Am curious, how have the shade balls been working out in terms of maintenance, coating wear, leeched microplastics, containment (so they don't wind up in oceans), etc? In retrospect, did it make sense compared to the $250M or so uplift it would have taken to build a conventional roof?
IMO it comes down to making your stuff available without it being behind a login-wall, pay-wall, ad-wall etc. The big platforms have made it seductively easy to get started with little effort, but you rob yourself of audience by letting them lock up your content behind it. I hope we see a larger exodus of users who take the author's lead and escape the walled gardens.
Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time.
No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Most people including the author think more software = premium/better. But as software engineers, we know better. That's not the case at all. More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>I imagine there could be regulation to force vendors keeping their old cars repairable.
Yes, but what does that mean in practice? That Manufacturer has to keep making parts for 20 years after production ends? How does that help if your entire infotainment system runs on Google's AOSS system and google just pulls the plug on it or the built-in modem stops connecting to the internet because your country decided to switch off all 3G networks(which is a real problem happening everywhere). Is the car "working" but with all apps and satnav completely blank still functional or does it need "repair" - if so, what does that repair even look like?
As a basic example - I have a 2020 Volvo XC60 with Sensus OS - all the maps are preloaded on the internal drive and they will continue working until the hardware breaks - they might get outdated but they will work. But I drove a new Volvo XC60 with AOSS and I was in the area without any signal coverage - in that case all the maps were just blank, the middle of the driver display was blank, it literally looked broken because nothing would load and the screens didn't have a good fallback for such a scenario.....which will inevitably happen to all these cars, either because they lose connectivity or because google/volvo decide to stop supporting them on their network.
You mean, ensuring repairability would be hard? I bet. And exceptions could be made where a change of technology makes aspects of the car non-functional (3G vanishing). On the other hand, the choice of contractors/suppliers, contracts with those entities, and so on would work differently with a repairability law in place.
Both the governments and the manufacturer benefit from you driving a newer vehicle instead of keeping your old car running. Topics like environmental impact safety etc. are higher priority compared to repair-ability. Additionally most people don't care.
Additionally there is the issue of licensing and regulation around the hardware and software of a vehicle. The regulation in my country is written around "type approval" and this means you can not change the car significantly beyond what is approved during the car "type approval" process.
On top of that this market is ripe for abuse of planned obsolescence as the product is very technically complex and there is no real regulation against it.
This is why I drive an old car and a simple modern car, most modern smart tv's with wheels strapped to them will become bricked the moment the manufacturer doesn't support them anymore (after the 10year lifespan).
In my experience, it does actually work. Tesla model s had an issue with the flash memory endurance, and the NHTSA made them replace it. Which they did, and upgraded the 3G modem to LTE while they were at it. My 2013 Model S is still going strong, still gets software updates.
They forced them to replace it because it was recognized as a manufacturing/design defect. This is a very different scenario from "normal wear" replacement.
Additionally the Tesla model S is still in production with only a facelift. Therefore the parts that are produced are not unavailable (or not supplied).
I think you can't replace/upgrade the flash and modem yourself without the assistance of a Tesla dealer.
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.
It's not only bug fixing. It's what happens to phones too: updates for a fixed number of years.
I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.
This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.
I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.
I don't understand how they can get away with this even. Imagine if they discover a root exploit in whatever old version of Android they're running.
Now if there's no update, people can just hack your car via the internet or Bluetooth. While your infotainment can't access the ICU usually, they're connected via Canbus which has zero provisions for security, and taking over your whole car is usually quite easy from this point, as many have demonstrated.
And even if there's a fix, you have to drive to the service center who might not even update your car for free.
I'm just surprised how this hasn't ended in disaster already.
I think that parties can win elections by pointing fingers at what people do with their phones, but they can't create enough concern by pointing fingers at the Canbus and at hacking cars.
> Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
Yeah unless its integrated into another module. Or you remove or unplug it, and suddenly it throws an annoying error because a module is missing. Or even your car goes into limp mode because of some kind of weird cascade failure.
There might be some cars this works on now, but it's going to be harder and harder to do over time as things get more integrated, and the more they realize they want that sweet location data money.
Well thats a nice theory but do you yourself give guarantee to all models that they will keep working after such potentially destructive 'hack' ? I don't think so. Its trivial for manufacturer to make it stop working because of ie some security blah and just having a big warning on the screen to go to the repair shop.
So a typical internet advice - don't listen to it uncritically, or not at all.
I was told by a car dealer service guy that if the touch screen went on the blink, the car would be totaled. (Since replacing it cost more than the car was worth.)
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
Because you can choose to leave your phone at home and are travel everywhere by car if you don't want to be tracked. But you can't leave your car at home and travel anywhere.
It is true that we don't need cars sending telemetry to track us since there is a conveniently placed identification number on the front and rear of the car, the number plate (used by government), but this is physically broadcasted and that limits its reach.
So why should the manufacturer of my car have access (and the right to sell) a lot of my personal data like location, weight, age indefinitely just because I own a product manufactured by them?
It is an unnecessary overreach on very sensitive data and I can't really opt out (if buying a modern car) since all manufacturers are doing it.
Yes I also carried a phone everywhere the last 20years, but that doesn't make the tracking right (also on phone I think we should be tracked less).
I understand and agree in general, but the root issue is in the laws and what's permitted to companies. Giving your data to car manufacturers and 3rd parties should be mandated to be disabled by default by law and only enabled with proper informed consent.
My car does not have a cellular modem in it, and my phone runs GrapheneOS. I use airplane mode extensively and rotate SIMs regularly. Data brokers aren't getting any anything from me.
Funny that you say that because of all the big tech companies, Apple has the best track record at fighting for consumer privacy. And you certainly cannot say that for any of the car makers that currently have an EV lineup.
Apple has a terrible reputation if you don't cherrypick news. Most of their 'security' stuff is PR work. Its just that rest of competition is even worse.
The power of a tablet is far more than is required for an infotainment system. Make a standard, like we used to have for radios and regulate everything to expose all the controls via a standard connection. Standard parts for replacing and sizes for fitting.
The only way we can have nice things is by regulating. I don't want proprietary tyres either.
It doesn't have to be that way though. There's a bigger scam in the tech industry in general that says the path we're on is the only path we can be on.
More software doesn't have to mean less value for the customer. More software doesn't have to mean your tools and devices are spyware machines. That's just the lie we've been told.
Exactly! There's vastly more software available for Linux than there is for Windows and the Linux experience is vastly superior. It's a real-world example of "more software == better".
As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.
Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.
> Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
Telling that to normies would usually give me blanks stares and "nothing to hide" or "don't care" arguments.
My "but your situation my change" and "gov can turn bad" arguments never hit. People are terrible at projecting themselves. That's why climate change is so hard to fight. It's too far and abstract.
Humans need to feel concrete and awful pain to realize their mistake and learn.
But I'm hoping the Trump situation is going to cause that. Now that the US is at the brink of dictatorship (some might argue it's already there), maybe American citizens will realize that putting their entire life on a centralized platform, having non encrypted communications and spying devices everywhere is a terrible idea.
I'm not very optimistic though.
And even if they do, in 3 generations, they will have forgotten. I have no idea how to fix this.
That's why I have a dumb car, but added a tablet with maps and can bus connection (OBD-II) via bluetooth. All in my control. The OBD-II adapter is not visible. Did cost my about 50€.
Maybe that's because software that we use every day (websites, saas, etc) generally get better over time and it's still relatively cheap. Meanwhile cars still rely on things like an archaic check engine light rather than just tell you what's wrong with the car and an infotainment system that's worse than a circa 2012 iPad.
People feel that cars haven't really improved much in practical terms over the last 20 years. At least to the layman, they don't feel smoother, safer, more comfortable to drive. They just got more expensive, more cameras and crap like auto-start that no one asked for.
So at least the hope is to take some of the best parts of modern software manufacturing and apply it to the car. Tesla did this and is why it was the first successful car company that's been started in the past 50 years or so.
Auto start is pretty much universally hated especially since it's ubiquitous and can usually only be turned off for a single ride. But cool, I'm glad you like it.
Cameras and electronics make the car much more expensive to repair.
But I'm confused, are you pro-technology in car or are you one of those that say "this exact level of technology is perfect, any more or less would be bad". I see this weird tech hater sentiment. For instance some are worried about technology taking blue collar jobs but if you suggest removing technology to create more jobs, they would be against that. Consider how many jobs the washing machine has taken. We could create millions of manual clothes washers if we got rid of them!
>>Auto start is pretty much universally hated especially since it's ubiquitous and can usually only be turned off for a single ride.
Which I absolutely don't understand. It's a fantastic technology and I wish I could retro-fit them to some of my older cars too, it's literally fantastic. Like, who likes sitting in standstill traffic and listening to their 4 cylinder rambler working when they are just standing still???? Even in my V8 LR3 I wish the engine would just shut off when in traffic, it's extra noise that's not needed or welcome inside the cabin. Especially since the advent of integrated starter generators, all the old arguments against it, how it's slow to start or how it wears out the starter motor have literally disappeared. But you still see people rabidly complain about it on forums, for no reason that I can see anywhere, other than "I just don't like it".
Great. Leave it on. I want it off, and I want it to stay off when turned off.
The start delay is not a big deal in traffic that's stop-and-go. But I have a poor-visibility situation at the end of my street, for which the only solution is "move away". There was a light indicating if a car was approaching over the hill, but when it was damaged the city didn't replace it. So when I hit the accelerator, I need the car to go right then. Not half a second or a full second later, when there might be a car that wasn't visible before coming at me.
In a 2023 Mercedes it is most assuredly not instantaneous. Maybe it's just their implementation that's unpredictable. But that's the car my wife owns, so it's the one I've tried it on.
Still, keep using it if you like it. I don't hate that it exists. I hate that I can't turn it off and leave it off.
Yeah I'm just saying try it in a car where it works well. In my XC60 it's paired with an electric motor on the rear axle so even with the engine off the car accelerates from standstill like an EV - instantaneously and with plenty of torque.
Then you've changed the whole issue. I wouldn't have an issue with it in a hybrid at all, but in a pure ICE car, it's not always a good thing.
I suspect the hatred comes from the inability to leave it off. I don't have to turn my radio off every time I start the car. I don't have to turn off the climate control. I don't have to turn off the automatic wipers. If I turn them off, they stay off until I turn them back on.
The key word there is disappeared which means engineering effort was put into vehicle design to make it a non issue. more robust/new starter design, more expensive battery tech required, simulations to validate no carbon buildup and real world testing, software calibration to make sure if engine is too cold or turbo too hot doesn't auto stop. All driving up costs to consumer thus consumers would liek to have something for that added cost. For many rural drivers a typical commute may be 15 miles with 2-3 stoplights and 1-2 lights. this effectively negates the fuel benefitsand often is annoying when coming to a stop at a stopsign to have car turn off momentarily for no benefit and possibly detriment to fuel economy if the ratio of stop sign initiated auto stops is higher than stop and sit at a stop light. I do appreciate personally the moments of quiet when not moving but is it worth it the added cost to my vehicle ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>>often is annoying when coming to a stop at a stopsign to have car turn off momentarily for no benefit
The benefit is that it's nice an quiet. I don't care about the fuel saving.
>>it worth it the added cost to my vehicle
I'm not sure what that cost is, even if there is one. My XC60 got rid of the starter motor and just uses then ISG which it would have to have anyway being a plug in hybrid. The engine obviously has to start and stop at any moment to allow EV running too, so that engineering had to be done anyway.
But I had one of the early S/S systems in a 2013 Nissan Qashqai and I never had any issues with it in my 7 years of ownership, not entirely sure if it added anything to the price of the vehicle as the previous model year with the same engine but no S/S cost exactly the same.
I thought more software meant I could write a little Lua and get the seat in the second preset position when I pressed the key fob in a particular way...
> More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments.
Also more unreliability, because software engineers often aren't real engineers.
> The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
The problem here is (probably) the internet, which gives management an excuse to slack on QA. If there was no chance to ever update the software, they'd probably do a better job. But now with the internet, they can say they'll just fix it in a patch later, but then never actually get around to doing that.
There ought to be a law that says car software may only be shipped on console-style non-flash ROM carts.
>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but I'm sorry: the reality that we live in and incentives at play are such that if a capability can be exploited, then it will be exploited to the detriment of the consumer. Full stop.
It's interesting how many complaints I see on HN that are framed as if they're complaints about a specific piece of technology when they are really complaints about capitalism. I'm all ears if you want to criticize our entire economic system, but I think it's silly to have that conversation specifically in the context of car software rather than at a societal level.
> when they are really complaints about capitalism
it's not a complaint about capitalism. It's a complaint about asymmetric bargaining power in the seller/buyer relationship.
That's not inherent in capitalism. It's inherent in an anti-competitive market. The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
"It's not a complaint about water. It's a complaint about the wetness."
If capitalism requires constant vigilant government intervention to prevent monopolistic practices, anti-competitive markets, and asymmetric bargaining power, then it seems to me that this is absolutely a complaint about capitalism. If anything, your comment just makes the indictment more damning.
i'd rather have the gov't be vigilant, than to have the gov't be the one monopolistic dictator. None of those problems of monopoly are inherent in capitalism - they exist in one form or another under a different market style (that of a command economy). It just appears different.
> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
The world we live in is capitalistic. We can imagine another world that isn't, but when we're considering specific pieces of technology, it's worthwhile to judge it by how it will perform or be exploited in the world we live in.
When you're fighting the same enemy on a dozen battlefields, you won't stand a chance of winning until you understand that fact and go after the root cause.
The whole idea of enshittification is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. The steps in this chain are not inherent to 'making products', they emerge entirely from the confines and incentives of our market-based economy.
And it's not just "centrally planned economies" that avoid this. We see evidence from historical modes of production like artisinal handicraft. Despite there not being a free market of producers (as guilds generally possessed legally-enforced monopolies over saleable production) the general quality of goods thereby produced did not generally trend downwards. Indeed, we can see from the sources that in cases where quality was known to have dropped, popular backlash led to interventions, e.g. the various Parisian bread laws, or hallmarking regulations for goldsmiths. Obviously, similar mechanisms exist today in the form of governmental regulations, but the problem with free market economies is that they produce actors both incentivized and empowered to hamstring the government, capture regulators, and ultimately undermine that self-same free market, to their own benefit.
This feels to me like a false dichotomy. The only alternative to the current way of doing things isn't a planned command economy, no matter what "libertarians" or tankies might argue.
Anything other then capitalism with slightly more regulation is just going from the US to Germany. Great, but they have software updates on cars too.
If you want to change anything more fundamental, you are going to have to do a planned economy.
At best you can say, maybe could be slightly better Germany by having a better political process or something. But even then, software updates in your car are going to be a reality because it solves are problem for manufactures, saves consumers lots of time in many cases and generally the positives outway the negatives.
I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
At best we can argue for some better practice about OTA Updates in regards to security and functionality. Maybe forcing manufactures to have a 'security only' feed an a 'feature feed'.
> I bet you 100% that in any planned economy OTA updates would still happen.
How so? In a democratically planned economy, we would expect that economic decisions considered by the majority of the population to be unwise/upsetting/etc. would not take place. Yes, many/most decisions would probably happen 'behind the scenes', according to the delegated authority of smaller committees or individual officials, but that's only so long as those decisions don't cause bad results for the broader populace.
More broadly, how exactly would enshittification take place in an economy not based around market principles? The whole idea is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. These steps are not intrinsic to reality, they emerge entirely from the confines of our market-based economy.
And yes, you can argue that in an "ideal market" they wouldn't happen, but a truism of modern economics is that "sufficiently free markets" produce actors with the power and desire to capture/destroy said free market.
Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect. Criticising specific poor business practices and/or technologies that enable them has a much better chance of improving people's lives.
> Criticising our entire economic system tends to have very little effect.
I think its actively counterproductive. Criticising the entire economic system doesn't do anything. Complaining in broad strokes about stuff you can't change reduces your sense of agency over the world.
Also, if people believe that businesses must be sociopathic, they will make sociopathic choices in business. The belief reinforces the problem.
Do personal computers even really emerge under communism? it is yet to be seen. But this specific technology seems to only evolve under capitalism to suit the needs of a certain type of buisness against the consumer.
If it emerged under communism, it probably would be equally as bad. I imagine if it emerged under communism or socialism it would be designed to solve a similar problems: securing the needs of the state against the citizen.
The economies of all countries that claimed to be socialist or communist were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Because nowadays the economy of USA resembles more and more every year to that of the socialist countries from the past, a non-negligible risk has appeared for the personal computer to become an endangered species.
The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade, long before the current wave of extreme price increases.
There is a steadily increasing pressure from big companies and from the governments controlled by them to eliminate true ownership of computers and of many other electronic devices, by introducing more and more restrictions for what owners can do with their PC/smartphone and by introducing more and more opportunities for others to control those devices remotely.
Many kinds of computing devices have eliminated their low-price models and they are offered now only in models so expensive as to be affordable only for big businesses, not for individuals or SMEs.
Ten years ago, I could still buy various kinds of professional GPUs with high FP64 throughput and any model of Intel Xeon server CPUs.
Nowadays I can choose to buy only high-end desktop CPUs for my servers, because the state-of-the-art server CPUs and datacenter GPUs now have 5-digit prices. NVIDIA, Intel and AMD see only big businesses as customers for such products, and they no longer offer any smaller SKUs in these categories (Intel nominally offers a few cheap Xeons, but those are so crippled that they are not worth for anything else but for enabling the testing of some server systems).
So in the kind of unregulated capitalism that exists today in USA, PCs would not have appeared and there is a risk for them to disappear, because they have become a relict of the past.
Ah the old 'No true Scotsman' argument. Except of course that the centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union were exactly what socialists before WW1 demanded. And what they tried to implement.
If the Soivet Union and friends were not Communist/Socialist then a communist economy simply doesn't exist, and has never existed and we see 0 reason why it would ever exists. And its not even clear what it would be or how it would work. So its completely and utterly irrelevant for any debate in the real world.
Its only in circular marxist self-mastrobation logic to redefine Soviet Union as 'monopolistic capitalism'.
> The prices of personal computers and of their components have been increasing steadily during the last decade
Not in terms of actual performance ...
Maybe for Graphics cards, but at the same time, those graphics cards can do things now they could not before so they gained in value.
Those against capitalism are going to speak out against what capitalism will lead to be exploited. I don't consider it "silly" to be against something that will lead to disaster, even if the disaster is systemic. Like, so what? Honestly. You can be against giving bad actors new tools without the tools having to be bad themselves. That's the premise of gun control for example.
As another poster already said, the complaints are not about capitalism, even if sometimes they are worded in such a way, but they are about monopolistic capitalism.
For "capitalism" without other qualifications, there are no alternatives. The so-called socialist or communist economies have always lied by pretending that they are not capitalist. In fact all such economies were the extreme form of monopolistic capitalism.
Towards the end of the nineties of the previous century, a huge wave of acquisitions and mergers has started and it has never stopped since then.
Because of this, to my dismay, because I have grown in a country occupied by communists so I know first hand how such an economy works, the economies of USA and of all the other western countries have begun to resemble more and more every year with the socialist/communist economies that were criticized and ridiculed here in the past.
While the lack of competition and its consequences are very similar, in some respect the current US and western economies are even worse than the former socialist/communist economies. At least those had long-term plans. While those plans were frequently not as successful as claimed, they at least realized from time to time useful big infrastructure projects.
The main role of the laws and of the state must be the protection of the weak from the powerful, for various definitions of weakness and power, to prevent the alternative of attempting to solve such inequalities by violent means, when everybody loses.
Therefore there must be a balance between the economic freedom of the private companies and the regulation of their activities.
It is obvious that in USA such a balance has stopped existing long ago and the power of the big companies is unchecked, to the detriment of individuals and small/medium companies.
The US legislators spend most of their time fighting for the
introduction of more and more ridiculous laws, which are harmful for the majority of the citizens, while nobody makes the slightest attempt to conceive laws that would really protect the consumers against the abusive practices that have now spread to all big companies.
cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment
Haed disagree. You've been bamboozled, too.
Recalls of any kind are a signal to me the vehicle shipped half-baked. I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor. Or at least the one with sufficient isolation between safety-critical and convenience features that recalls like those you describe are low priority enough to not be urgent.
The reality is, and this is just a fact that all cars have recalls. And currently there are already lots of recalls that require software. Now you just have to go to the dealship.
At best you could argue, maybe the software is better because a bug is more expensive to fix. But that can also lead to low risk bugs not being fixed.
Either way, the solution is not to prevent update, but make the cost higher for companies if their software or their update causes anything safety critical to be wrong.
Regulation around having a separate update for security critical things might be reasonable on government level. But usually the update is not forced in if its mostly features.
> I'd rather have the car with slightly older features that took a little longer to release, but got it right before leaving the factory floor.
Yes, I too have only ever shipped perfect code without any bugs, especially with incredibly large and complex software systems involving dozens of teams. You just need to spend another week or two and you'll get it perfect every time!
Imagine having a car that pulls packages from npm or Docker hub whenever it gets a network connection. If there were cosmic justice that's what many HN users would get.
Knowing the HN crowd, they would probably run over some family barely being able to make rent, then whine on the internet for the next 7 years about how much that event affected _them_ and _their_ feelings.
When was the last time you worried about someone cutting your brakes? A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality. Security is important, but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake so improving default safety levels has been a clear net positive for society so far. Maybe I'm being shortshighted and a future security exploit will change that, but it's not something I currently fear as someone whose car gets occasional OTA updates.
Cutting someones breaks requires physical access to the hardware.
Changing:
if (brakeDepressed()){
engageBrake();
}
To:
if (brakeDepressed() && currentTime < '5/6/26 4pm EST'){
engageBrake();
}
Can be deployed to thousands of vehicles, and would stop brakes from working during peak commute time on the East Coast.
Someone who can write out that code with that specificity should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing from actually making its way into consumer vehicles (or that OTA updates would be the only avenue to accomplish that). In a properly designed system, the only real fear here is a state-level attack. And I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
How do you know that a car is the result of a properly designed system before you get behind the wheel (or step in front of it?).
>the only real fear here is a state-level attack
Why isn't this a valid concern? We should just be fine with russia or china having the ability to remotely hack all of our cars and kill/spy on individuals, even critical members of our leadership? What about our own government? What about some terrorist launching formerly state-level malware from his basement with the help of AI?
Not only state actors. Vulnerability can be exploited by non-state actors. A terrorist getting hold of this capability to crash every Honda at 4pm introduces new challenges. The impact of 9/11 was not about how many people were killed. But it terrorized the population with that act. People stopped getting into flights. Imagine similar stuff with our daily routine cars.
State level actors have plenty of money to find any exploit around those protections and some need little incentive. They can hire a spy to cut my break line but their gain is much lower vs the cost. They don't care about me at all anyway except if I'm in a group of 100k people they can get at once.
> the only real fear here is a state-level attack.
This is blatantly false. In the real world there was a major recall after security researchers (not state actors) demonstrated that they could remotely interfere with safety critical systems. OTA updates without user involvement are a massive security vulnerability. So are internet connected safety critical systems. Neither should be legally permissible IMO.
> I just don't think getting every Honda to crash at 4pm is a vulnerable enough attack vector to make this hypothetical worthy of much thought.
Setting aside assassinations do you just have no imagination? There have been all sorts of crazy disgruntled worker sabotage stories over the years. Mass shooters exist. Political and religious terrorists exist.
For a specific mass scale state level hypothetical imagine that the US enters a hot war with a peer adversary for whatever reason. The next day during the morning commute the entire interstate system grids to a halt, the hospitals are completely overwhelmed, and the entire supply chain collapses for a week or so while we pick up the pieces. With a bit of (un)luck it might happen to catch an oil tanker in the crossfire while it was in a tunnel thereby scoring infrastructure damage that would take years to fix.
> should know there are countless technical and procedural ways to help prevent that sort of thing
Sometimes when I look at code it feels like I was led into a weird surprise party celebrating structure and correctness, only for everyone to jump out as soon as I get past the door to shout, “Just kidding - it’s the same old bullshit!” All that to say, we’re about as good or worse as anyone else, at our respective jobs.
> A lot of times these hypothetical fears are disconnected from reality.
Conversely, a lot of times people don't fear real dangers of reality until it bites them. "Hackers wouldn't care about me, and the single password I use on every website is super good and complicated."
> but people generally don't engage in destruction for destruction's sake
Generally true, but they do engage in destruction when there's profit to be made or when it becomes in their geopolitical interests, and sometimes that destruction is quite notable: Remember when it was safe to assume that passengers could passively wait out airplane hijackings?
Your average script-kiddie might not seriously consider cutting everyone's brakes simultaneously, Al Queda would have been giddy.
Software has an atrocious track record for security. Doubly so for hardware manufacturers. It only takes one smart cow to disable millions of vehicles vs a local knave cutting brake lines.
I yearn for the days of wrapped software where developers had to make a gold pressed release. Not, “we can patch it later”.
If you want to talk about society, then this is about systematic security not individual security. If someone somewhere can push a button and flash your car with OTA firmware to drive you off a bridge, political assasinations become a lot easier.
In fact, with all this data they are collecting, you wouldn't even need to be the next edward snowden to get this treatment. You could set the firmware to target, say, every left-wing voter in america.
You don't even need the own the car with such behavior. Everyone becomes a pedestrian eventually.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the first place. Otherwise we just just a parade of defects all the time. Even if it's minor things and never fixed, the user can adapt; that's not possible in the face of continuous updates.
> At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars.
Cite your sources, please
> cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
If a "recall" can be fixed via software, doesn't that mean just shitty software to begin with? And that usually happens only when a car is infested with tons of software - proving the exact opposite of why we need less software inside cars?
we need sources for the fact an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine? If you agree that people in general value the health of their lungs that alone is sufficient reason.
It's also becoming quickly a question of geopolitical resilience, running your transport system on dinosaur juice coming from regions where people blow each other up is bad in particular if you happen to be Japanese automaker Honda
> an electric motor, all other things being equal, is better than a combustion engine?
This is not the core argument. Motors maybe superior - we can agree on that. The power source (batteries) and the environmental impact they have - that has always been the core argument. [1]
My background is global geophysical exploration, primarily for mineral resources with some dabbling in the energy domain.
For a single example, this passage:
High demand and prices are already encouraging some producers to cut corners and violate environmental and safety regulations.
For example, in China, dust released from graphite mines has damaged crops and polluted villages and drinking water. In Africa, some mine owners exploit child workers and skimp on protective equipment such as respirators. Small artisanal mines, where ores are extracted by hand, often flout laws.
is entirely emotive, intended to tug on feelings (which it does) but otherwise it has no bearing on the bulk of major mining that contributes to bulk of mineral processing.
The tonnes of nickel and cobalt we see largely comes from big mines, big trucks, formal Occ Health and Safety regulations, etc.
It also commits the usual mistake of confusing "just in time" exploration results that firm up suspected deposits with sizes and density estimates for the commodities of interest with absolute limits on what is available over the cycle of time.
As demand increases further areas that are "known" (but not measured) get further technical inspection (magnetics, drill sampling, etc) and become new fresh reserves.
Does the article you cited cost money to read? I found a description on google scholar:
> Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries
> Reserves of cobalt and nickel used in electric-vehicle cells will not meet future demand. Refocus research to find new electrodes based on common elements such as iron and silicon, urge Kostiantyn Turcheniuk and colleagues.
I notice that the article was published in 2018. So I guess we only have to wait two more years to decide if it's right or not. Will we be out of cobalt and nickel by then? I'd be happy to take a bet with you, assuming you stand by the article you cited.
it's not a fact, it's an opinion, and just because you see it as truth doesnt mean it is. This is why the left/progressive crowd is so disliked by the conservatives - they phrase any argument from an inherent view point that they assume is self-evident.
> This is why the left/progressive crowd is so disliked by the conservatives - they phrase any argument from an inherent view point that they assume is self-evident.
the fact that a combustion vehicle inherently produces byproducts that are extremely harmful to your health and an electrical engine does not is not an opinion, it's a medical fact you can verify yourself by breathing next to a car exhaust.
Conservatives, I assumes this means American modern conservatives, dislike this because they make French postmodernists from the 70s look like evidence based scientists
> Conservatives, I assumes this means American modern conservatives, dislike this because they make French postmodernists from the 70s look like evidence based scientists
Cite your own sources that they're not. And maybe try to avoid the ten year old nonsense that's frequently floated as "evidence".
On recalls -- like the one that said that individual icons have to be slightly bigger? Yeah, shitty software.
Or the one that made Tesla annoy drivers with a smaller timeout? That was actually a safety issue --- people would turn off FSD to adjust something and then turn it back on again. Much, much less safe.
You made an assumption about something I never said and used that as the base of your argument to make a point.
I didn't say anything, I simply asked them to cite a source for that kind of a grandiose claim. If you make a claim like that without citation(s), the onus to prove it lies on the person making the said claim, not on me to disprove it.
>a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced.
This doesn't have anything to do with EV vs ICE, but whether it has a over the air updates and whether the problem can be fixed with a software update or not. I expect car recalls are pretty well into the noise in terms of "societal level" problems too aren't they? Even if they were not I expect whole "software defined car" thing, whatever that really means, has not resulted in mechanical defects plummeting, but rather just more software defects. Although it is quite possible EVs have less defects in general than ICE cars I suppose.
I’ve never had a software-based danger on my hardware-based vehicles. As such, there is a whole class of recalls that I never needed: all the ones you tell me I’m missing out on.
I'm impressed that you're daily driving what must be a 30+ year old vehicle. What model? Most enthusiasts have another vehicle to keep the miles down and use when the antique needs maintenance.
1990 AU Ford Falcon family here - still in near showroom condition (well, looks good but has a scratch and a minor ding) with ~ 600,000 km on the clock.
> when the antique needs maintenance.
You're talking about all the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, et al cars, tracks and tractors that litter our district? Yeah - there are a lot of them in this part of the world.
All the farmers love the bleeding edge gear and are getting into AgBot boom sprayers, etc - but they still can't shake a love of keeping the really old stuff going - pimped up rat-trucks abound and we rebuilt an old Alice Chambers tractor ourselves two years back.
"Antique" is a term for any vehicle that meets the local criteria for antique vehicle registration [0], usually older than 25-30 years. Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.
> Your falcon is in the same club as those older vehicles now.
No, it isn't - you missed:
In Australia, the rules for antique vehicle registration vary between states.
I am well aware that the vehicle I own and drive is normally registered as a normal vehicle and is not treated as an antique.
What we do have, here in W.Australia, is a limited usage "Classics" rego for vehicles 30 years or older.
Reduced rates for enforced (but how??) reduced usage:
The owners must also be a financial member of a Department of Transport (DoT) approved motoring club.
a 1991 Holden Commodore would drop from $867.55 to $171.30 per year
Vehicles in the scheme are only able to be driven on public roads for a maximum of 90 days per annum.
Classics (not antiques!) are beloved cars kept road ready but only occassionally used on public roads.
As far as I can tell, a software defined vehicle is one that has fewer computers in it for cost cutting reasons.
There’s an argument to be made that this allows better integration between subsystems, and therefore a better user experience.
We have a vehicle built this way. It is a death trap. Most of its safety issues can’t really be blamed on it using a new computer network technology. For instance, if it is dawn or dusk (so, commute hours) the vision systems get flaky and it likes to override steering and brakes to force itself into oncoming or merging traffic.
However, one issue is firmly due to it being a software defined vehicle.
If you are changing lanes with the turn signal on, and hit a bump while the passenger adjusts the stereo volume, they’ll accidentally turn the hazard lights on. Af that point the steering override will kick in and try to force abort the lane change.
A normal car wouldn’t be able to wire the hazards into the power steering subsystem, and also probably wouldn’t have the button be part of the radio control panel.
I chalk it up to poorly designed software from a company where software isn't the core competency, rather than blaming the basic concept of putting software in a vehicle.
"Bad software is bad" doesn't have the same ring though...
I think in this case the point being made is "bad software makes the whole product bad", not just "bad software is bad".
Its similar to how bad brakes or a roof prone to leaking makes the whole car a bad car. The "weakest link" undermines the whole system.
> software isn't the core competency
Software is a essential part of modern cars, remove the software and they don't function (or in some cases are not allowed on the road). The car manufacturers "core competency" is making cars so I would argue that software is definitely a "core competency" of a modern car manufacturer.
I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, sending aside concerns of mechanical reliability. But it also has many annoyances, and EVERY single one of them (with no exceptions) are software-defined bugs or behaviours, and all could all be improved with software updates. But legacy order has never cared about improving software after you bought the car.
For all of Tesla’s many faults, they one of the first automakers where it feels like the software is not abandonware. It’s a positive trend and it’s nice to see a few other manufacturers following suit.
I'm afraid it's exactly the opposite -- Tesla has awful software, and no self discipline about adding more bloat. There is a lot of rigorously designed software in cars where you can't see it. Jeep is no one's idea of quality in any respect though.
Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.
Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.
I know enough about the software in BMW (NBT/OS7) and Audi (MIB2/MIB3) instrument cluster stacks to know there's at least as much complexity — if not substantially more — in many of the legacy brands. Not to mention the exponential complexity which comes from their highly modularised approach, where systems from a variety of external suppliers have to co-ordinate with each other.
By contrast, the Tesla software stack is (or appears to be based on a few minutes of research) shockingly straightforward considering its apparent complexity. Rather than being a hodge-podge of vendor software, it appears to be Qt-based software running within a Linux environment on Nvidia and/or Intel chipsets. Reviewers routinely praise the screen for being responsive and "iPad like". If there's a bloat issue, it'd be interesting to hear some specifics.
As for your quip about "decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design" you might have been right 20–30 years ago.
Isn't the role of the VW MIB2 (as in "Modular Infotainment Baukasten") explicitly the infotainment part of the vehicle (and NOT the instrument cluster, cruise-control, etc.)?
I never had an issue with those, as their reach is isolated (or "limited" as people would say today) to the infotainment part of the car. It couldn't even take control of the climate system back when I had one.
Can't argue much about MIB3, it is just a few years old and a child of the Tesla Software-defined-car era (albeit still tries to uphold Volkswagen's DNA of strictly separating roles of all components, partly making it the mess it is...)
Look at the automotive standards for system verification, in standards like ISO 26262 functional safety. These standards are followed by engineering led organisations that respect safety. Tesla prefers a more laisse faire approach.
This is all orthogonal to software defined vehicles, except that you have to choose to segregate functions to achieve strong non-interference goals, and all that checking might slow down software development and Tesla doesn't like that.
The HMI on Teslas is trash, and drivers are measurably slower and more distracted in simulated and real conditions in their designs. The scan is slower, the affordances are weaker, the multi modal nature causes processing delays. The worst part is design and marketing teams being forced to copy them. Chinese imitations, like the insanely cheap/ugly MG4 tablet instrument, are going to age very badly.
Volkswagen tried to evolve to a more "touch" based HMI -that everybody hated- and is now touting it's abandoning that HMI as the largest redeeming factor of it's cars.
China is banning the ridiculous "innovations" on car handles and further "innovations" on steering wheels.
The Tesla software stack has few advantages: it's cheap and can be easily revised when the Beta-user discovers issues with it. So I have to pause and think to who's benefit it's made the way it is.
From an HMI perspective a Tesla is a nightmare, getting in and out one is constant question as to -why- these design choices were made. Especially after taking out "just doing things different" as a reason. A friend's first additions was loops to the physical door-releases so that passengers could actually get out should something happen and incapacitate the infuriating button-based door releases.
Luckily there is progress such as the recent Ferrari HMI that actually thinks about how the HMI will be used. The central screen even offers a palm-rest for when manipulating the screen. Integrating physical buttons and switches with the canvas of a screen is the logical way forward.
The car industry is soul-searching as we speak on what to do with technology and our interaction with it. But one thing is absolutely certain: whatever Tesla did is not the future.
At least your friend can add loops to the physical door-releases. If the problem is software defined, good luck hacking in even the simplest of one-liner bugfixes.
I agree Tesla door releases are silly, on both sides of the door. As a bald person in a city with hot summers, I am no fan of the glass roof either. But at least I can mitigate those. And neither are anywhere as maddening as being unable to wind windows up after opening the door. Or having to switch the radio off every single f****g time I start driving. While those might sound like mere annoyances, the repetitious inanity is utterly grating. I value physical ergonomics greatly, but there's something about pseudo-malicious software behaviours which make me angrier than any door handle ever could.
On a recent holiday I rented a Model 3 (pre-facelift) for a few weeks. It has a few quirks, but nothing that irritated me. It was an utterly pleasant experience. The quirky door handles became second nature within a day, for example. Navigating maps and music on that screen was less of a driver distraction than in many other cars I've driven. Not perfect, but well above average.
I do appreciate physical buttons, but my 1-series BMW from 2013 has taught me that there's something better than physical buttons. It's having systems behave well enough that the buttons might as well not exist. I almost never touch the climate control. Setting the internal temperature to 22 degrees seems to work perfectly all the time; somehow it always seems to do the right thing. The only intervention I regularly make is to press the "MAX A/C" button when driving home from sports or the gym. And I'm pressing that before I start driving anyway, so it's not a driver ergonomics issue.
I literally worked on building the next generation of handheld OBD devices (m68000 based) that techs used to reflash Toyota ECUs in 1997. Automakers can and do update software after the car has been sold. Before that, techs would need to swap EEPROMS.
It’s getting better, but even now many traditional automakers strictly limit software updates to bug fixes only. And they'll probably only fix the bug if there's a legal or sales incentive to do so.
My own car is a 2013 BMW 125i. Its software stack received a handful of very simple quality-of-life improvements in 2014. The clearest example is the on-screen volume overlay. As delivered, my car’s volume knob provided absolutely no visual feedback.
If you ask nicely, BMW dealership can update it. But that's not enough. The way BMW "codes" your vehicle after a software update means that any features introduced after its date of manufacture are disabled. So even after I had the dealer install newer software (to fix a crashing bug with navigation) the volume overlay didn’t appear. What I ended up having to do was "recode" the ECU with a new delivery date. Literally all I did was change the delivery date in a pirated copy of BMW E-Sys, push the change to the car, and the overlay appeared like magic.
You can do all the research in the world about a car, learn everything there is to know, and decide "this is worth my money". (Bait)
And then your car's manufacturer chooses to use the update mechanism to modify the center console screen to serve ads[1] while you're driving. (… and switch.)
Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
Is that actually true? I mean, assume I have access to all software in the world and all IP lawyers got kidnapped by aliens - could I just write a software for Stellantis Economy to turn it into Tesla (or vice versa)? I don't think so.
> Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
That's a disingenuously literal misinterpretation of what I said. I wasn't saying that a Tesla and some economy car are identical, only that they have in common the characteristic of being defined at their core by software. It should go without saying that software alone can't turn a Cherokee into a Model Y for the same reason that software alone can't turn a HomePod into an Apple Watch.
But there's an obvious difference between a good software experience and a poor one. Like in my wife's Cherokee, how the radio always turns on every time you start the car, no matter what you do. Like how the digital speedometer is completely concealed by any warning text that appears. Like how all window controls stop working as soon as any passenger opens their door after stopping the engine. This is all software, and I write this in response to rkagerer saying "no thank you" to cars getting meaningful software updates.
> I wasn't saying that a Tesla and some economy car are identical,
You literally said:
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
You didn't say "one of many differences". You said "the only difference". Maybe you wanted to say something else, and you still can, but you can't claim it's my fault you said that.
> It should go without saying that software alone can't turn a Cherokee into a Model Y for the same reason that software alone can't turn a HomePod into an Apple Watch.
Which invalidates your statements that the cars "are software". They are more than software. They are a complex combinations of software and hardware, each of them having its part - and, obviously, if one of the parts is bad, it makes the car worse.
> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail.
This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
Even for me (a software developer who reads these articles) it's really hard to actually know whether the software is any good. Are there unlockable features? Are there subscriptions with reasonable costs? What happens if I don't have a subscription? How often are updates shipped? What's the general consensus around the quality of the system as a whole?
It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".
All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.
Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.
Looking at most modern cars, I'm of the view that most of them are so fully whacked with the enshittification stick, that it's pretty hard for them to get even more enshittified without risking sales to actual normies. A very normie person in my extended family decided against an MG because she could tell how bad the software was — an impressive feat of enshittedness.
Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.
It's techcrunch. The angle of software-everything has to be there.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
I get the trucks and SUV's where you need them. I live in a rural area and without ground clearance and 4x4, I literally wouldn't be able to visit my parents. But my daily driver is a Honda Civic. Because 75% of my driving is done on paved roads that are well maintained (except in the winter).
What kills me are the MASSIVE vehicles in the suburbs though. Why do you need a 3 ton suburban to drive around 2 kids on very clear, very well maintained streets? Why would you buy a 4x4 truck when the most off road you'll do is driving over wet leaves on your cul-de-sac in the fall?
2. You're on a site with a bunch of programmers who regularly use weird words for stuff that already has a name. Reading through HN is wading through a swamp of made up names and tech neologisms, you're just used to it already. I once told a software guy that our team's SWEs had migrated away from React and Node to Stork.JS and Blackadder. He nodded like that meant anything.
devs have really got to start using NSA style naming conventions where they use the Joycean compound with random stuff that sounds cool e.g. BANNANADAIQUIRI or FOXACID.
Have you ever actually heard it used in conversation or writing where the speaker's intention was a meaning that included people outside of the USA? I haven't.
Something like 10-15% of US households own a boat or camper. Over 60% of cars sold today are SUVs, and a ton of those would not be great to tow a boat or decent sized camper.
The vast majority of people I know who daily drive SUVs and trucks do not own either a boat or camper.
You can tow a boat, caravan, etc. with a smaller Holden Rodeo crew cab at 1.5 tonne (and / or many other vehicles that are not massive over sized yank tanks).
I've got a Mazda 3 and I don't worry about SUVs or trucks running over me. Drive sober and watch the road, don't use your phone. Do this and you reduce your risk of an accident by something absurd like 1000x.
The reason people love massive vehicles is because they're shitty drivers, they know they're shitty drivers, and they have no intention of changing. They want to text while driving and they want it to be the vehicle's responsibility to keep them alive when they go off the road or get run over by a train, or drift into the opposing lane. Keep your eyes peeled for these morons, keep your head on a swivel. If you're attentive you're already in the 90% percentile. Paying attention is better safety than even a seat belt.
I love minding my own business and not having to worry about driving through narrow roads, etc. People definitely drive SUVs so they can try not to care about other people.
I don't disagree with your first statement but there is a huge range of cars in the Japanese market. They make the Toyota Land Cruiser and Nissan Patrol after all, smaller by American standards but the biggest cars most other countries will see.
I'm not sure what exactly pisses me off so much in this idea - after all, I am not upset by the existence of $Brand Basic, $Brand Premium, $Brand Luxury and $Brand Now-Everybody-Knows-You-Have-Money, each of which has different features and bells and whistles. But put it in one single box and charge me monthly rent to go from Basic to Premium - and it does feel wrong. Even if TCO of Premium comes out as lower over time. I don't know why exactly it feels that way but it looks like it feels that way to a lot of people. Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor? Or the constant necessity of begging somebody else for permission to use your own car (yes, car loans, but they feel different)? Not sure. But it feels like it's real, even if it's only in my head.
I think you've captured it perfectly with "Maybe it's daily reminder that all the luxuries are right here, right under your fingers, if only you weren't so miserably poor?"
I think its a rational move for Honda. They cant compete with tesla et al on EVs or self driving. People buy honda for reliability and low TCO. The world is heading towards lower disposable income for maybe a decade. Honda is playing by strengths, market positioning appealing to a particular target audience and keeping its margins. It adds.
And bugs, and DRM, and mass surveillance, and giving the power to the state to abuse even more of the tech, and giving police super powers, and giving bad actors (terrorists, assassins) the abilities to kill you with a virus, and the general concentration of power that this implies.
This is a terrible idea, and that's why I have mixed feelings about the robo taxi. On one hand, it's a great resource-sharing tech. On the other hand, all of the above.
I don't know the author insinuated that. It sounded more like, we release the car now, and as engineers come up with new capabilities, they get rolled out over a software update. Case in point was my car received an update that pulled in weather data. That didn't exist in the UI originally, and they added it with time.
Also because SDVs actually come with half baked firmwares that make the ECU crash, throw down the CAN network, make lights and screens act up...
Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.
Honda is going to be the "opt-out" on that future car. And if one defect - the mafia has to pay you to raise your prices to prevent mass-defection by the customers from what is essentially a defect by default car.
Honda is going to get kickbacks by the EV industry to be more expensive.
Not really. Competitors shifting focus out of the space, combined with their being incredibly competitive in the space (they're known for making some of the most reliable engines), says to me they've found their product-market fit. They've got plenty of time to quietly reboot and have another crack at the EV game down the road.
This is one of those times I'll trust the judgement of the grey haired execs who actually have all the numbers, over the plucky young journalist who's just spouting an editorial opinion. (Nothing against the latter, I just think in this specific case they're naive and dead wrong).
Maybe, but customers DO want it, without realizing. I'm a decent DIYer, but I realize my wishes is not the same as a typical customer. Sadly, but customers vote with their wallets.
Exactly. I dont want the software and I dont want something that I paid $100k to be gated tomorrow by a software update or broken by it. Or the constant reporting on me to god knows who. Until this dumbass touch screen design idea gets removed from a car, I am not buying such a car. Even it means paying more in gas. Touch and SDV is the dumbest thing in a car. My motion is not to be tracked and for sale.
I hate to break it to you, but unless you own a mainframe that allows you unlock more RAM (that is already physically installed), unlocking more HP via software is actually how tunning works; and it is mot a scam from the 90s where you buy TurboRAM or whatever snake oil was sold back then.
> you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
Manufacturing one hardware setup and charging separately for features is not the problem. The problem is charging ongoing rent for a feature that isn't an ongoing service. A seat heater doesn't use a server, need content updates, or create meaningful recurring costs for the manufacturer after the car is sold. It shifts the relationship from ownership to permission. It also creates bad incentives: features can be removed later, tied to accounts, complicated for second owners, or turned into endless monetization opportunities.
I agree with that. I don’t know what your prompt was, but I wasn’t arguing in favor of subscription access to hardware, I said flat upfront fee based upgrades make more sense, and I was only pointing out that market segmentation over a single physical product via software feature locks is a pretty common thing and it’s not necessarily a bad thing for consumers, there are some side benefits, some tradeoffs.
I’m not personally into paying subscription upgrades, I tend to avoid them. But the one case where I could see potential for consumer benefit is when there’s a choice between a high upfront fee or a low subscription price. I would assume a subscription price over time will cost more than the upfront fee. However, there’s an argument to be made for lower cost access, for smaller barrier to entry for the upgrade, especially if it can be discontinued if the customer doesn’t find enough value.
There was a motorcycle airbag jacket that offered this choice and was discussed on HN maybe a year or two ago. People were, of course, freaking out about a safety feature being tied to a subscription, and I can totally understand the fear, but the rhetoric around it didn’t match what the actual product offered, and the company was offering the choice between flat fee and monthly fee, not demanding a rent-seeking only option. Personally I think most of the ick feeling of a subscription idea goes away for me if it’s not the only option.
If you shove content at me that I even suspect was AI generated I will summarily hit the delete button and probably ban you from sending me any form of communication ever again.
It's a breach of trust. I don't care if you're my friend, my boss, a stranger, or my dog - it crosses a line.
I value my time and my attention. I will willingly spend it on humans, but I most certainly won't spend it on your slop when you didn't even feel me worth making a human effort.
It turns any authenticated browser session into a fully typed REST API proxy — exposing discovered endpoints as local Hono routes that relay requests through the browser, so cookies and auth are automatic.
The point is that it creates an API proxy in code that a Typescript server calls directly. The AI runs for about 10 minutes with codegen. The rest of the time it is just API calls to a service. Remove the endpoint for "Delete Account" and that API endpoint never gets called.
This 100% breaks everyone's terms of service. I would not recommend nor encourage using.
I'm frustrated our governments keep trying to foist essentially the same garbage upon us that has already been rejected over and over before.
Why do we need what amounts to a massive, state-level surveillance apparatus, steeped in legislated secrecy, plugged directly into the backbone of every internet provider?
Would you be OK if police officers followed you around everywhere you go, recording who you talk to, and when and where you interacted - not because there's any suspicion upon you, but simply to collect and preserve all the metadata they might need to find that person up to a year later - "just in case" - to question them about your conversations? Because that's more or less what's being proposed here. The only difference is it happens opaquely within the technical systems of ISP's and service providers where it isn't as apparent to the general public.
It gets even worse if you presume the information will be stored by private contractors, who will inevitably be victims of data breaches, and will be sitting on a vast new trove of records subject to civil discovery, etc.
> The SAAIA ... establishes new requirements for communications providers to actively work with law enforcement on their surveillance and monitoring capabilities .... The bill introduces a new term – “electronic service provider” – that is presumably designed to extend beyond telecom and Internet providers by scoping in Internet platforms (Google, Meta, etc.).
As the article points out, jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Canada has taken a dim view of warrantless disclosure of personal information. What precisely is insufficient in regard to existing investigative powers of law enforcement and their prerogative to pursue conventional warrants? Why do they need to deputize the platforms who you've (in many people's cases) entrusted with your most personal data?
To be frank, this is the sort of network I would expect in an authoritarian country, not here. The potential for abuse is too high, the civil protections too flimsy, and the benefits purported don't even come close to outweighing the risks introduced to our maintaining a healthy, functioning democracy.
Maybe there need to be some adjustments but we also have to acknowledge that the world has evolved and there have to be some response to that.
In the "old days" when all we had is telephone law enforcement could wiretap your phone with a warrant. As I understand it with an order from a judge your phone could be tapped or your mail could be read. You wouldn't (obviously) be served that warrant or even be aware of it. This was part of a few existing laws/acts. I.e. that's the status quo. If we were a surveillance state back then, we'll be that again.
The other difference from the "old days" is that some of the communication companies are global and not Canadian. I.e. your encrypted conversations go perhaps [to] a Meta data-center in California.
If we remove the ability of law enforcement to monitor and access evidence of criminal activity with a warrant from a judge we are increasing the ability of criminal organizations to operate and coordinate. That is the balance here.
It is true there are other important differences. E.g. the amount of information, its persistence, the ability of hackers and other actors to potentially access it. This isn't easy. But doing nothing is also not great?
I'm also Canadian and I have to admit I haven't been following the details here. It's hard to separate signal from noise and it seems everyone cries wolf all the time over everything. I will read it in more detail and try to form an opinion.
I think it's a preparation for wildly unpopular measures in the next ~10 years. There will be dissent, and they need a way to catch dissidents at scale.
At the end of the day it boils down to putting your users first.
Making the product better generally stems from acting in their interest, honing the tool you offer to provide the best possible experience, and making business decisions that respect their dignity.
Your comment talks a lot about product and I agree with it, I just mentioned this so we don't lose sight of the fact this is ultimately about people.
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