> Cars now use an ETC (electronic throttle control) managed by a computer, as is just about everything else on engines these days. Naturally, this makes vehicles more difficult to repair, not to mention the glaring “right to repair” issue growing by the day when everything runs on a chip.

It isn't more difficult because anyone is conspiring against you. Maybe it's more difficult because electricity is invisible, the techniques require new knowledge, or you're not familiar with it. Go get some CAN bus debugging equipment, plug it into your high-speed CAN bus, move the accelerator pedal, and you'll see the CAN messages.

Although, there's usually no debugging necessary for your accelerator pedal, because you no longer need to lubricate your accelerator cable; bits don't require lubrication.

From an engineering perspective, it is very convenient (and reliable) to have everything in the car just sit on a communication bus and write software to do the logic, rather than have dedicated wires or mechanical connections.

Want to link into any car in the last 5 years can-bus for anything beyond simple air-fuel mixture issues? You can't. You can't even reliably go to a mechanic down the road, as they don't carry the 500k a year license from GM for the proprietary OBD2 scanner.

This problem is 10 fold with electric cars, and 100 fold with Tesla or boutique EV manus.

I understand having idiot lights for idiots, and sure, do that on the dash, but please give end users any way to get some actual info. It’s the “door ajar” when the vehicle knows which door but doesn’t disambiguate to the user. It’s bad design, or malicious design to boost dealer profits.

Steering angle: 0 degrees

LF wheel speed: 305 rpm

RF wheel speed: 293 rpm

LR wheel speed: 302 rpm

RR wheel speed: 285 rpm

In this case, it may be possible for the car to determine that you probably have some incorrect pressures, but it may not know exactly which tire(s) is/are wrong. Nor does it know what the pressures are.

It also perfectly calculates distance to empty in miles/kilometers.

2021-2023: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/electrical/other-electrica...

2015-2020: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/electrical/other-electrica...

2013-2014: https://parts.ford.com/shop/en/us/electrical/other-electrica...

In fact, your example looks more like one overinflated (or perhaps overheated) tire --- RR.

You still don’t know for sure that it needs inflated, because:

1. setting tire pressures incorrectly is not uncommon

2. That button is user accessible and might be pressed inadvertently or by someone who didn’t set the tires correctly

3. If all tires change in pressure at the same time, it would be undetectable

This is why these systems generally tell you to “check” your tires, rather than inflate a specific one. If they made that assumption, your car could be telling you to inflate an already overinflated tire.

There are many cars with tpms in the wheel that still won’t tell you what wheel it is or what’s the pressure, so I still much rather have no sensor to deal with trading the “inconvenience” of checking the tires once the light comes on, which is what you would do anyway.

I was explaining why the engineering of the system dictates the information that the interface provides.

I don’t care what pressures the tires have as long as they are good. If I stop to inflate one, I check all of them anyway, with a real gauge. But that’s just me, I know.

The transponder in each tire just shouts out its serial number and pressure on 315mhz and then sleeps for a random amount of time. The car counts how many times it has heard the various serial numbers, and assumes the top four most frequently heard serial numbers are its own tires (as opposed to those on the car next to it).

It is sort of stupidly easy to gather location data from TPMS sensors. If I ran a major criminal gang I'd track the cop cars this way. 315mhz is almost VHF, it goes a long way. One receiver per city block should do it. Covering your turf would be easy.

Other vehicles actually know which is which without being told. I'm not sure exactly how this is done, but I'm guessing/vaguely recall hearing they do this by using multiple receivers.

As for tracking from a distance - these sensors have very low output power, and a lot of their signal is blocked by the metal wheel. It can somewhat be done but you'll need more than one receiver per block if you want 100% coverage.

Sources: worked as a tire shop technician for a while, messed around with SDR, read a lot online. Also: https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-09111...

That's one of the revelations from Snowden files. Us govt does this!

It's always been this way.

Uhhh, except I have an OBD-II adapter in mine[0] and combined with an Android app[1] can see in detail basically everything about the car, including individual battery voltages inside the cell pack?

[0]: https://www.scanmytesla.com/adapters

[1]: https://www.scanmytesla.com/

You can now monitor a piece of data you have no means whatsoever to adress outside of the tesla ecosystem. which is thrice fold not an issue with "open-er source" ICU vehicles because: 1. no concern for this battery (obvious I guess) 2. you can bring it to the mechanic down the street, 3. You can do it yourself with parts you source with a warranty that the dealer does not care about.

If your battery "starts to go", do you think you can go anywhere besides Tesla, and that they will not first charge you for a diagnostic using their license ODB2 software? Your diagnostic using a non licensed odb2 scanner and....android app will not allow them to bypass the diagnostic you will certainly have to have done by them, because of their insurance/warranty process requiring licensed equipment. ICU manufacturers DO pull the same shit, but you can at least bring the car to a cheaper mechanic who is hopefully footing the bill of the tooling/license.

Say you ARE Able to perform work outside of Tesla, better not tell Tesla that, or your vehicle will be blacklisted.

Huh, I guess I was just imagining it when I plugged into the OBD-II port on my 2020 Ford and reprogrammed a bunch of engine and transmission parameters to improve performance. I certainly didn't have any proprietary Ford software or hardware.

There are some boutique companies, and even some oems [2] that provide software to retune your engine but I have no experience, nor desire, to do that kind of tinkering.

1-https://www.amazon.com/Scanner-FORScan-Adapter-ELMconfig-Dia...

2- https://www.mazdaserviceinfo.com/pcm-reflashing

I don't have the expertise to set up all the parameters on my own, but I'm very happy with the tune they provided.

You can't do that with a generic OBD-II compliant tool and Ford's OEM firmware.

I am particularly thinking about John Deere. Although not specific to Electric vehicles.

https://youtu.be/EPYy_g8NzmI

In your example, have you since taken it to ford and told them you did this? Better not, as you've broken your warranty and they will see this and report that to you.They will put this information on record, and you now have a nightmare selling the vehicle.

Again, and your example is a good one, ICU vehicles and manufacturers are at least addressable/self repairable. This is not the case so much for electric.

Mine was $150 and came with Honda support. Other manufacturers can be downloaded for $50.

isn't that the way every industry intersecting with IT behaves, and isn't there always someone else fighting to open it up, so https://github.com/iDoka/awesome-canbus A curated list of awesome tools, hardware and resources for CAN bus

After finding a good shoulder on which to beach my LTD and popping the hood, I found the problem: the socket side of the ball-and-socket throttle cable linkage had broken and would no longer hold together. Looking in my (voluminous undergrad compsci-student) trunk for a solution, my eyes landed on the -shiny- beigy PC tower, specifically the floppy drive. A couple strands of the disused 34-pin floppy cable well tied proved to be strong but flexible enough to hold that joint together and get me back to school.

Despite my college having a robust automotive program (which I even had a suitemate in), I never replaced the part and that hack held until I got rid of the car 10 years later (though I kept the other 30-odd strands of the cable in the glove box just in case).

While nostalgic, don’t read this as supportive because today I’m far more likely to find a CANBUS interface in my trunk than a floppy cable.

Good times.

As a safety feature the car went into limp mode, limited it’s rpm and performance to less than about 40% of power and threw all the Christmas lights it could at the dash, error codes and idrive warnings.

I limped the car home and did a fault code reset from my laptop with the pirated bmw dealer software via a bluetooth-obdc2 dongle and it was fine after that.

Of course the problem continued under strenuous driving conditions. I could’ve replaced the pedal assembly but meh, it was always a good reminder to back off a bit in my 1800kg car.

It's a running joke on BMW forums, if someone throws that code most responses ask if they were driving fast and hit a pothole since that's a pretty consistent trigger.

There was often a combination of about 3-4 errors that would occur when it went into limp mode. To this day I’m not actually sure if replacing the pedal would’ve fixed it and I think off memory, it was a 220$ experiment to find out.

(On another note, make sure you’ve got the gearbox upgrade software if you haven’t already)

Fun to drive! But it required a lot more maintenance than new cars today.

Sure, diagnosing and repairing a problems like the throttle control example is more difficult and expensive today than it was in the '70s. But cars are also so much more reliable today that the frequency of these repairs is considerably lower.

I have a 2009 Toyota Matrix that I have owned for 12 years now. It has nearly 140,000 miles on it. Last month, the vehicle finally had to get a repair of a non wear item (failing O2 sensor), which cost me $300. In 1975, how many cars could be expected to last 13 years and 140,000 miles before needing a single repair?

Vehicles being hostile to their owners is not unique to electric propulsion, just like goods and services being hostile to consumers is not unique to transportation. It's a society-wide thing and it's about locking people in and reducing uncondoned behavior. It's about subjugating people.

"your car exploded? well you didnt use a triple certified dealership for your last oil change so you cant hold us accountable for that. says so in the contract."

now obviously if a car had that level of danger.. you wouldnt even be able to get the oil change done anywhere but the dealership. and in modern times where we try to hold companies responsible for everything we possibly can, it makes sense that anytime there is a remote possibility of liability, they attempt to gate the customer out of it completely.

i feel like the general population has either grown to be, or always has been, so indifferent towards subtle legal differences that we continue broadening the strokes of liability which is causing us to lose the power to do many basic things ourselves as a trade off for avoiding any personal responsibility tied to the consequences of doing those things improperly.

I do not think lawyers literally encouraged it, I just think that they are expensive and going proprietary helps avoid issues.

What's your take, though? Genuinely interested. It is widespread across the entire industry, so there appears to be an industry-related driving factor for it

This is interesting to me. Do conflicts of interest with both of your respective employers come up?

Some designs are inherently harder to diagnose and repair though, even with access to OEM tools and parts. I reject the notion that being harder to repair is automatically bad, only when it is an intentional business decision to create vendor lock-in and not an engineering decision made to improve the quality of the product.

It depends where you are, how well the car was designed, budget probably, luck

Meanwhile breaking 100k miles without issue seems to be a 50/50 shot on several models.

Look at fleet vehicles like taxis and police cars.

The Ford Model-T was obviously much simpler than modern cars, but it also didn't have airbags that needed to be replaced after a fender bender. That doesn't make the new cars inferior to the Model T. Just different.

The more complex engineering brings benefits; some of the benefits are worth the added complexity, but others are not. (Not to mention it, "worth it" to whom... the customer, manufacturer, or society as a whole...)

Of course, the engine was a two-cylinder that had maybe 25 parts to it, the rebuild process only needed a crescent wrench, a screwdriver, and some gasket making chemicals, and was so simple that 2 pictures told you all of the information you needed to succeed.

My main concern is long-term maintainability for imported vehicles by me personally. Even though I'm a software and electronics nerd, I still don't have all the things necessary to maintain a modern vehicle, nor do I want to be re-manufacturing PCBs or replacing surface mount components. So once any one of the dozens to hundreds of boards goes bad, you have to find a replacement, and you also have to hope that the of EEPROM is in the right state for your car in regards to error codes and calibration so that you can actually use it.

One example from a 2012 Toyota Crown, replacing some trim on the steering wheel tweaked one of the sensors out of calibration. During recalibration, part of the radar braking system failed to calibrate. The car is perfectly fine in 99.9% of parameters, but the computer has disabled every computer assist system and put others in limp mode until this one can be calibrated. No traction control, stability control, cruise control, ABS, magnetic suspension, all stopped. The car handles like a truck now. That's a tough problem to solve, and a really annoying one too, since the car would work at 100% capacity if only this sensor would calibrate. Dealer can't fix it, importers can't fix it, I can't fix it.

Contrasted to more rudimentary cars, I can pretty much fabricate or repair any part I need to as time goes on. As fewer shops will work on these cars as well, I pretty much need to be self-sufficient, so simpler is better.

So it's not about reliability, but maintainability, every car will fail eventually. Not everyone lives in the middle of a city with a dealership nearby, and in my experience not even dealers can get some of these parts anymore. I can't even get parts for a 2007 BMW from my dealer anymore.

The difficulty level of fixing 90% or more of computer issues would best be categorized as EASY to VERY EASY and yet people are paid mid-5 to 6 figures to do them because of the same phenomenon.

Most people, when their car stopped going forward when they press the go pedal would have a panic attack and call a tow truck. Being the kind of person who has the knowledge to identify the issue, trace it to its origin, and to craft a kludge strong enough to resolve the issue saved you a tow and a repair fee, but you can't assume that because it's easy for you it would also be easy for anyone else.

I guess I'm just saying what we've all heard before, knowledge is power. Fixing your own car, or your own computer, or your own home is at some level knowledge work. Having the knowledge without the ability to use it is frustrating, so most people won't put the effort in to learn the knowledge until they have a use for it, and most of the time they won't have a use for it until it is too late to gain the knowledge.

What's said about EVs can be as much true about ICE powered cars, the computer controlled nature is the same for both.

I appreciate my 1982 Range Rover more every day so. Besides a treadful fuel consumption. After all it is running on 3 fuses, perfect for an electricity and electeonics idiot like me.

This really isn't true. Cars all the way up to the mid 2000's are very easy to work on and repair. I have always done all of my own repairs. Domestic cars even today are still easy to work on. Yes you need a diagnostic tool to do some more advanced diagnosing. A $300 Autel will do most things, an $800 Autel will do nearly everything. Yes it is an expense but it can pay for itself in one repair when you factor in labor costs at a mechanic. And that Autel will continue to work for all of your repairs the next 5+ years.

You need to buy $300+ worth of mechanical tools to work on your 1982 Range Rover.

You need to buy $300+ electronic tool to work on a modern car.

I would say German cars from the ~2010's up are out of reach for the average person to repair, they are using fiber optic networks and complicated engine management systems. But everything else is really isn't that difficult if you have a basic (High School Level) understanding of how electricity and computer networks work.

Some power tools help, again those do other things as well.

If you cannot do most of the repairs on an old car yourself, they are unaffordable. Garages, if you one willing to work on them, charge around 100 bucks per hour where I live.

My problem is, despite being an industrial engineer, I seem to have a blind spot for electrics and electronics. Mechanics are much easier. The main reason I will never switch to eletronic fuel injection, I can rebuild the carbs in the desert and can calibrate them. EFi goes over my horizon so.

Was it emission control stuff? Computer controlled fuel injection?

Definitely was a different era when you could rotate the distributor to advance/retard the timing.

Reliable cars don't necessarily have to be entirely electronic.

I noticed at one point that I stopped seeing broken down cars. Sure, I’ll see accidents sometimes, but I cannot remember the last time I saw someone pulled over with an overheated car, something smoking, or just not running for whatever reason.

That was indeed the case in the 80s and 90s, when the fleet consisted mostly of eastern block made shitboxes, in which you never knew what would happen first: the engine fail completely or rust eat a hole in the floor.

In 1975, they built things to be serviceable because they expected regular maintenance. Obviously if you neglect the maintenance you are going to have severe problems, but many people just didn't care about maintenance and drove them into the ground.

Now, they design for a certain lifetime without maintanence, after which it becomes prohibitively difficult/expensive or impossible to repair. This increases the perception of reliability especially given a population who won't do periodic maintenance.

If you look at the "survivor" vehicles that are old and ultra-high mileage, one thing that stands out is the owner(s) adhered strictly to the manufacturer's specified maintenance intervals.

I recently started driving a drive-by-wire vehicle. A while ago I had an issue where the engine dropped to a near-idle (on the freeway) and the pedal was effectively non-operative. The diagnostics said the computer wasn't getting the expected results from moving the throttle body, so it went into some kind of safe mode.

Now, there are plenty of ways that drive-by-cable could fail, but in this case I was slightly resentful because I could have mitigated the computer's loss of senses with my own.

Furthermore, because the law surrounding creative works is extremely strict, any repair that might touch something that could be construed to be DRM protecting the manufacturer's software becomes legally dicey. You also can't tell anyone how to break that DRM, no matter how justifiable repair is. So if you somehow figure out how to reserialize new parts onto a locked-down vehicle, you're probably allowed to do that; but you can't legally sell that knowledge onto other repair shops.

Nobody would have to do any of that BS if it was illegal for that DRM to exist under Magnuson-Moss to begin with.

I'm still waiting for an example of where DRM stops a normal repair

The example of DRM stopping normal repair is serialized parts: lots of vehicles, farm equipment, and phones are designed to refuse to work if you swap certain parts on them. The only way you are supposed to be able to swap parts is to pay the manufacturer's branded repair firms to make the swap for you, and then send some kind of signature to the computer in that vehicle that says the repair was authorized. Bypassing these schemes requires tampering with DRM code, which trips DMCA 1201. Yes, it may be legally unenforceable, but to get there requires a decade's worth of expensive litigation to prove that something that was legal before you put a computer in a car should be legal after you put a computer in a car. And even then you almost certainly can't distribute the tools you made to do what should be a legal repair because those tools might be used by someone else to pirate the ECU firmware or something.

The simple way to protect consumers ability to fix products is to simply require manufacturers to provide the information to do it.

But, I still don't think this is an IP law issue. IP law should not be a weapon used to prevent you from repairing your devices -- but neither should anything else. If you only change IP law, companies are just going to find a different way to prevent you from mucking with their stuff.

There's a reason we call this "right to repair" and not "right to make an attempt to do hacky DRM workarounds"

The current discussion is about fixing cars. But the right to repair is a problem for everything with a computer in it.

You could take the title of this article and replace "an electric vehicle" just about any electronic device most people would own.

https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...

I imagine insurance companies will eventually have clauses that prevent this.

For me this is the crux of the matter. As the person in the driver's seat, I demand that I be the ultimate arbiter of what the motor(s) and wheels ought to do, regardless of what any set of sensors and/or set of computer programs thinks is going on.

I once had a car refuse to release the emergency brakes when it was time to disembark a ferry because the firmware misinterpreted the natural rocking of the vessel (and hence the car itself) as some kind of suspension fault. It left me more than "slightly resentful." I was absolutely furious at being stuck in a really rotten situation where my car was actively causing problems for those around me (people behind me had to drive off the ferry) and wouldn't even let itself go into a mode where it could be pushed off. The dealership's service center simply said, "Uh, sorry. Your brakes are locked. You can't override it. You need to get it towed in."

I don't care if the car thinks it's keeping you from rolling off a 500-foot cliff. If I say, "No, release the brakes, I mean it," the car had better do exactly as I tell it.

You can, actually, and its fairly commonly done[0]. Mapping pedal to throttle position is trivial, as is intercepting and modifying the pedal output signal. Its also not that hard to rip out the throttle body and replace it with a programmable unit. Imo new cars aren't so much harder to fix and modify as they are different to fix and modify.[1]

As Socrates rise from his grave and say: “The cars now love luxury; they have bad throttle control, contempt for steering; they show disrespect for elders and love economy in place of horsepower. Cars are now tyrants, not the servants of their drivers. They no longer rise when the key turns. They contradict their owners, turn off at stoplights, gobble up electricity at the plug, beep incessantly, and tyrannize their seatbelts.”

[0]Pedal boosters or pedal tuners. [1]Not excusing the myriad of insipid design choices, of course.

It was such a large inconvenience the replacement cable is still sitting in the box behind the seat.

I do know that I can’t remember the last time I drove a car with a bad idle, which is much more than anyone who lived in 80s can say.

Also: throttle by wire permits simpler cruise control integrations, better fuel economy and also facilitates the operation of safety systems like traction/stability control - so it’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison.

It's a small victory for the future of the species.

Technology changes and you can either learn it or not.

Specialization of labor does make everything more complicated, but I'm glad I'm not having to grow my own vegetables or pump my own well water, despite the fact that I have no clue how modern farming or water treatment work. I suspect transportation will continue to become more specialized just like everything else.

An electric car, for all intents and purposes should be substantially easier to repair, diagnose, and work on, but manufacturers are doing things like using proprietary signaling protocols, locking out third party parts, and putting complex software in the place of simple and reliable hardware. Electric cars aren’t new, they’ve been around since the 90s and it was perfectly possible to create one without the “smart” nonsense we are seeing today. My car doesn’t need to report my location to a database or have a manufacturer kill-switch and it doesn’t make one a Luddite for feeling that way.

The 1890s, to be precise...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Parker_Electric_ca...

Case in point, I have a former high school friend who runs a farm that’s about 50 acres as his primary business - without major machinery. They have quads and pickup trucks, but most applications where one would use a tractor are now done with animal power.

The result? It’s actually cheaper to operate as grass is cheaper than diesel. He’s not getting rich, but makes as decent living.

That's not the main problem with newer cars. The problem is that much of the required knowledge is intentionally kept proprietary so there is no way for regular people to fix it regardless of how much they want to learn it.

Only a tiny sliver of people need to understand how CAN actually works. Most Average-Joes just need to know how to connect (which is often done just via plugging into the OBD2 port, giving a keyed connector with power, ground, and at least one CAN bus).

As a hobby, I sell a low-volume device for a niche vehicle that works exactly this way. I assure that almost none of my users have any idea how a computer works, let alone anything physical on the CAN bus or what an MCP2515 or 120 ohm resistor is.

I would say that some repairs are _easier_ now. The computer can tell you about many issues it knows about. You can see if a cylinder is misfiring. Or if the O2 sensor is bad. Etc. Just have to plug in a reader. It would be great to have some standardization and open documentation on this. But it beats dismantling stuff and trying to figure out by trial or error (or by listening to sounds)

Late 80s? No, that's at least a decade off. OBD2 wasn't even made mandatory in the US until 1996. That's when things started to go off the rails.

Maybe the car you were taking about is in the metaverse though?

edit:

Perhaps far more importantly, the concept of features as a service has suddenly caught the eyes of vehicle manufacturers, see Toyota latest debacle with deactivated remote starters. The more digital control they have....

This is really a question of when. People are rightly assessing the sale/lease of software by the second in the very near future. Imagine driving down the highway on the first of the month and your pedal deactivates because you forgot to update an expired credit card autopayment.

Future's looking bright, can't wait to get my toilet on CANbus

There already were airflow/pressure and throttle position sensors and idle control servo in the throttle body unless you mean carb antique.

Removing direct mechanical linkage decouples raw air flap control movement from driver intend (/1), allows things like dynamic throttle response, rev matching, better cruise control, better fuel efficiency by precise control over fuel/air mixture, lower emissions, and simplifies throttle body by removing a ton of mechanical junk.

/1 If you really think you need that in your life try flying older helicopters where You the pilot must act as an engine governor because thats how it worked in the 60s and thanks to insane aviation safety regulations everything got frozen in time with 1060s designs being still manufactured up to 2010.

A highly complex interconnected message bus has hundreds of bugs (guaranteed) and many unpredictable failure modes. Also diagnostics is potentially impossible if the manufacturer hides the details.

Simpler is always better.

Nothing in the passage you quote indicates this is a conspiracy, merely a change.

Maybe it's more difficult because electricity is invisible, the techniques require new knowledge, or you're not familiar with it.

Or maybe it's as the article suggests - complex electronic machinery creates the possibility, not the necessity, of an manufacturer sealing everything from being repaired by individuals.

Is it beyond comprehension that a new technology can give many advantages and offers a number of problems? That people who criticize completely sealed systems aren't always "back to the good old days" Luddites (notably, even the historical Luddites didn't conform to what Luddite has come to mean now).

Was this really just until the late 80s? I’m pretty sure I had cars with a traditional throttle cable with model years in the 90s or later.

Mazda Miata (MX-5) had it in the NB model (until 2005) too.

I even briefly considered doing so after reading a favorable review of the Comma2's driving algorithm by Consumer Reports, but decided too much could go wrong with messing with my car's throttle wiring.

- Reporting features for brake, gas, steering inputs, a la SNMP

- Computer assisted brake, with a backup linkage

- Fully electronic gas pedal, with a speed sensing cruise control

- Electric/electronic power steering, using a torque/relative deflection sensor

These features are case-by-case:

- Command based "write" access for brake/gas/steering

- Absolute steering position sensor

So a lot of older cars require special spliced cables to fake analog readouts or nonstandard digital links to retrofit a self drive, and newer cars still needs to be purchased with those input features enabled as well.

However more rececnt trends see OEMs trying to prevent you from doing this kind of thing, in the same way that Apple, John Deere, and others try to prevent you from repairing or modifying or repairing your own hardware. This makes me very sad, because the future should be a utopia for people who whish to repair or modify their own hardware and instead we head towards dystopia, for no good reason!

Skoda at least (I expect all of the newer VWs, Audis, Seats, ...) use the built in mobile uplink to gather massive amounts of data about usage, e.g. how often the car is "pushed hard", or driven dangerously. Nobody knows exactly how they will use that, maybe to limit guarantees? - but if the cars is yours and yours only, this shouldn't matter, right? It shouldn't happen in the first place. Well, not anymore I guess.

The manufacturers will not limit these possibilities to a certain drive-train technology - why should they? It is also not limited to "newer companies", all of them will do it. Further, if the customer likes these models, the manufacturers (and increasingly more of them) will expand their offering.

Heck, the majority of cars on the street where I live are not legally owned anyway, they are all leased and people like that a lot.

Why wouldn't it matter? About 10 years ago, a friend bought a brand new VW Polo and after 2000km ended up with warped brake discs. When he went to the VW dealer to have them replaced under warranty, the dealer refused, claiming that the warrant only covers stuff like engine and bodywork and not consumable parts like brake discs, and also that brake discs should not warp under normal usage, which is one of the conditions of the warranty to be valid, and since they are warped, the dealer claimed that the owner mush have been driving his car outside of the normal usage specs the car is rated for and under which the warranty applies. I guess that telemetry will help manufacturers validate or invalidate warranty claims.

I have a feeling this will be one of those one-sided advantages, the manufacturer will review the telemetry and only use the data if it assists them in denying a warranty claim.

You could have stopped there. After this point, there's really no more to be said.

Really? Because if I buy a brand new car and end up with warped brake discs after just 2000km, and the dealer refuses to fix it under warranty, I will raise hell regardless of what technicality the dealer/manufacturer will uses to justify not fixing it.

That said, ruined in 2000km is ridiculous, certainly a manufacturing defect.

That's laughable. I have to replace rotors on a semi-regular basis. It's absolutely normal if you drive your car hard even on the street.

He turned out to be right: I only recently replaced the rotors at 150,000 miles whereas at 100,000 miles, my Saturn and Ford had already had at least one rotor replacement. Since a lot of people will get a new car before the old one hits 100k, they may think of rotors as something that never needs replacing.

OTOH: those Nissan rotors were an absolute bitch to get off by that point. I was wearing hearing protection while wailing away at them with a 5lb hammer for at least 10 minutes each before they came loose.

Warping is generally caused not by the rotor warping/bending so much as uneven wear or brake material deposits. This most frequently happens because the system is driven beyond design limits and overheated to the point that the pad material bonds with the rotor. It is also possible that this is a factory related issue and not overheating, but presumably this would have been noted on the test drive, and not after 2,000 km of gas.

If I'm the dealer, I ask myself which is more likely: 1. that my delivery inspection mechanic and the customer failed to notice a braking system issue at the time of sale, or 2. that a customer with a new car took it out and pushed it to the limits?

Sorry, is several million Euros in fines this year, a billion over its lifetime not toothy enough for you? They're going after big players, tiny companies, even individuals.

From personal experience, getting access to data about me is usually fast, demanding they delete it appears to work, and my own complaints to the national regulatory body have resulted in me getting my own way.

GDPR is great.

> They're going after big players

Don't you see the oxymoron in here? A billion is a non-event for a single one of the big players making their money on stalking, and you're saying that a billion over its lifetime (4 years) across all companies is toothy? Come on.

> my own complaints to the national regulatory body have resulted in me getting my own way.

I'm glad it works for you, and I guess you must live in a country where the regulator isn't completely useless. In my case, in the UK with the ICO, the best I managed to get out of them is a few letters which the company promptly ignored just like they ignored my own query, and this non-resolution still required significant admin work for me (just so they don't have an excuse to close your complaint on a technicality - despite being handed evidence of a GDPR breach).

It's not the cars that are becoming less car-person centric that's the root of the so-called problem. It's the people themselves that are becoming less car-centric. As we continue to have more and more people in cities (growth outside large cities is basically nil) we need cars less and less. That means ultimately that we care very little about cars. We lease them to get rid of them as soon as possible, we want the least amount of trouble versus the easiest trouble to fix, etc.

It's not the cars, it's the people.

Cars now use an ETC (electronic throttle control) managed by a computer, as is just about everything else on engines these days. Naturally, this makes vehicles more difficult to repair...

Citation needed. Might be more expensive, but swapping out the broken module the OBD reader told you to swap is probably not going to be that hard. The actual module is probably under the dash near the pedal, but that's probably the extent of the difficulty. And that's assuming that you ever need to replace it. You'll probably sell the car first. Throttle cables, OTOH...

As technology in our cars continues to advance, repairability and maintenance are becoming a real issue. Just ask any old-school mechanic

No, you go ask any old-school mechanic, because this old-school mechanic who quit professionally turning wrenches in the '90s sez "hurray!" to our electronically-controlled low-maintenance overlords. Because I'd rather not spend another evening replacing a set of ignition points so that I can get to work in the morning. We drive our vehicles until the wheels fall off, but for those that lease a vehicle for three years, my guess is you're not doing jack maintenance-wise before the lease is up (you will have to change oil on an ICE).

What happens when your fancy electric vehicle stops getting software updates.

Ooooooh, scary question! It'll be just like TFA's phone example: hackers will hack my car!!11! No, wait...I know the answer to this one because our Nissan Leaf quit getting updates when the 3G was shut off, and I've not taken it back to the dealer in several years. And the answer is...nothing happens. I mean, what's the assumed answer to what the author must think to be a rhetorical question?

Tesla essentially made the first electric car people wanted to drive. It did that with a clear inspiration from the smartphone world, hiding and locking away all the ugly internals with a slick touchscreen interface. Of course other manufacturers are going to follow the most successful player, but at the same time they don't want to alienate their already established (ICE) consumer base and its network of dealers and mechanics.

Electric cars are a clean slate and they can afford to be bold with anti-features, Tesla have shown that they can get away with it.

With your specific example, nothing happened, which is the best case scenario, yes?

The problem is the potential for inconvenience and disaster is there. I do not look forward to the day when my auto manufacturer forgets to renew a domain name and all of a sudden every single car by that maker cannot start its engine because it can't connect to HQ.

It's a contrived example, sure, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Where are you going to get that replacement module (which is entirely proprietary) after the dealer is no longer selling them?

When the throttle cable on my 1950s car snaps I can simply get a new cable from a thousand places. A cable is a cable.

A hundred years from now, I confidently bet that there will be a lot more still-running cars from the 1950s-1990s than any newer ones because the newer ones become quickly impossible to fix as soon as the factory and dealer stop carrying those model-specific propietary parts.

The cars from the 50s were incredible polluters. Part of the reason we even have emission standards was because of how much NOx and unburnt fuel came out the tailpipe. When the last one bites the dust I'll miss it as much as I miss a stage coach.

- Loads of aftermarket conversions of existing cars to EVs are done by third parties using a wide range of components from OEMs, custom built stuff, or scrapped EVs. E.g. Tesla batteries have a high value for this. Not that hard apparently.

- There are companies providing aftermarket upgrades to Teslas and other EVs to e.g. install custom batteries. For example, Our Next Energy (One) has installed their batteries in Teslas and other vehicles: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/05/our-next-energy-tests-i.... So, it's not true you are dependent on the OEM for this. Same with many older EVs that are still servicable. E.g. the original Nissan Leaf from twelve years ago can be equipped with after market battery replacements.

- Tesla recently urged owners of older models to come in to replace their 3G modules with 4G replacements to keep the over the air updates and other online stuff going. The cars work fine without that but obviously lose some functionality as 3G networks are being shut down.

- ICE vehicles are similarly software intensive. It's just that most vendors are a bit behind on update procedures and the update procedure generally sucks. They're busy switching to EVs instead of developing new ICE vehicles, so there's a lot of effectively unsupported software in the field that will never get serviced even if it is full of bugs. Which is of course common because most car manufacturers aren't very good at creating software. It's not a problem if the car keeps on running.

- Lots of things are software intensive these days. This is not unique to EVs. Why single those out?

Very much this. The description in the article sounds like owning a laptop vs a desktop pc. People don't care that they can't upgrade their car if they're just going to get a new one every three years anyway that has better features and twice the range. It's not how I buy cars, but the majority of car buyers don't buy cars like I buy cars.

Right now the price point of EVs is in the Luxury segment, and these people have never cared about the long term aspects of car ownership. Old cars are low status cars, so they unload them.

The drivetrain cost of EVs is probably under ICE in Tesla (they aren't pricing them like that, they are milking the market right now), and probably will in main auto in a few years, and it will plummet from there as economies of scale hit the OEM component makers. EVs are just batteries, 1-4 motors, and a control. system. Brakes for extra stopping power over regenerative braking if you want.

So the lower end will start to blossom in the next few years.

A lot of right to repair is to keep it under warranty. That's a legit antitrust concern between everyman mechanic and the auto makers. After warranty, if there's enough cars, there will be people that can fix them. And again, it's less components.

Tesla does need to have approved vendors at some point, but I definitely understand their logic in blocking access.

They're been doing it for decades at this point. Which part of it aren't they good at?

I'm not in the automotive industry, but the code I write has to conform to MISRA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Industry_Software_Reliab...) guidelines. I think they've learned a few things by now.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRUB...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9449559

"In a nutshell, the team led by Barr Group found: “a systematic software malfunction in the Main CPU that opens the throttle without operator action and continues to properly control fuel injection and ignition” that is not reliably detected by any fail-safe."

And the black box could fail to record any braking input in such cases.

That's not good! People died! And you would have a hard time convincing a jury that the driver was not at fault, if not for the thorough independent code review.

And that's the safety critical stuff, now imagine all the code for the infotainment systems.

How do you expect automotive to not suck when the rest of the software world delights in it?

Who cares?

Cars don't normally get updates after they leave the factory, unless you take them to a dealership - usually because there's a recall. Tesla is changing this, and expect other companies to follow suit.

But there's really zero reason why this is going to be confined to electric vehicles. The engine literally makes no difference. It was historically easier on EVs because, given that the engine is not always rotating, belts were not feasible. So they had electric steering (and other things like electric climate control). Regenerative breaking meant that you had to delegate braking action to the computer too.

However, ICE vehicles already use an ECU, so engine is already software based. Then, we have ABS and lane assist (and adaptive cruise control, etc) which means that some computer can control the throttle, brakes and steering too.

Other features like infotainment are completely orthogonal to the drive train.

> For now, we’ll continue to buy cars that are increasingly more difficult and costly to repair

Seems like the author hasn't bought an ICE vehicle recently. They are all more difficult to repair. Even things like replacing the infotainment system are no longer feasible since it's all integrated.

This article sounds like FUD against EVs.

Anyone that realizes these cars are a security nightmare? Wifi and cellular on a car! Brilliant!

The fact that ransomware hasn't yet hit cars is as shocking as it is inevitable. Russia literally disabled all ViaSat phones before invading. Telsas literally download firmware at will when a centralized server tells them to!

Edit: actually, looks like the attacks are already underway! https://fortune.com/2021/03/19/russian-pleads-guilty-ransomw...

No they don't, you're prompted to download software updates, they aren't automatic.

But ofc that’s just one remote attack avenue.

Let's look at washing machines: (or any other appliance) If you buy a washing machine there is limited incentive for the manufacturer to make it repairable or easy to dismantle and recycle the parts. Also for the owners there are incentives to run it as long as they can, while new, resource (energy, water, ...) efficient replacements will come out.

If you turn this around and make it a rental system where you buy 1000 runs or so the producer for one is incentived to make sure they have as little service cases as possible, so the machine has to be robust enough for that. And then when taking it back they have an interest to recycle the parts as good as they can since it's suddenly their problem and people get new or refurbished machines regularly which reduces resource usage.

Switching to such a model ain't easy, but interesting to me nonetheless.

The manufacturer could make a cost/benefit-analysis, concluding that building a machine that lasts approx. these 1000 runs but no longer, and paying for recycling afterwards is cheaper than building something that lasts and is recyclable.

Also, replacing it every ~200 cycles with just another cheaply built throwaway-machine could also become a viable business model. Why should the manufacturer care, if it becomes cheaper?

You could also make the manufacturer pay for recycling anyway - which is the case in the EU for several device classes IIRC, no need for a rental model to establish that. For some devices this means that the manufacturer has to take it back when you are done with it. The problem of course is that this is directly paid for by the customer - and by itself does not change anything.

But my argument is that it wouldn't for the rental model either.

For example the lint filter could have a sensor and owner could be punished if they didn't clean that :)

Machines wear unevenly and maintenance could prolong the lifespan considerably.

Another problem: the Global South is a huge user of second hard stuff (car, phones, everything).

"smart" devices kill the second hand market on purpose, to prevent reuse, leading to way more consumption and pollution.

Never trust market forces to solve environmental problems.

The problem with rental system is user now has less incentive to treat rented item well. But overall I think it still leads to less production and less resource usage.

Note that this is not exclusive to cars. Presonus did this to me when I purchased a StudioLive rack mixer. The previous owner had access to the “free” DSP programs it has built-in to do various effects like compression in the device itself. When he switched the registration to me, those were disabled and I’d have to pay to unlock them, because as Presonus said, they were only free as a promo offer to the initial purchaser and non-transferable, despite other parts of the licensed software being transferable. To add insult, that pack of DSP plugins that run in this thing are the ONLY available plugins, so it’s not like I can get some open-source or third-party ones.

I dislike them so much after this whole interaction that I won’t ever buy their stuff again and will repeat this story to anyone who will listen. I didn’t pay for the plug-in pack a second time, because I refuse to give them more money. I just got an external compressor instead.

Anyway, total BS IMO for manufacturers to disable functionality that the hardware had when new when it changes hands.

I drive a 20 year old car, my local government is pushing for me to buy a newer one "cos emissions". Which is ridiculous - I drive it infrequently enough that the cost of just making the body of a new car and nothing else would outweigh the savings.

The endgame seems to basically be that I move out of the city, which would be a massive own goal emissions/energy wise because it's far more costly for me to bop around on my own land miles away from services than it is for me to use my car once or twice a week whilst taking public transport most of the time. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

The same goes for buying items made of recycled materials, a more power-efficient computer, and so forth. That's great - if you actually need the new item. If you are getting the replacement solely for environmental reasons you have to consider the impact of producing the new item and disposing of the old one before making that call.

The CFD manufacture and disposal cost are sunken costs - you shouldn't include those in most calculations.

Counter-intuitively for high use situations, the longer the CFD has left to live the more obvious it is to change it sooner to save $ and the environment.

Assuming ① cost in dollars is proportional to environmental cost (edit: for both electricity and LED bulb), ② electricity costs $0.10 per kWh, ③ LED bulbs live as long as CFD bulbs, ④ LED bulb uses 7W whereas CFD uses 14W for the same lumen output, then if CFD has 5000 hours left, you can save $3.50 of electricity. If cost of LED is reasonably less than $3.50, it is obvious it makes sense to replace CFD with LED.

If the bulb would never need to be replaced (examples: very low usage; you are moving out soon; or house is going to be demolished before bulb is replaced) then it may make sense to leave a CFD in place.

The price of the LED is an investment with a payback period, so if you can't afford it or you have better returns for that investment elsewhere then you shouldn't replace the CFD.

If your electricity comes from your own renewables, then the calculation is different again. Although note that in most countries nearly 100% of your reduced electricity usage will result in a nearly 100% reduction in non-renewables like gas or coal (even if your country is say 80% renewables). Marginal generation and usage matters.

If you can find a better source than your professor, I would be interested.

Yes but the manufacture and disposal of the LED aren't yet. The calculation you want is whether running the inefficient CFL ends up being better than the energy used in the whole supply chain of manufacturing and shipping the LED bulb.

Switching means spending led_rate + 2 supply_chain costs while keeping your old bulbs means cfl_rate + 1 supply_chain. I'd put money that the latter being better for the environment.

Edit: To the person who downvoted me but didn't reply do tell how literally throwing away a 10W CFL and replacing it with a 6W LED is better for the environment than just using the CFL until it breaks and then buying an LED.

I didn't downvote you (can't downvote replies). I generally downvote people who comment about downvotes (even edits), since it is against HN guidelines. If you get downvotes, the value is in wondering to yourself: why. Not that the person who originally downvoted you is unlikely to reread your comment.

I deserve downvotes for this comment for mentioning downvoting, and perhaps because I went off-topic.

Edit: also IMHO worrying excessively about karma makes for unhealthy conversations.

Even trashing your working ICE car to buy an EV is a net negative if your car is still running fine. Unless you drive a _lot_, the least polluting car you can get is the one you already have. And that's not even talking about the energy sources used to produce the energy to charge the EV....

What we're witnessing is the last creation of capitalism, aka "green capitalism", but it's still about mindlessly consuming, you just get to feel good about it regardless of the reality.

> For example, a typical medium sized family car will create around 24 tonnes of CO2 during its life cycle, while an electric vehicle (EV) will produce around 18 tonnes over its life. For a battery EV, 46% of its total carbon footprint is generated at the factory, before it has travelled a single mile.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

For CO2 absolutely, but for local air quality it makes sense for us all to run out and buy EVs as quickly as possible.

At least in London, air pollution has been a major concern for some time now.

Is anyone really advocating for 'trashing' working vehicles? I thought we proved how dumb that was back in '08...

Seals fail, emissions management devices wear out, fluids start to leak, it's terrible. Constant repairs with uncertain outcome. It's worse for cars.

There's always a scenario where an old car is a perfectly fine alternative, but there are lots of situations where the older car is less safe and emits substantially more than a newer alternative.

"Cash 4 Clunkers" was a disgrace, but mobility and ease of access to transportation are a public good and a utility that should be easily available to all, not just those people who can afford a newer car or people who've got a low mileage volvo 240 in the garage for when they want to go camping.

My car has 100g/km CO2 emissions. I'd need to drive 10000km or 6500mi to emit a ton of carbon.

But that's like, loads. I use the car for occasional 10-20 mile drives to DIY stores or whatever. I'd need to do that every day for a year to even get close to 1t.

For a new car we're talking 10x that, at minimum.

Companies feel the need to not just earn money when they sell their product, but earn to even more over its whole lifetime. This refocuses their goal into providing products that regularly need some attention, which only they can provide, instead of creating the best product they can before it is sold, and let the customer and third-parties maintain it if necessary.