Makes you wonder about ice cars too.

Depends on the manufacturer. A lot of American and European “smart” cars work fine without an internet connection. You need to use a key fob, and apps cloud maps or streaming apps obviously won’t work, but the basic driving, climate, and media stuff should work.

A lot of American and European cars actually kill your cloud service access if you don’t keep paying a subscription fee.

Samsung are pretty close.

My smartphone still works without service. Just as a tablet/computer device. Cars should be the same.

As a member of /c/FuckCars I say we don’t want cars at all. We want robust public transportation, and bicycle paths. Entire cities designed around going green. People want to get angry at the Starbucks CEO for using a private jet, and reasonably so, but NOBODY wants to take responsibility for the toll each car puts on the environment. Yes, even the electric cars. That electric energy still has to come from somewhere.

At least the cars can be updated (at least until the manufacturer says fuck it). A ton of those ‘smart’ devices have no such capability so when a vulnerability is found it won’t ever be fixed.

Disposable cars is where we’re headed. We allowed it with electronics, why wouldn’t we allow it with cars?

NFC door locks have a sliding panel with a key override. Usually a shit lock that can be opened by any amateur… One of the many reasons I don’t have one.

Probably just should said “phone key” instead of assuming NFC. It looks like a lot of these cars use other technologies to unlock without a fob.

Or when the network that the car relies on no longer exists. My old e-reader’s mobile connectivity no longer works because the phone company providing the service turned the 3G network off in the upgrade to 4G.

It’s just 17 years old. People tend to keep cars for about that long. What happens then? Does it just become limited to basics only, or become a big metal brick?

NFC door locks, smart infotainment, displays for gauges

And I don’t need any of that.

Give me a simple car and I’ll buy it.

Aw yeah we need the right to repair on that pronto. Like climate and infotainment should be totally different systems and control panels. A car should function 100% with the infotainment system offline.

Should be happening now but I understand these things take time.

People have already been jailbreaking Teslas to unlock full self-driving, which is a $10k software patch.

I’ve been waiting years for Tesla hacks to add power or remove Autopilot or remove software-locked batteries or unlock paid features. Haven’t seen it anywhere.

And somehow the RPi9 will still need some $90 5V20A USB power supply

Opencore Legacy Patcher, but for cars. Nice.

That should be a thing - some place where all the connectors from various parts are marked and you can just remove the Tesla brain and put an RPi in place.

But I don’t think it is =\

A lot of his problems are also from the lack of available parts.

Which is why he has multiples of some of the orphaned cars in his fleet.

I don’t think it’s too far out of the realm of possibility considering numerous people buy crashed/scrapped EVs and adapt them into old vehicles or modify them into Franken-cars on Youtube.

Yep, and precisely why I refuse to buy anything that requires an internet connection to work. I’m even wary of services that lock me in for longer than maybe 6 months. The only annual subscription I have is for my VPN.

An actual device/machine that I plan to use for years? Hell no. Offline only is a must have.

A car is also difficult to ignore, compared to something smaller.

A small expensive device that stopped working because the company shut it down is annoying, but you can at least put it to the side and ignore it.

You can’t really do that to a car that has functionally become a paperweight because the parent company has gone under.

Yup, that’s why I don’t buy that crap. I would love an EV, but they all seem to spy on their drivers and I’m concerned that all that spyware isn’t properly protected anyway.

An EV really shouldn’t be all that complicated, and there’s zero reason for it to connect to the outside world. All it needs to do is:

• charge the battery
• regulate the battery’s temperature
• discharge the battery to make it go

None of that requires power, and that whole process is much simpler than my ICE car, which doesn’t have any external communication either. Give me an EV without all the smart crap and I’ll probably buy it.

This was really thrown into sharp focus for me a couple of years back, when I read an article about how people with ocular implants are being left to go blind again because the company who made their implant has been bought by another company who doesn’t want to continue support.

I just can’t think about how callous that is, and if a company doesn’t give a shit about that, why would they give a shit about a car?

I really hope some massive EV startup goes under and bricks thousands of cars. It might be the last straw that forces lawmakers to regulate services shutting down (keep providing the service or open source all your code so that some else can keep providing that service)

because they have a long life

Not as long as it could be and that’s intentional. My '97 piece of crap will outlive most EVs anv even most new ICEs.

One thing is the risk that your device might become a paperweight with $300 smartwatches or home automation systems, another is to have them with $30,000 cars.

The problem is not that there is a risk, the problem is how the magnitude of the potential loss from that kind of risk when the risk applies to cars.

Rationally there should be a lot more consumer protection rules on things were people have to work many months or even years to earn enough to buy them than in things that cost the income of a few days or weeks of work, at the very least the kind of information forcing the full disclosure upfront to customers of such risks and their consequences (if a brand’s electric car will literaly become a paper-weight once support from the manufacturer ends, that should be shown in every advert for that product using a very large font).

The current combination having such risks associated with massive potential losses whilst the manufacturers actually hide that from customers and do little or nothing to reduce the impact of such risks, is unnacceptable.

Yeah well I raised this question six years ago and muskrat fanbois got me banned from like four EV ‘the other site’ communities.

Tech folks love to put questions the way “what if someone can own you via this thing”, and normies intuitively defend against that - they feel the implication that they can be owned and not know it is an insult, while it’s just truth. They also irrationally think that a system allowing to own people is a two-edged sword while it isn’t, they kinda feel empowered by complexity they don’t know. A bit like people not having a B52 plane feel awe before it and the ordnance it can drop.

However, if you put the question like this, what happens with all those pyramids of crap when they are not maintained anymore, it may work.

Unless they have a massive infotainment system that requires cloud services to work properly or the main way to access your car is the app on your phone (and other shit like this).

Also who’s gonna guarantee spare parts in case something breaks down in 5 years time? Will I be able to fix their car or will it be a paper weight?

They might keep driving, but some infotainment features (or even other features that are tied to subscriptions) might stop working.

Depending on the implementation of these features that could mean the car constantly shows error messages, or the infotainment freezes, or in the worst case the car won’t even start or charge.

Some of these concerns are true for newer cars of traditional manufacturers: what happens when their online services become unavailable?

Take a look at the YouTube channel “Aging Wheels”, they have acquired and daily driven a Coda, an EV that the parent company shut down, you can see their journey in the channel.

Depends actually. If Tesla shut down, that would disrupt a lot of fast charging. The charger handshakes with the car which allows it to auto bill to your card stored on Tesla’s servers. For non-Teslas, they have to use the app to start charging.

Can you explain how? I’m at a bit of a loss how.

Still, as from a mechanical engineer perspective I would trust slightly more a combustion motor system to work offline rather than an electrical, where I could never know how the motor really works and relays on.

Personally I enjoy driving a 1987 bensine Ford.

Woah woah woah. You can’t “disrupt” the car industry without a subscription based model that can brick your hardware at a moments notice.

unless the IP is bought

It’s always bought on liquidation. The creditors require it to be sold to legally satisfy them. What’s worse is that the IP may only be licensed in the first place.

Novell was re-awarded OS code which it sold – a term I use based on talking to people in the room on both the seller and buyer side of the negotiation table at the time, but merely second-hand knowledge. Novell was awarded ownership as the fact of the sale became a poker chip in a US$5bn lawsuit that could be refuted to give an advantage to one adversary in that lawsuit.

Novell hasn’t done a thing with it in 20 years. The code is essentially dead because it would cost too much to restart and update.

This was how the original Unix died, and doesn’t violate your plan. Counterexampled?

With more market saturation, we’ll see more standardization. Imagine if the original ICE cars took a proprietary gas pump. LOL, the market would have fixed that horseshit with the quickness.

A huge selling point for pistol-caliber guns is if they take Glock magazines. They’re cheap, reliable and available everywhere. I’ll likely never own a Glock, but magazine compatibility would sway my purchase towards another manufacturer that doesn’t have a proprietary mag.

Charging will eventually be a self-solving problem. Right now it seems the manufacturers are trying to get ahead by saying, “Our model charges at X (number of) stations! They only have Y. Pick me!” If I can ever afford an EV, the most standard, “normal” option, whatever this is, is where I’m buying.

And if the free market doesn’t quickly arrive at a standard, time for the legislative hammer. While I’m leery of fucking around, I do so love how Europe says, “Nope! Every device sold here must be compatible.” Phone chargers and such.

I saw a YouTube video where a guy had a dent in the back left of his rivan and the body shop wanted 40k to fix it because the car is really easy to work on.

I miss the days when the radio was its own separate thing in a car. Hate the outdated UI? Just replace the radio head unit with a modern one.

Nowadays it’s a lot more difficult. There is a module called iDatalink Maestro that allows you to still maintain most factory features after replacing your head unit, but a lot of cars tend to be incompatible—especially EVs—as more and more features become integrated into the stereo. The days of modular components in cars is nearing an end.

You can get that experience with new cars too. Especially anything made by BMW who presumably don’t extend their craftsmanship ideals to their software.

There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.

Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.

The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.

With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.

Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.

1000%, we need to demand minimum functionality or stop perpetuating these fucking things by purchasing flawed products from flawed companies.

Agreed! The most promising standard is called matter. Vote with your wallet!

A lot of car parks are becoming like this. It’s especially frustrating when you try to download the app but you have no signal and there’s no other way to pay.

Its an asset, it will be sold off, spun off or recovered.