← Back to context

Comment by Archelaos

16 hours ago

The article misses to explain why this is an EU problem, not just a BMW problem. Is the problem described caused by a specific EU regulation (which?) or is mentioning the EU just click bait? (Honest question.)

It is a BMW problem and the rest is clickbait. If you own a BMW you know all this as it has been the case for over decades.

It's also not a eu thing as all manufacturers are locking things up, Ford and other US brands are trying as much as all other manufacturers. They just haven't reached BMW levels yet.

  • UN Regulation No. 155, and 156, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are requiring car manufacturers to implement cryptographic validation that allows only authorized software from the manufacturer to be run.

    • This is just signing, nothing cutting edge. Verification of signatures is a fairly old tech. What is the exact problem here? Is it that manufacturers do not publish the signed binaries or is it that you want to run something on your car compiled by you?

    • What I meant more is that you need more and more specialized tools (according to the manufacturers). My previous ford needed a special (expensive!) bracket to keep the drivetrain in place if you want to do anything on the engine which makes home service less likely.

      These regulations do not mean you need 25k in tooling, but that is what it has come to. And thus there is a blooming (mostly Chinese/Russian) aftermarket tooling business with sketchy software you want to run in a VM.

  • This 2022 BMW X1 my wife drives is the last BMW we will ever own. £395 for an oil change. £180 for brake fluid. £500 a year road tax.

    Meanwhile my 2011 Prius continues to pass its MOT without fail, needs just the usual very affordable consumables, gets 50% higher MPG and actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1.

    • >actually has a larger cargo capacity than the X1

      You have just discovered that SUVs are large because some people want their cars to be large. They come with all the downsides of that and not much of the upsides.

      1 reply →

    • Hmm... I never bought a BMW, certainly because I am poor, but also because everyone around me who drives a luxury car keeps telling me how expensive yet unreliable everything is, while everyone who drives a Toyota and Honda almost never talks about their car. I took the hint and have been doing what is financially responsible.

    • Sounds like you're getting it serviced by a BMW dealership? I take my PHEV 3-series to a local independent mechanic, and the entire cost is usually less than you're paying for oil alone. Also, because it's a hybrid, the road tax rate is very advantageous.

  • Lol no way do BMW owners commonly know this. Most buy the car because it says BMW on it and they think that means quality.

    • I was more or less pointing to the expensive repairs needed in BMW as in you know it's locked down and you need expensive OEM stuff. Maybe that is covered under "quality is expensive" for normal people but when you buy a BMW you know the replacement parts bill is costing you an arm and a leg.

      1 reply →

What they mean by the EU-bashing is two things:

1. The EU de facto mandates the car manufacturers have to develop and sell cars that produce less CO2 (mostly by the way of fines for higher polluting vehicles). This led to the development of hybrid ('mild-hybrid', 'full-hybrid', and PHEV) and EV vehicles.

2. The manufacturers tend to both complicate the technology and lock the stuff down, so it's not easily repairable. This has its own enviromental price, and EV Clinic says this is not accounted for. That's not completely fair as on one hand there are EU repairability directives that address this but on the other we still want to have some degreee of market competition and in the end the market should punish those manufacturers (as it is already doing, I think).

One thing I want to add is that the EU also mandates real-world-fuel-consumption-measurement (OBFCM) devices in new cars and if that is followed to its logical conclusion and the manufacturers pressure is resisted, this will mean the end of hybrids as the real-world data is horrible for them.

https://zecar.com/reviews/plug-in-hybrid%27s-real-emissions-...

It's clickbait, but at the very least it's not LLM slop, considering how they spelled the word "theoretically".

Correct, it isn't it's more a "German Boomer Engineering problem"

Though I'd say this is 80% of the problem, the safety fuse thing is needed but it probably takes a while for companies to get it right