Comment by carefree-bob
5 days ago
There is also the issue of longevity. Most people don't expect 20 year old laptops to keep working, but they expect 20 year old cars to keep working. The software defined vehicle is a disposable vehicle, and that means it better be cheap or someone is taking a depreciation bath.
That's because cars are fundamentally hardware products, not software products. Yes, software powers the heart of it (ECU), but it is just another "part" in a million other parts, not the main central selling point of the car.
So, if I buy an expensive hardware product for something that can significantly alter my net worth, it is not unreasonable to expect it to last a few decades.
The analogy for this would be the same as buying a property/house. Just because it has a smart home module in it, doesn't make it the central USP of the house - people invest millions into it for the location and size (area), not for the software it runs on.
However, what's happening today is software is being pushed as the central USP of the car, kind of like how they did with phones - and that's not a good thing and which enforces my belief further that we need less software inside hardware products, not more.
And because we know cars do not have to have all that crappy software. We have cars lasting decades without it.
Agreed!
It might surprising to you, but most people haven't already locked themselves into the apple prison
My 20-year-old PC hardware will just about work, but a lot of projects are dropping support for 32-bit x86 these days.
If you brought the newly released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonah_(microprocessor) in 2006 - no Windows 11 or later, no Debian 13 or later, no Ubuntu 20.04 or later...
Gentoo works and you can build or even cross-build it yourself. The next big problem is going to be, unsurprisingly, Firefox: glean component is exceeding 3GB memory during compilation (the 32bit user address space).
Cars are harsh environments with heat, moisture and vibrations. Automotive electronics are considered heavy duty compared to consumer electronics, but are still rated for about 8,000-10,000 hours of operation.
One way to think about it is that temperatures inside a car left in the Arizona heat can easily reach 160. Inside the engine bay, they can easily reach 200F.
Now, if you leave your consumer electronics inside a car every day during the summer, you can expect a significant proportion to fail. For instance, your lithium batteries in your laptop are going to have a bad time if you operate them over 113 and they will start getting damaged when operated over 100.
https://www.apple.com/mz/batteries/maximizing-performance/
But you expect your computer modules to take it, and they have been built in such a way to take it, as well as all the vibrations, moisture, and temperature swings of a car. You can leave your car in the street in the summer, walk back into it after it's been sitting in the sun, and apart from needing a steering wheel cover you can start the car and drive away, with all your modules working. And you can do this for a decade. It's pretty amazing. How many people have gotten the "phone is too hot to operate message" when leaving their phone in the car in the summer, but their infotainment screens continue to work? It's happened to me all the time.
If you drive 2 hours a day on weekdays and one hour on weekends, so 12 hours per week, then that is 6240 hours of operation in a decade, so expect your car electronics modules to start dying around year 13 of use, and by year 16 of use, you are past the point for which these modules have been rated.
The infotainment screens will last 7-10 years. Sensors in the engine bay will last 5-10 years.
The problem is that people expect their cars to last 20 or 30 years, and they should be able to, but cars weighed down with electronics are going to last only about 10 years. That's a huge problem for people who will get saddled with massive depreciation. If you paid $70K for that car, you are going to lose it all over 10 years, that's $7K depreciation per year (on average) but of course it is front loaded as you will lose 40% of that in the first 3 years.
So the software defined car, is going to radically change the economics of car ownership, and how much automakers can charge for cars, or equivalently it will dramatically shrink the pool of people who can use a car.
Now, you may think "I will escape this and just lease the car", but that is just a financing arrangement does not allow you to escape depreciation, as you pay for the depreciation in your lease cost. You can say "I will escape this and take an uber or taxi" but here, too, the depreciation costs will be passed onto you as a customer. You may think "the automaker only cares about the first buyer" but the first buyer is the one that absorbs the vast majority of the depreciation. There is no escape.
I don't think people have internalized the financial horror that is the software-defined car. The average age of a car on the road is now 14 years. You are talking about transitioning to cars that will only last 10 years. It's going to completely shock both automakers and car buyers.
What will happen to your iphone-defined dash in 10 years, when iPhones use completely new protocols and are not usable with your car anymore? It's one thing when it was just infotainment, and people could install more modern aftermarket units, but when the entire thing is integrated into the dash and controls critical functionality, then this will turn into a nightmare.
Cars with 20yo computers do work tho.
The older modules were more durable, but even those start to fail after that much use. In the past, you could go to a junkyard and pull a new module, but now everything is vin-locked to the car, so you need to buy a new module from the manufacturer, but oops, they are no longer selling them. Now what do you do? It's a real problem.
Some shops try to reverse engineer the modules and create clones, and that works a little bit, but it's a real problem. But that was for modules made in the early 2000s.
Now fast forward to today where the electronics is completely different and much less durable. You have basically PC motherboards being inserted into cars. I think people have not yet understood the implications of this in terms of their car's durability.
I've been talking to a guy with a 2007 Volvo and the upper electronics module failed -- it's in the rear-view mirror. Now, you can still drive that car, but he pulled one from a junkyard and tried to replace his -- now the CEM wont recognize the module. OK, with Volvo, you can crack the CEM pin and get it to accept the new module since the reverse engineering community has managed to figure that out.
But with modern cars? With the "software defined vehicle"? You are S.O.L.
When a mechanical part fails, you can fabricate a new part, and aftermarket vendors come and make replacement parts. But with software? The vendor isn't releasing the code. You can't make a replacement.
At least in places with strong consumer rights I imagine there could be regulation to force vendors keeping their old cars repairable.
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AI in a box, look at the signals coming in, look at the signals going out. emulated and clone them.. you have a acceptable and a reject state button. Blackbox blackboxed car.
Cars with (double) DIN units are ok. When the built in GPS is missing half the roads in your area or Carplay/android auto stops working you can just buy a new headunit for a few hundred dollars. But cars with everything "integrated" aren't ageing as gracefully and it's not easy to upgrade the built in systems. 20 years old is fine, 10 years maybe not.
I own a 2019 VW egolf. It does not work as intended and its only 7 years old.
When they shut down 3g nobody thought about what it would do to "smart cars" that only had 3g modems.
Mine lost the ability to update and is now stuck with an out of date map, no remote start or preheating, no ability to check charge levels remotely, and a ton of bugs that will never be fixed.
When the software stops being supported it basically ruins the car for many purposes. For example, as someone who lives in a cold climate the ability to remotely preheat the cabin and turn on defrosters is an absolute necessity of most folks.
VW doesnt care to fix the issue so owners are stuck, forever.
Yeah but those were primitive (as in simple, more reliable) and hardened electronics, and you had tons of knobs to set most important things directly even if the screen would die completely.
Now its just a tablet glued to some annoying location and no physical controls. Do you expect a tablet to last 20 years battery notwithstanding, the touch to be perfectly sensitive for so long? Most people don't, for good reasons.