Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
A company needs funding before it can even start making a hardware project on the scale of a car, and it is vastly easier to obtain funding for a project like this than for one that would not screw over customers. Free markets are usually great, but they can have terribly misaligned incentives at times.
Gas companies are burning the world to the ground just to get a few more quarters of profit. They'll buy regulators and presidents of they have to. In fact one is openly selling himself to them at a bargain rate.
The answer which has worked before is to end the corruption and monopolies/oligopolies as we did before: anti trust. Voting in honest civil servants, voting out or jailing the corrupt, keeping money out of campaigns, and outlawing professional bribery (lobbying) are critical to enforce the rules that keep the playing field level.
Guess which party has sold out the hardest in the US? Which is led by a man who openly sells deregulation to polluting industrialists in exchange for campaign funds?
The problem comes when the infrastructure company is also the retail company. That's how you get shitty service. In the UK, the infra monopoly is owned by Openreach. You can use literally any retail ISP, they all pay the same for carriage. They can differentiate on price or service or (yuck) bundling, and you can change providers with minimal downtime.
So I think the answer for the US is to separate infra from retail and regulate the wholesale price.
This is a misrepresentation of market forces. Markets produce many different products and services based on the assumption that consumers want them. Those consumers like stick and further diversify, the others die. This is what markets do, they don't have a crystal ball, instead they create products and services by trial and errors, and additionally execution can make or break a company.
When working as a vendor with mature automotive manufacturers they’ll often evaluate your company to ensure you’ll still be around over the timeframe that they intend to sell or service cars with your parts in them.
Doctorow has a good point here.
Bankrupt Fisker says it can't migrate its EVs to a new owner's server
I avoid all the whizbang rent seeking bullshit just by driving horrible old cars.
I really hope someone makes a conversion kit for the computer in these cars. It would suck to be out on a new car, and just have a brick sitting in your driveway.
I don't want to underestimate what a driven person can accomplish, but I'd estimate a year of work for ten engineers with relevant experience.
I think you'll have to poach someone from the target vehicle's maker, just to get the industry contacts to source the connectors. Minimum order 10k, obvs. You'll need to keep ~100 types in stock; I guess about €10m outlay.
I think you'll have to print the cases, and you'll face issues with vibration and temperature range. How many flex cycles are you putting the parts through in testing? Are you testing for water ingress, salt spray? Or do it properly and get into injection moulding; add six months and another million or two.
After you've spent 8 figures bringing the kit to market, I might be interested, if you can sell a kit for a '94 jag at a price point way below what I imagine your unit costs will be. But I'll be claiming from you when your parts fail. Then I'm going to warn people away, even if your customer service is excellent, because I've now lost acres of knuckle skin and snapped some of the interior trim getting to these parts.
Superfastmatt on YT put a 50s jag on a tesla drivetrain. But, IIRC, he took care not to mix-n-match, in order to sidestep integration work.
Obviously an electric vehicle doesn't have fuel injection, so s/ecu/motor controller/g. But I understand what you mean.
> its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed
Ouch
Why was it bricked in first place? Cars don't brick themselves by entering tunnel or driving in wilderness.
I get it, he has to keep stirring up controversy to stay relevant, but Cory sometimes looses his marbles over irrelevant crap.
‘Cuz $DEITY knows that “bricked” has a very wide range of colloquial definitions.
Allowing manufacturers to open/close your vehicles at whim sounds putting too many eggs at same basket. DMV is the one who knows who actually owns the car after all...
Not all the links are behind paywalls. Fisker themselves are among the groups saying they don't know how to get the cars running again.
Eh ? Like any gambling game: Insert Coin
TFA doesn't say that all Fisker cars are bricked - It says that they become unusable do to minor maintenance issues that can't resolved without Fisker servers being online.
I wish I could buy an electric car with no radio transmitters and no ways to install software other than JTAG ports. I think that'll be possible in the relatively near future through EV conversions of legacy vehicles, though that route may have crash safety concerns.
If I ever get the funds I'm building this vehicle for sure, because it is pretty much guaranteed no one else will.