Ever drive in a car with a big screen from like 10+ years ago that has the most outdated, useless UI?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 Hate the outdated UI?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.
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'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.
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.
The same is true of any modern ICE, you're not exactly gonna get source code or schematics for drivetrain management
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
I look forward to the day when my refrigerator stops working because the company went bankrupt, or because their server was down.
Sono Sion shut down, and good luck even getting your money back. Of course and shamelessly, Sono Motors and their CEOs get to continue to cruise through it. Wait EV startups out until they release is my advice, too much of an industry and competing markets locking new competition out. The only incentive to purchase into them, paying less, is also what puts your money at risk.
Sono Sion wasn't even Chinese. it was fully German. The dangerous thing about Chinese EVs is that they are much more certain to deliver, and that gives more of a false sense of security that they will continue to maintain and conform to regulations.
Mostly, yes, but the fact that we can't definitively say "yes" is a problem.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
