Comment by CalRobert
16 hours ago
As much as I tend to agree philosophically, could it not result in people making changes that endanger other road users?
16 hours ago
As much as I tend to agree philosophically, could it not result in people making changes that endanger other road users?
No, one can do that anyway. There is basically no real way to stop folks from modifying their cars. It can be made more difficult, sure.
This is about selling tools and access. It's another profit pipeline for car OEMs.
Perhaps it is also about liability. Otherwise, we would have people installing OpenClaw on their Teslas.
Then why wasn't it a problem before? People have always been able to install aftermarket or possibly even hacked together physical parts. If there was liability you'd expect some sort of shield blocking access to, for example, the hydraulic system for the brakes.
As it turns out though blatant irresponsibility is quite rare (depending on your definition anyway) since people have a strong self interest in not endangering their own lives or wallets. It's similar for homeowners - many states explicitly carve out a requirement that insurance companies cover DIY modifications that are within reason and this generally works out since you have a strong vested interest in not destroying your own house regardless of any insurance policy.
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I don’t think that’s the reason, seeing as a car is already endangering everyone around it by existing. More likely about keeping the tooling to diagnose issues proprietary and expensive.
Obviously, they are both very good reasons. Just because you don't like one of them, doesn't mean the other one doesn't suddenly exist anymore.
You could screenshot this and put it under the definition of “perfect being the enemy of good”
That kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason.
Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.
Four 9/11s worth of people die every year from drunk driving. If we can't even get that under control, I don't see why being able to modify your own car is a big deal.
We could do both…
Disabling alertness sensors might worsen drunk driving actually.
It doesn’t have to be a “big deal” for the powers that be to resolve that you shouldn’t have root access to your iPad on wheels, dude.
Isn't this largely a US problem?
Enforcement is abysmal for stupid reasons. Courts are reluctant to remove the ability for people to drive because America purposely made itself dependent on cars, and cops are reluctant to actually arrest a lot of people for drunk driving because they tend to be buddies, or worse. You can find plentiful examples of off duty officers trying to get out of drunk driving simply by being a cop.
This is what you get when you can vote on the sheriff and judges who insist they are "Tough on crime" because they sentence a dude smoking a joint to years in the joint while ignoring real problems like, you know, murder and theft and violence and all the shit their buddies are doing. The "Tough on crime" people are the ones drunk driving often enough.