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Comment by quailfarmer | Hacker News Reader

They’re not black boxes, you’re just not an electrical engineer. They’re actually way simpler than ICE in a bunch of ways that really improve reliability. We just need to develop a collective understanding of how electric drivetrains work, the kind of understanding that we had developed in previous generations for ICE cars

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This is a funny comment because that's almost exactly what I have a degree in. The point here isn't the engine though, even though those are also a separate beast, but rather that all of these vehicles are packed to the brim with a bunch of chips with internet access and you have no idea what's really running on them. With electric cars we're seeing even more of this than with ICEs.

Sorry, a quip in bad faith. Collectively, _we_ (would-be car maintenance people) are not well enough versed in how these types of systems are designed. This is a collective failure, lack of documentation.

Unless you have the complete source code available to you, this is a patently false statement.

Yes, reverse engineering is labor intensive.

Expensive too. Your test harness is likely the car!

LOL, you should give it a try IRL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41970406

Yeah I read that thread, it sounds like great progress! Really makes me think about the hardware I put out into the world professionally, and if I could realistically have reversed engineered it with no prior knowledge.

Cryptography is probably the real game changer here, secure boot, attestation, message authentication. Can’t exactly blame automakers for wanting those features, given the stakes, but that would make reverse engineering fairly impossible.

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