I rewatched Wall-E the other day. I forgot just how staggeringly good that movie is. How the hell does every single robot have their own personality. Not to mention how everyone that Wall-E interacts with ends up for the better, after a lil chaos, of course. I cried so many times. I’m 33.
The difference between wall-e and eve makes me think of cars. How old and even some modern combustion cars are built well and engineered to be highly modular and user serviceable. EVs are highly proprietary. They rely on closed systems that can’t practically be serviced without special equipment.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m NOT a fan of fossil fuels at all. I just don’t like how cars have been slowly morphing into proprietary unreliable cellphone-like commodities, or how the push towards EVs seems to be accelerating that trend.
A modern high-end BMW can have over a hundred separate ECUs (microcontrollers). All communicating over multiple CAN and FlexRay networks. The complexity is mind boggling, just so you can have subscription based seat heating and other nonsense.
No technician on Earth will be able to debug this black box spaghetti except the manufacturer. If you try to access/reprogram one of these chips (as you should be able as you OWN the damn thing), the microcontroller has OTP (one time programmable) memory that ensures the device can physically brick itself should you try.
I do not share such faith in the manufacturer that made the black box spaghetti.
I do have faith that some random dude in Pakistan will figure out how to unlock a sensor using a paperclip and a 555 timer and will post it to YouTube.
If the person in the video is wearing flip flops and smoking, tends to be good info.
Yes, exactly! We are just going to see more of this as time passes and I hate it. Idk what I can to about it other than buy cars that do less of this. Not that my one purchase every other decade really matters.
Well, we could nationalize car production.
You can stop buying cars and rennt them instead. The electronic clusterfuck spaghetti is not your problem anymore. You still get all your data harvested and sold to the highest bidder though.
Meh. I doubt most people buy a new car every 2 years. Nor that most people buy multiple of them. And “it’s just me doing it” is a good thing to leave out. Possibly most people think that, even if perhaps not in this specific case.
Valid. I just lack general faith in the practice of voting with your wallet. My default assumption is that it takes an unreasonable amount of persistence and coordination, and that the majority of people either don’t know or don’t care about whatever issue is being considered.
Bmw is dogshit but even when they had 7 computers they were so amazingly ass backwards they had to have chassis diag specialists for each of their higher end models.
You can always get an older car and do a conversion. If you can find one with a bad/no motor you could even save a few bucks.
Wait, is that a normally done thing? As far as conversions go, I’ve only seen someone’s project of combustion-powered Tesla. Combustion to EV sounds interesting.
But anyway, won’t you then have the same issues anyway?
The kind of person in the position to convert a vehicle from one energy source to another is either competent enough to do any future work themselves, in which case they already have the necessary tools to do said work, or has enough money that the potential difficulty in maintaining the vehicle is not a concern.
No, I can’t always do that. Even professionals can not always do that. What do you smoke to believe this?
It seems to me that the future of electric mobillity is more car renting/leasing than car ownership. Servicing will be included in the monthly payment and you won’t have to service it yourself
Not just cars. The logical endpoint of capitalism is a rent-only economy. Everything will shift in ownership to the ones with the ability to purchase above the market price. Undercut everybody for infinite gains in the future.
Edit: I should say that i meant unregulated capitalism. I honestly don’t find anything wrong with people being well payed for doing exceptional things. Taking advantage of capital gains is NOT exceptional.
You’re right, but I just noticed something about that (I’m probably very late to the party here): so an endpoint of unregulated capitalism is that ownership is limited to a few, who almost certainly acquired ownership through some form of class exploitation and theft. Or, to oversimplify it…ownership is theft. Hmm, sounds familiar.
One could argue that the endpoint of socialism is the abolition of individual ownership. Maybe there’s a bridge to be built there?
Renting forever sounds like a nightmare. They already took housing from me. I don’t want to keep losing things.
I don’t know. Personally, I see myself earning a high income and renting a home and a car to free myself from the angst that comes with ownership.
I respect your opinion. I don’t feel the same.
I don’t know much at all about the EV industry, especially how their technology differs between manufacturers. But does that really matter, strictly speaking? Like the majority of “other” repairs are going to be just as uniform as traditional vehicles; things like tire changes, brakes, suspension, and whatever else I’m not smart enough to know about.
Other than the actual engine itself, can that other stuff really be fully proprietary, or non-servicable?
EDIT: I’m realizing that I didn’t really clarify the distinction of “should” vs “does”. I recognize that a huge amount of right to repair bullshit comes from companies being intentionally obtuse/greedy. What I meant to question was whether these restrictions on serviceability actually have merit, or if it’s strictly enshittification being brought into the auto world.
Oh, sweet summer child…
Of course you can introduce all kinds of serialization and parts pairing just like you do on any other device. Below is a fairly mild example, but just look at all the bullshit John Deere is pulling on their tractor repair or the BMW where the car will intentionally malfunction if you don’t replace your battery at a dealership.
https://carnewschina.com/2024/08/08/xiaomi-su7-cannot-do-ota-due-to-changed-lights-and-owners-worry-about-flooding-their-frunk/
I’m the sort of person who enjoys doing things myself when it comes to my car. It isn’t just a tinkering hobby to me. My car is a huge source for feelings of safety and control. Theoretically, I could tear down and rebuild almost everything on my car with a socket wrench set. Obviously it’s more complicated than that and as other people have mentioned there are some modern combustion cars that are massively complicated just to stop people like myself from getting into them. EVs on the other hand are way easier to lock down because the whole power train is basically a black box connected to a battery and operated by an app. Sure the breaks and wheels are the same but nearly everything else is either black boxed (motor and controls) or gone completely (transmission and drive train)which makes the car as a whole less fixable / modable. This makes me feel less safe having to rely on one.
Pretty much every component in a car these days has some sort of microcontroller. They use software to lock you out of repairing things that have no business being locked behind software. In your example, even suspension tuning is locked behind software for Teslas.
https://www.autoblog.com/news/tesla-repair-locks-owner-rights
They don’t need much maintenance and the engine brake evs do to recover the energy removes stress on the regular brakes so the brakes last a lot longer.
But an electric car is basically just a bigger rc car, it doesn’t need any real maintenance. There’s no fluids.
Remember when apple started getting dinged for programming their batteries to fail artificially and making them unnecessarily hard to replace just to force more people to upgrade?
Mark my words. That trick is coming soon to a Tesla near you.