When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?
When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?
restofworld.org
When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?
104 comments
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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
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People have already been jailbreaking Teslas to unlock full self-driving, which is a $10k software patch.
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And somehow the RPi9 will still need some $90 5V20A USB power supply
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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.
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Should be happening now but I understand these things take time.
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Opencore Legacy Patcher, but for cars. Nice.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The same is true of any modern ICE, you're not exactly gonna get source code or schematics for drivetrain management
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Finally people are starting to ask the questions that actually matter.
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Yeah well I raised this question six years ago and muskrat fanbois got me banned from like four EV 'the other site' communities.
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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.
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As long as they're a smartphone on wheels the answer is no.
We want real cars again, even if electric.
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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.
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Public transportation does not operate in the middle of nowhere where the closest store is more than half an hour away.
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Name checks out. I'm all for public transportation, but to think that it will eliminate cars is nonsense.
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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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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's not your car if someone else controls it.
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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.
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1000%, we need to demand minimum functionality or stop perpetuating these fucking things by purchasing flawed products from flawed companies.
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Or, you know, regulate them
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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.
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Agreed! The most promising standard is called matter. Vote with your wallet!
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Looking at Aging Wheels YouTube channel with his fleet of non working Wheegos, the answer is no, they won't.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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....
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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.
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Woah woah woah. You can't "disrupt" the car industry without a subscription based model that can brick your hardware at a moments notice.
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Why wouldn't they? You plug it in and keep driving. It's not any different from petrol cars.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I look forward to the day when my refrigerator stops working because the company went bankrupt, or because their server was down.
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Samsung are pretty close.
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That's not on purpose they are just defective shit boxes engineered by the cheapest guy on fiverr
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Mostly, yes, but the fact that we can't definitively say "yes" is a problem.
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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.
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Will VW support Rivan owners ?
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I saw a YouTube video where a guy had a dent in the back left of his rivan and the body shop wanted 40k to fix it because the car is really easy to work on.
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So while this repair isn’t perfect, it’s pretty darn close. It’s not known how much the customer paid for the repair, but other claims on RivianForums estimate that PDR for similar damage on the R1T ranged between $4,000 and $6,000. And, thankfully, this process didn’t involve cutting and paintwork that could have stretched the undertaking by weeks or months, rather than days.
I had not seen that. Interesting that carriage house sized business found benefit from 21st century automotive design.
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I think ford and gm have turnkey crate motors and I suspect the vehicles have the same systems. Might be fun problem to solve.
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I don't think it's too far out of the realm of possibility considering numerous people buy crashed/scrapped EVs and adapt them into old vehicles or modify them into Franken-cars on Youtube.
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There was that one guy on YouTube and he rebuilt a military humvee with telsa motors.
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My assumption would be that they'll work better.
The scariest part of technology is software updates.
104 comments
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.
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.