circumvent?

I don't think the average fisker or lucid purchaser is willing to do 500V hacking. In fact, I would wager the DIY fisker/lucid community might be less than 6 people.

I admire the spirit but I just don't think hackers will do much with $100k bricks beyond salvage components.

I never understood the liability aspect of vehicle repair from a manufacturer's standpoint. The common refrain seems to be that these new vehicles are not serviceable without the dealership/manufacturer. It seems to be a narrative to drive out the owner from repairing vehicle or independent repair facilities.

The liability seems to be the same as historic vehicles, for... vehicle repair. So why is this any different?

The burden of proof is on the manufacturer to prove that a modification caused damage to the vehicle.

CAN bus is in many ways too difficult to encrypt. (not that it can't be, it's just got way too small a packet size). Nothing prevents manufacturers from getting complicated though - eg "knock three times on this ID, then request info from this ID then .....". (example from an old Shadowrun netrunning campaign idea)

I'm working in EV charging domain. EV chargers that comply with ISO 15118-20 may prove difficult to get working once more (due to key signature requirements). Otherwise, all should continue working as long as the charging protocol they use continues to be supported. And that said, the EV charge managing component should be replaceable.

The 2015 "Jeep Hack" (affected a huge number of Fiat Chrysler cars) was actually one of the coolest moments of hope & inspiration for me. Ok, so the embedded OS isn't linux, but it still runs good old FreeDesktop D-Bus? You can just RPC to the window & tell it to roll down? You can just RPC to the head unit & adjust the volume? Nice. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

I'd assumed everything was some terrible impenetrably dense proprietary cruft, but oh, the whole system runs some standard well known protocols that would be super super super great & convenient to use, if we had network access to the car? Yeah, nice.

Wouldn't it be so great if someday things actually got better. The "Hack" was, oh, you can engage the parking break if you get network access. Oh no! So the response is that now we for sure will never be empowered useful-to-ourselves consumers again. It sucks that the low-trust society keeps dominating, that it keeps overshadowing the can-do is-possible universe, that making possible is forever dwarfed by Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.

The one really bright spot of the past, in my view, was Webinos, which was a super cool IoT system that had some automotive interest. Notably, unlike most systems, it kept users sovereign, let devices (like cars, or car windows/stereos) expose themselves up to user-specified gateways, securely without intermediaries. Didn't make it, but I have yet to see anyone with 1/5th the promise, with anywhere near as low-ickiness as modern devices.

>Fisker Ocean was in a similar place recently and I started looking at their owner groups to see if there would be a business case

Rich Rebuilds got one for this exact reason recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_OxgAYG0Io

There is no reason this stuff needs to be dependent on the cloud at all. It's a mixture of self-serving reasons like wanting to sell subscriptions and the fact that modern developers are so steeped in the cloud that they can't imagine how to do things any other way.

Yup, I'm a big believer in regulation-mandated escrow for keeping software servers on and media purchases downloadable for a legal minimum of something like 10 years, and even longer for major purchases like vehicles, household appliances, etc.

If you can't maintain it because you go bankrupt or whatever, you've already paid another company to take over. No different from mandatory insurance, basically.

Chargers and payments are a solved problem. The charging ports are standardized (NACS in North America & Japan, GB/T in China, and CCS2 everywhere else). The protocols for automatic payment are also standardized. Some EVs made by other manufacturers lack support for the payment protocols, so Tesla has started rolling out credit card readers to their Supercharging stations as a fallback. So even if there's a new automatic payment standard, in the future you'll be able to use a credit card to pay.

The first generation Model S still works just fine at Superchargers. Any EV you buy today is even more likely to have support a decade from now.

And that's why no one should be buying any Chinese EVs except BYD. (if you absolutely have to buy a Chinese EV). All Chinese car manufacturers except BYD are losing money with every car they sell, and insiders agree that every other Chinese EVs except BYD will fold or go into bankruptcy.

Why did Chinese companies jump into the car industries producing cars when they didn't have the know-how before? simple, rent seeking. Chinese government was offering incentives to do so. https://reason.com/2023/08/23/chinas-e-v-graveyards-are-an-i...

A “life and death race” has begun to unfold in the world’s largest market for electric vehicles - https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/24/business/china-ev-industry-co...

Why would chargers break compatibility? The protocols are open standards, and there's a huge install base for them in both cars and dispensers. Even Tesla's NACS adopted the ISO 15118 protocol, the same as in CCS cars in US and Europe, which allows use of dumb adapters to keep backwards compatibility.

I used Polestar’s app as a key for my car for a few weeks. I think everyone does! “Wow! I don’t need a car key? So futuristic!”

All it took is one trip to the Salton Sea where either my phone or car didn’t get cell service and I’m never making that mistake again. Which is especially weird because Polestar claims that the digital key works using Bluetooth, but the auth itself must be done over the internet or something.

The article isn't conclusive, but I read this as meaning they were keeping the companies open long enough to issue firmware updates, that make the cars viable in offline mode.

And this is one reason I will never buy a car that doesn’t support Apple CarPlay and Android Automotive

Tesla's own navigation will not work, yes, because it uses things like the live availability of superchargers to decide where to stop for charging along the way.

But why won't Spotify work? Isn't it just a web app?

That's 3 things.

Most people want modern infotainment systems in their cars with up to date traffic data in the navigation system.

I like having my inverter online, I can monitor it and change the settings from anywhere.

If I want my watch to support streaming audio and make phone calls without carrying my phone around - it kind of does.

Like in the above comment, this isn't specifically an EV problem.

All modern cars have this failure.

I just bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf. It's the last model year of the original design, and has many tactile mechanical button, not jut a tablet on the dash. It's also totally self sufficient WRT cloud connectivity.

I'd highly ecommend this model and year...

I have an EV but I think of it as an appliance. I don't worry about the software becoming obsolete because the software is complete by the time it comes out of the factory. When I test drove the vehicle I found its state of software satisfactory and I would not need any new software or even need any support for the software. I also like the UI enough that I don't mind seeing the same UI for the next ten years without succumbing to the latest design fad.

I understand that some Internet-required features (such as viewing real-time charger availability in the car) will certainly become unavailable. But I'm prepared to use my phone to do the same thing.

The important thing is to get a vehicle that is popular enough that there will be future demand for maintenance. That way even if the manufacturer goes under or drops support for that model, other companies will take up the mantle. This threshold is surprisingly quite low. There were around 2,400 Tesla Roadsters made. Although Tesla has dropped support for them, Gruber Motor Company will repair or maintain them.

I think that's the only model that Tesla has dropped support for. The original Model S from 2012 is still supported by Tesla, and still gets software updates. Of course you won't get new features like self-driving improvements, but they still ship bug fixes and stuff like Spotify support. They also do maintenance and repairs, though I'm pretty sure all of the vehicles from that era are outside of warranty coverage.

There are millions of Model 3s & Model Ys around. If you buy one of those, you'll never have to worry about finding someone to do maintenance or repairs.

In Eastern Europe there are a few places that an emulated Tesla server software is being run. And you can buy a car, say from US, and they will patch (hack?) it to use their server. I don't know how good it is feature wise, but it is good enough that the cars drive around.

So to your point - you can probably use a car after the manufacturer is gone or stops supporting a vehicle. But this comes with a risk of trusting these not very legal enterprises.

Modern gas cars have all the same touchscreens, with the same software, and the same apps talking to the same servers.

EVs are equated with being computers on wheels, but that's just because barely any BEVs existed in the pre-software era, so there aren't many people who vow to never upgrade from their 1976 Sebring CitiCar.