- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Ever drive in a car with a big screen from like 10+ years ago that has the most outdated, useless UI?
Now imagine that’s your whole car.
I miss the days when the radio was its own separate thing in a car. Hate the outdated UI? Just replace the radio head unit with a modern one.
Nowadays it’s a lot more difficult. There is a module called iDatalink Maestro that allows you to still maintain most factory features after replacing your head unit, but a lot of cars tend to be incompatible—especially EVs—as more and more features become integrated into the stereo. The days of modular components in cars is nearing an end.
The days of modular components in cars is nearing an end.
It’s a shame, because with EVs especially modular everything should be a whole lot easier than ever before. I guess it took a decade and a half for governments to force smartphones to be able to be jailbroken or use the same messaging protocol, hopefully we see a similar evolution on EVs where these locked down features get forced onto common standards.
This is why I think the people modding cars to be evs are so much better.
Especially EVs, or especially Teslas?
You can get that experience with new cars too. Especially anything made by BMW who presumably don’t extend their craftsmanship ideals to their software.
I reckon it all comes from the stupid ass tesla hype, both Hyundai Group then later VW Group came out and said they will be putting back physical buttons.
Other than that, they should also fuck off with their software, make it be able to control the functions of the car, everyone uses carplay/android auto anyway, so what’s the point of all the other stuff.
I’m looking forward to the “how to hack your Tesla to 100% operational functionality using a raspberry pi 9 and this dongle, run your car with your phone!” youtube videos (or whatever streaming service steps over its flaming corpse to replace) it in the next few decades
People have already been jailbreaking Teslas to unlock full self-driving, which is a $10k software patch.
And somehow the RPi9 will still need some $90 5V20A USB power supply
You can connect it to the Tesla’s battery and it will drain them more in 5 minutes of operation that driving the car for 200 miles does, but at least it will be able to run a full LLM and render billions of triangles with full raytracing at 200 fps on a 4K display.
Should be happening now but I understand these things take time.
Opencore Legacy Patcher, but for cars. Nice.
Will a new anything work if the manufacturer kills off the entirely unnecessarily forced network features?
This is not an EV problem, this is an MBA grifting problem.
Still, as from a mechanical engineer perspective I would trust slightly more a combustion motor system to work offline rather than an electrical, where I could never know how the motor really works and relays on.
Personally I enjoy driving a 1987 bensine Ford.
I also do have a degree in mech eng and electrics as well. Electrics are much, much simpler, the reason EVs have a reputation for being hard to service is that they are new and chock full of online bullshit, which is true of new ICE cars as well. If it was just the battery and the motors, it’s incredibly simple.
They’re simpler in concept but then you slept 27 on a network and then the owner gets to find out that when one of the components dies you can’t just pull one out of something else and put it in because it’s not licensed correctly.
The same is true of any modern ICE, you’re not exactly gonna get source code or schematics for drivetrain management
What would be more complex an electric fan, or a fan with an internal combustion engine? It’s all the add ins that make cars complex. The motors are always simple.
Finally people are starting to ask the questions that actually matter.
Yeah well I raised this question six years ago and muskrat fanbois got me banned from like four EV ‘the other site’ communities.
Can you name one of these that exist in an EV that doesn’t exist in an ICE vehicle? The issue is the same across the board. Notice a child can build a remote control car. Nothing complicated about a battery (gas tank) and a motor. It’s the controllers to the windows, locks, on screen entertainment, wipers, sun roof, trunk/hood latches, antilock breaks, that become the worry of software/firmware being tied into.
The ice motor ends up being more complicated, as you regulate timing for spark plugs, fuel injectors, and how lean the fuel is as it enters at different speeds. Electric motors don’t need that part.
Oh look a bot asking me to do knowledge work for free.
Get blocked, get reported, and begone from my internet forever.
Da fuck? Get fucked
Companies should be required to maintain a stash of plans and source code which is automatically released upon the company stopping operations, unless the IP is bought.
unless the IP is bought
It’s always bought on liquidation. The creditors require it to be sold to legally satisfy them. What’s worse is that the IP may only be licensed in the first place.
As long as they’re a smartphone on wheels the answer is no.
We want real cars again, even if electric.
My smartphone still works without service. Just as a tablet/computer device. Cars should be the same.
If Google or Apple went out of business (depending on which phone you have) you’d stop getting updates and it’d stop working.
My NES hasn’t received an “update” in the 37 years since it was manufactured, and it still runs fine. So does my Tandy 1000 PC. Didn’t even have to replace any capacitors. This is what we want. Some time 15-20 years ago we started taking the wrong path with our tech.
I am old enough to remember appliances coming with full schematics printed inside their cases.
Electronics age out over time. The old stuff, made with more materials, take longer to age out. However, the old stuff does not have even a smidgen of the performance or power efficiency the modern stuff does.
Why do you need performance or power efficiency in a car’s computer? It just needs to go when I press the pedal, and stop when I hit the brakes. That’s not complicated, and something like battery wear leveling and temperature regulation can be a completely closed system and not require any updates whatsoever.
I really don’t understand why cars need so much complex stuff, I just want it to get me from A to B, ideally in comfort. My current car that’s >15 years old does that just fine with no internet connection, why do I need all the complex software?
Why performance…
Do you like your car’s head unit to spend 1-5 seconds not doing anything before responding to your touchscreen or button press? No? Then yes, performance matters.
Power efficiency? Anything to extend battery life.
Yeah, I don’t need a touch screen. All I want is feature parity with my 15+ yo cars.
Capacitors age because they are filled with liquid electrolyte, which dries out over time. Batteries age for mostly the same reason, and the chemical reaction slowly becomes irreversible. Those are easily replaceable. However, an integrated circuit is just a wafer of silicon. A piece of sand. It’s going to take a long, long time for that to degrade. If it weren’t for needing constant software updates and cloud connections to be useful, an iPhone could theoretically last a hundred years. “Tin whiskers” may also be a problem, but we are talking decades before you have to worry about that.
I don’t think your theory about old things lasting longer because there is more mass to them is correct though. It really sounds like you are making that up because it sounds good in your head.
The larger components have more space between them… it takes longer for the “tin whiskers” to grow and become a problem. That and these old devices ran at higher voltages, so they have more tolerance to minor voltage fluctuations. Also, plastic does degrade eventually, copper traces can corrode, etc. Build quality matters, too.
Would it? In what way? Sure the App Store would be done. But apps I current have and safari would be fine.
Think of all the Apple shit your phone depends on. iCloud, iMessage, any time you have to authenticate with your apple password. Probably a bunch of other iBullshit that I’m not familiar with because I don’t have an iPhone. At the very least, your OS would stop getting security updates, and like you said, you wouldn’t have an app store to push app updates. Some stuff would break immediately and other stuff would degrade over time.
Now imagine it’s your car
If we look at Android instead, I can just use one of the other app stores. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, and my updates come from GrapheneOS, not Google (though they basically package up Google’s updates). If Google completely disappeared, I’d probably just donate to GrapheneOS so they can afford to take over SW maintenance. But even if I don’t get any more updates, my phone is already quite secure and I’d still get updates for the vast majority of my apps.
I want something like GrapheneOS for my car. Or better yet, I want my car to be simple enough that it doesn’t need security updates to keep going. My car should go when I step on the accelerator pedal, and stop when I hit the brakes. It doesn’t need internet access or security updates to do that.
As a member of /c/FuckCars I say we don’t want cars at all. We want robust public transportation, and bicycle paths. Entire cities designed around going green. People want to get angry at the Starbucks CEO for using a private jet, and reasonably so, but NOBODY wants to take responsibility for the toll each car puts on the environment. Yes, even the electric cars. That electric energy still has to come from somewhere.
Public transportation does not operate in the middle of nowhere where the closest store is more than half an hour away.
It will when we fund it. If 100% of the people require public transportation, then 100% of the people will want that transportation to be funded as well as it can. Kind of like how even out in the sticks you have plumbing, and drinking water. Imagine if only 10% of the state needed plumbing. It wouldn’t get funded well enough to cover you guys out there.
Look, I’m with you most of the way in theory, but a lot of rural areas don’t have plumbing and drinking water from public utilities, they have their own septic and water wells. I know it’s pedantic but a lot of parts of the world are so rural that it probably doesn’t make sense to have fully public transport, like it doesn’t make sense to have centralized water. The scope needs to be great systems within towns and cities and lots of park and ride hubs around the perimeter
We need to start smaller. Have you been to many remote, rural areas?
Name checks out. I’m all for public transportation, but to think that it will eliminate cars is nonsense.
That doesn’t work for people like me who might drive 10 miles to work and then at the drop of a hat have to travel to another location 60 miles away, then have to travel back to the original location before the end of the day.
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That would work if we invested as much into public transit as into cars. This goes back to designing cities for public transit instead of cars. If we did that with the money we currently are putting into cars we could have high frequency metro lines where inner city interstate / highway routes and high speed rail for inter city interstate/highway routes along with frequent bus service in the cities/towns on the lines. We think public transit is inherently slow and unreliable but that’s because we never invest enough money to make it fast and reliable.
I’m guessing you’ve never lived in rural America? I don’t think you’re grasping how big the world is for some people. I have to drive three hours to get from my urban home to my favorite mountain bike trail in the mountains.
No I haven’t lived in rural America but most Americans haven’t either. Most live in the suburbs, cities or towns. It’s like saying people need to eat less sugar and we should stop using it for every food and people saying “what about the diabetics who need sugar” yeah they do but that’s not the majority of people. We can make exceptions for them while also overhauling our food industry to remove this thing that’s causing health problems for most people.
As for the mountain bike scenario ideally you would take a train to a town near the trail and then the town can have a shuttle up to the mountain. If we did fully invest in public transit this wouldn’t add too much to your trip and has some other benefits.
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This would be good for the park and wildlife in general as less traffic would make it easier for animals to migrate. Less roadkill
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This would lower the amount of development needed in the park as parking lots wouldn’t be necessary.
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It would make mountain biking more accessible for people who don’t have a car or can’t drive.
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It would make it more social, you could meet people on the shuttle on the way up, if there are regulars then a community could form.
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It would reduce the amount of air and noise pollution.
- The towns are too small to operate or afford shuttles to the nearly 2000 mountains in my state.
- Nearly 2000 mountains, the amount of traffic in any given area is negligible.
- There is almost no development and definitely no parking lots. You find an empty spot in the dirt near the trailhead. Usually no more than five or six cars around. Did I mention the part about nearly 2000 mountains to choose from?
- Fair point. But we don’t need the mountains to be more accessible. We don’t need more people out destroying nature. Stay in your cities.
- Nobody around here wants to socialize. We’re getting the fuck out of society into the serenity and quiet of being miles away from everyone.
- Your last point is complete bullshit. Increased accessibility means more people, more people means more pollution of every kind. The tallest mountain here does have a shuttle to the top and the locals don’t like going there because it’s always packed.
Yeah maybe there are are 2000 mountains, but how many have mountain bike trails? If there are trails then there is probably some organization maintaining them like the state or national park service who can also run the shuttles. Shuttles are also pretty cheap and can stop at multiple trail heads based off requests. You can also rotate where the shuttles go each day / week so if there’s a more obscure trail/mountain then you can just wait until it comes up in the schedule. The towns would also probably want to run the shuttles as well since it will bring business to the area.
Ok, let’s assume we want less people on the mountain, what gives you the right to go to the mountain then? Because you can afford a car? That doesn’t seem fair. Also most people have a car so it’s not restricting that many people. If we say only 30 people should go to the mountain a day that’s way easier to enforce if we say only 2 shuttles of 15 are allowed. It’s also fairer as who gets to go is just determined by whoever signs up first, as opposed to whether someone owns something.
I think many people would like to socialize. There’s a loneliness epidemic and many people are looking for friends but don’t know where to meet them. If I was looking for friends with common interests like mountain biking the shuttle up would be a great place to meet them. Just because I want to get away from civilization doesn’t mean I want to get away from socializing, I hike regularly with groups of people and they mostly enhance the experience. If you aren’t into that that’s fine too, just put on your headphones ignore everyone and set off on the trail solo, nothing stopping you from doing that.
For the last point like I said usage can be controlled, even better then cars, but assuming the same usage a shuttle is less pollution then multiple cars. If like you said there are 5-6 cars at a particular trail head then one shuttle carrying all those people will cause less air and noise pollution and make it safer for animals.
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You people proselytize more than Linux evangelists and perhaps even Mormons do, and not even as entertainingly. Even if I agree with you, I don’t want to hear about fuckcars in every damn thread.
Dense cities and the consumerist lifestyles that exist inside them can not be “green” no matter how much green lipstick you put on it. Their very existence is destructive to the environment and disruptive of nature, switching out cars for bicycles or buses isn’t even scratching the surface of the issue.
This is exactly backwards. People in cities consume fewer resources per capital than people in rural areas, who can’t take advantage of the same economies of scale when it comes to transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, public utilities, physical supply chains, and all sorts of services in modern life, from seeing a doctor to repairing a broken window to borrowing a library book to getting a babysitter.
It’s rural areas that destroy more land, consume more water, generate more pollution, and emit more greenhouse gases, on a per capita basis, than dense areas.
I’m with you on everything here except the very last sentence.
EV impact is more about toxic particles from tire and brake wear, and greater road wear when most EVs are heavier than similar ICE vehicles. The cleanliness of an EV’s power source has been debunked over and over again, showing it’s still a net positive environmental impact to run an EV off dirty energy, compared to an ICE car burning gas or diesel.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-definitely-better-climate-gas-powered-cars
This is not just something that can impact EVs. NFC door locks, smart infotainment, displays for gauges. None of that is EV specific these days.
These cars were clearly not designed to work without cloud connectivity and or an authenticated account. That seems bonkers. China is huge and has lots of remote areas. How were these cars going to work when they couldn’t phone home?
IMHO, a lot of cars have gone way overboard with “smart” features, but this manufacturer’s problems are the result of cutting corners and not designing for some common use cases.
NFC door locks, smart infotainment, displays for gauges
And I don’t need any of that.
Give me a simple car and I’ll buy it.
Or when the network that the car relies on no longer exists. My old e-reader’s mobile connectivity no longer works because the phone company providing the service turned the 3G network off in the upgrade to 4G.
It’s just 17 years old. People tend to keep cars for about that long. What happens then? Does it just become limited to basics only, or become a big metal brick?
People stop paying for smart car’s online services all the time.
You typically lose access maps or only get basic offline maps without traffic and charging stations listed. You also lose the ability to use streaming apps, the ability to remotely control locks, windows, cameras and climate from your phone, stolen vehicle tracking, alarm notifications, etc.
But if you have CarPlay / Android auto, the good maps and streaming apps can be pumped in from your phone.
At least the cars can be updated (at least until the manufacturer says fuck it). A ton of those ‘smart’ devices have no such capability so when a vulnerability is found it won’t ever be fixed.
This is why I won’t touch a car that doesn’t have Android Auto, CarPlay, etc. I want to be able to update my audio apps and maps, even when the manufacturer decides to stop updating my head unit.
that only shifts the problem to Apple and Google, neither of which can be trusted to keep supporting older versions of CarPlay or Android Auto as the years go by and they change shit around.
Possibly, but these technology are a decade old, their product roadmaps still look very robust, and a lot of drivers actually base new purchase decisions on that feature’s availability.
IMHO, it’s low risk, and if it does get killed, oh well. Voice control and a dash mounted phone isn’t the total end of the world.
Probably just should said “phone key” instead of assuming NFC. It looks like a lot of these cars use other technologies to unlock without a fob.
It’s not your car if someone else controls it.
Cars are the tip of the iceberg. What about smart home appliances, like garage door openers, or door locks? They all come with their stupid apps, and once the company is dead, suddenly your home stops working.
We really need mandatory standards: post APIs for client-server connectivity and make the connection URL configurable.
1000%, we need to demand minimum functionality or stop perpetuating these fucking things by purchasing flawed products from flawed companies.
Or, you know, regulate them
There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.
Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.
The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.
With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.
Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.
Agreed! The most promising standard is called matter. Vote with your wallet!
Looking at Aging Wheels YouTube channel with his fleet of non working Wheegos, the answer is no, they won’t.
A lot of his problems are also from the lack of available parts.
Which is why he has multiples of some of the orphaned cars in his fleet.
That’s why I bought an electric car from a car company. Mostly the same parts besides the drivetrain.
Yeah, I got a Bolt EUV last year. No regrets so far.
I got a Kia EV6, the only negative is they used an older infotainment system so i don’t get wireless android auto. When the new ones come out for the same car I went to see if I can get it changed out.
Yeah, but hes got 4 and none of them work. Or at least the one working one is also breaking down a lot.
cars? what about all those charging stations that don’t have payment by card and require you to setup an account through a mobile app like what kind of cuntery is that.
A lot of car parks are becoming like this. It’s especially frustrating when you try to download the app but you have no signal and there’s no other way to pay.
I checked it and remembered correctly that in the EU at least they made it mandatory to have it on chargers
The new EU regulation AFIR (Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulation) stipulates that fast-charging stations with an output of 50 kw or more must be equipped or retrofitted with the option of card payment with immediate effect. The AFIR came into force on 13 April 2024 and takes precedence over national laws.
My favorite thing about that is when you fill in the required info and need an email but because you gotta enter it each time using a temporary email doesn’t work. Then you get spammed to death by them…
As long as the car isn’t dependent on an Internet connection or the manufacturer’s server and the ports aren’t proprietary, I think you’re good. I expect a car to have these.
Woah woah woah. You can’t “disrupt” the car industry without a subscription based model that can brick your hardware at a moments notice.
Why wouldn’t they? You plug it in and keep driving. It’s not any different from petrol cars.
Unless they have a massive infotainment system that requires cloud services to work properly or the main way to access your car is the app on your phone (and other shit like this).
Also who’s gonna guarantee spare parts in case something breaks down in 5 years time? Will I be able to fix their car or will it be a paper weight?
My point was, the same applies to petrol car. They all have infotainment and need spare parts.
I mean, sure, but how many petrol car startups are there?
Regardless, I agree that this in reality is a much wider issue regarding service and parts availability for products you buy. We need laws to regulate the availability of services integral to the products sold
Take a look at the YouTube channel “Aging Wheels”, they have acquired and daily driven a Coda, an EV that the parent company shut down, you can see their journey in the channel.
Yeah, he’s up to owning four of them, two of which are purely parts cars and one of which is currently apparently irrevocably broken with its parking pawl latched into place and thus immobile in his garage without hooking it with a wrecker and literally dragging it on the tires.
And that guy pretty much knows what he’s doing with various offbeat EV’s, and has a huge amount of shop space and apparently funds at his disposal to just fuck with these things as a hobby. The average owner, meanwhile, has no chance.
A rare Aging Wheels enjoyer in the wild! That dude has single-handedly gotten me more interested in automobile history and just how cars do things in general.
They might keep driving, but some infotainment features (or even other features that are tied to subscriptions) might stop working.
Depending on the implementation of these features that could mean the car constantly shows error messages, or the infotainment freezes, or in the worst case the car won’t even start or charge.
Some of these concerns are true for newer cars of traditional manufacturers: what happens when their online services become unavailable?
I look forward to the day when my refrigerator stops working because the company went bankrupt, or because their server was down.
Samsung are pretty close.
That’s not on purpose they are just defective shit boxes engineered by the cheapest guy on fiverr
Mostly, yes, but the fact that we can’t definitively say “yes” is a problem.
