geteilt von: https://beehaw.org/post/23392765
Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
Gas vehicles have the same if not more software than electric vehicles.
The amount of software you need is dependent on how many inputs and outputs the vehicle has.
Gas engines have way more inputs and outputs because they have way more moving parts and need to manage fuel ratios for thousands of revolutions per minute. Not to mention the inputs and outputs on a transmission, which electric vehicles don’t need.
First of all, there are internal-combustion cars that don't have computers at all. Or even electronics of any kind, for that matter. Second, even among cars that do use electronic fuel injection and such, a standalone microcontroller managing timing and air/fuel ratio is entirely different from (and vastly simpler than) this new shit where control of the car is intertwined with the infotainment unit.
I mean, sure, if you're comparing new electric car vs new ICE car, they both have closed-source bullshit. But that's the wrong comparison, because old ICE cars without that bullshit exist and old EVs don't.
Control modules became common in the 70s. The vehicles that don’t have computers at all have been off the road for decades
People don't realize that like turtles, it's computers all the way down.
Classic car clubs would like a word…
I think you are making a bit of a straw man here. An entry level nissan delivery vehicle has less electronics than the new i5 BMW is not a reasonable comparison.
For this to be a reasonable comparison of vehicles, you have to say that the top of the range i5 has more electronics than the top of the range hybrid or top of the range ice only BMW 5 series (which it does not). The electronics of the ice only 5 series is just as connected to the infotainment unit as the all electric BMW i5.
The electric motor will have fewer serviceable components than the ice unit, and will be cheaper to replace
I don't. I couldn't care less about vehicle classes; I care about the fact that every new car (with the possible exception of the Slate truck, which doesn't count because it doesn't exist yet) is closed-source and enshittified to an unacceptable degree. The fine details of said enshittification are irrelevant; it's all unacceptable even down to the bottom of the market.
I own six cars, all built between 1990 and 2010. Every single one has electronics for stuff like engine control and separate electronics for music, but more importantly, none of them have a modem or Wi-Fi transceiver for receiving enshittified "updates" or violating my privacy.
I cannot buy an EV that acts the same, at any price. The only things that came close were the NiMH EVs leased to fleets in California in the late '90s (GM EV1, Toyota Rav4 EV, Ford Ranger EV, Chevy S-10 EV, and that's the whole list), and good fucking luck finding one of those that survived being returned to the manufacturer and scrapped and is actually offered for sale in 2025!
Our cars are 2002, 2004 and 2014. I'd be scared to trade them in on anything new.
For an example of an EV that doesn't use a computer, I give you the Flocken Elektrowagen or the Detroit Electric.