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This is the worst of the technological glibness from "car guys." Modern cars are incredibly sophisticated devices with many different computer systems running

This is the worst of the technological glibness from "car guys." Modern cars are incredibly sophisticated devices with many different computer systems running a lot of code. They all run real time OSes, which are quite distinct from an operating system like Windows. They have to do their functions correctly 100% of the time. Now cars are getting tons and tons of sensors. RADAR, LIDAR, visual cameras, etc., all running sophisticated algorithms. There are massive safety reasons (not just to yourself, but to your fellow man) to not tinkering with these systems. I know a lot of car guys lament that it's harder to work on a car today, but your average consumer is delighted by this. Cars are much more reliable today than they were before. Most people don't want the freedom to work on a car that constantly needs to be worked on because it is always breaking. They want something that is reliable and with minimal maintenance just works every single day. Cars are also much safer, with much more robust safety technology. I'm a fan of Jalopnik, and I like to stay up on the latest in car technology, but my interest is from an average user standpoint. Electric cars with self-driving technology is really exciting. I'm excited for this future. I'm going to support it. I don't need a car to tinker with for my everyday needs, nor do the vast majority of people. If I want a car to tinker with, I'll get a project car for track use.

RealityVoid 9y ago
> Modern cars are incredibly sophisticated devices with many different computer systems running a lot of code. They all run real time OSes, which are quite distinct from an operating system like Windows. They have to do their functions correctly 100% of the time. Now cars are getting tons and tons of sensors. RADAR, LIDAR, visual cameras, etc., all running sophisticated algorithms. While that is true, PC's were very sophisticated back in the day also. We're at a different level of sofistication currently, but I feel like that sophistication can be abstracted away. After all, currently you plug a GPU card, an incredibly sofisticated piece of technology in your PC, and it mostly just works. Why sould it not be the same for cars? I say this as someone currently writing firmware for cars and wondering why this does not happen. Mechanical complexity is one reason, but once that goes away, what's to stop us then? Maybe just the power of habbit.
- eridius 9y ago
  If you screw up your PC by tinkering with it, all you're doing is hurting yourself. If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    That's FUD and a bit of a straw man. No one is debating whether or not you should be able to personally tinker with your car (electric or otherwise) because that's going to be possible regardless of compatibility of parts. You're perfectly welcome to go attempt to to swap your engine and fail horribly right now on your 20 year old gas guzzler or 20 years from now on your high tech electric car. That's not a reason to keep parts from being interchangeable across cars/manufacturers.
    - pwthornton 9y ago
      The biggest argument against interoperability is speed of change. Telsa, the leader in electric vehicles, makes a lot of their own components and algorithms. Standardization in fast moving areas slows down the pace of change. We are at the dawning of the electric car age and even earlier in the self-driving car age. Standards tend to either work well with mature areas or in areas where people need to pool resources together either for money or legal reasons (see codec standards).
      - RealityVoid 9y ago
        Automotive SW is quite mature. The kind of information you're sending to the different control ECU's in the car are quite small and simplistic. I see no reason why you could not implement dynamic and state-of-the-art algorithms on the image recognition part and push the comparably small result output on the control bus.
      - aanm1988 9y ago
        Standards enable alternatives to spring up, so long as they interface properly. That helps with both innovation and competition.
soared 9y ago
I completely agree. Another major factor the article missed is price.. you can buy a computer for $5 to $4000. Cars at at a much much higher range and therefore consumers have less desire to tinker / potentially break / buy new parts / upgrade / etc. (Although, I do not know how expensive PCs were back in the day)
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Machrone's Law held from about 1985 through 2001: "The computer you really want costs $5000."
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And it's worth noting that: 1. Those are non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and 2. While Machrone's Law was a reasonably accurate observation, in the early days it was pretty easy to get to that number just by adding a 5MB hard drive to your IBM PC. By later in that stretch, you could still get up to $5K (and probably could today) but that's with configuring almost every state of the art option/add-on you can think of.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      Start with a top-of-the-line CPU and the nicest available motherboard in a soundproof case. Max the RAM. Add a fancy graphics card, a big fast drive and a pair of giant spinning disks, a big ultra-high-res monitor, and the input devices that you really want. Buy new, brand name, and not on a special sale. Et voila, one $5000 desktop machine. (If you put it together over the course of a year, buying reputable reliable parts on the best sales, it might be a $2500-$3000 machine, yes.)
- emodendroket 9y ago
  If anything I think it's the opposite. It's not like you're just going to turn around and buy a new car every couple of weeks.
Animats 9y ago
I know a lot of car guys lament that it's harder to work on a car today, but your average consumer is delighted by this. Right. I restore antique Teletype machines from the 1930s and 1940s as a hobby. Those are totally maintainable. Everything is attached with screws and locknuts, and you can remove and replace any part. There's a 200 page manual of adjustments. They require annual oiling with over 500 oiling points. Most take one drop of oil, but there are several oil fill points. In heavy use, there's an annual cleaning, which involves partial disassembly and a soak in a cleaning bath in a repair shop. I've restored five of these machines to full operation. Some are almost a century old. (Plug: some of those machines will be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose CA, tomorrow through Sunday.) Imagine trying to sell a printer today that required regular oiling. That would not be acceptable, even if it increased the life of the printer by a factor of 5. Teletype Corporation recognized this with the Teletype Model 33, the yellow plastic thing that powered 1970s minicomputers. Those were rated for one year of continuous operation un-oiled, three years if regularly oiled. Few people oiled them. They wore out much faster than the older heavy-duty machines. Today, it's easier to restore a Model 15 Teletype from 1930 than a Model 33 from 1970. The 33 will have worn out parts, some plastic. The Model 15 won't; it's all hardened steel and cast iron. There are heavy trucks built that way, but cars? No.
- shostack 9y ago
  As an aside--do you enjoy the oiling process? A little bit here or there could be a fun maintenance task. 500+? That just sounds tedious and not really fun for a hobby...
  - addVenture 9y ago
    I'd recommend a read of The Practicing Mind to see how it might be different. A tedious task can easily be therapeutic if you go in with a "beginner's mind". It's kind of meditative, being present in the moment through the whole task.
    - shostack 9y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation--this is actually something I've wanted to learn more about as I struggle to get past the early stages of learning guitar.
deegles 9y ago
I sold my last car about 4 years ago, I don't expect I'll ever own one again. I think this will become the norm, especially if populations keep moving to cities and self driving cars become common.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > if populations keep moving to cities I don't think that this has really happened that much. More young professionals want to go live in the city but mostly they've displaced others, and there seems to be more suburban home-buying happening in that group. Besides that, it's only a handful of American cities with really robust public transportation.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    Yeah, if anything, for American cities all the evidence points to increased suburban sprawl with no end in sight. People too poor to own a car and pre-baby professionals may not need cars, but the rest of the American population generally does and chooses to do so.
emodendroket 9y ago
Most people don't want to work on their cars, true. I question whether the new, more complex cars are truly "more reliable" (how are we measuring and over what period of time? Compared to cars from when?) or that the average person is "delighted" that independent mechanics can service less and less of their cars.
aanm1988 9y ago
Arguments like this are the reason why things are becoming more locked down DRM riddled trash with no real concept of ownership. Why the internet is getting more and more siloed and full of walled gardens. Because it's easier that way and you don't really need to tinker.
joshu 9y ago
In a very different sense, cars do use shared parts and communication mechanisms such as canbus to decrease integration difficulty and cost. While I agree that it is not necessary for parts to connect to each other via standard mechanisms, I think the compatibility trend will increase over time. More and more parts will use standardized interfaces to each other, especially in terms of electronics, just to decrease costs.

RealityVoid 9y ago

> Modern cars are incredibly sophisticated devices with many different computer systems running a lot of code. They all run real time OSes, which are quite distinct from an operating system like Windows. They have to do their functions correctly 100% of the time. Now cars are getting tons and tons of sensors. RADAR, LIDAR, visual cameras, etc., all running sophisticated algorithms. While that is true, PC's were very sophisticated back in the day also. We're at a different level of sofistication currently, but I feel like that sophistication can be abstracted away. After all, currently you plug a GPU card, an incredibly sofisticated piece of technology in your PC, and it mostly just works. Why sould it not be the same for cars? I say this as someone currently writing firmware for cars and wondering why this does not happen. Mechanical complexity is one reason, but once that goes away, what's to stop us then? Maybe just the power of habbit.

eridius 9y ago
If you screw up your PC by tinkering with it, all you're doing is hurting yourself. If you screw up your electric car by tinkering with it, you could easily kill people.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  That's FUD and a bit of a straw man. No one is debating whether or not you should be able to personally tinker with your car (electric or otherwise) because that's going to be possible regardless of compatibility of parts. You're perfectly welcome to go attempt to to swap your engine and fail horribly right now on your 20 year old gas guzzler or 20 years from now on your high tech electric car. That's not a reason to keep parts from being interchangeable across cars/manufacturers.
  - pwthornton 9y ago
    The biggest argument against interoperability is speed of change. Telsa, the leader in electric vehicles, makes a lot of their own components and algorithms. Standardization in fast moving areas slows down the pace of change. We are at the dawning of the electric car age and even earlier in the self-driving car age. Standards tend to either work well with mature areas or in areas where people need to pool resources together either for money or legal reasons (see codec standards).
    - RealityVoid 9y ago
      Automotive SW is quite mature. The kind of information you're sending to the different control ECU's in the car are quite small and simplistic. I see no reason why you could not implement dynamic and state-of-the-art algorithms on the image recognition part and push the comparably small result output on the control bus.
    - aanm1988 9y ago
      Standards enable alternatives to spring up, so long as they interface properly. That helps with both innovation and competition.

soared 9y ago

I completely agree. Another major factor the article missed is price.. you can buy a computer for $5 to $4000. Cars at at a much much higher range and therefore consumers have less desire to tinker / potentially break / buy new parts / upgrade / etc. (Although, I do not know how expensive PCs were back in the day)

dsr_ 9y ago
Machrone's Law held from about 1985 through 2001: "The computer you really want costs $5000."
- ghaff 9y ago
  And it's worth noting that: 1. Those are non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and 2. While Machrone's Law was a reasonably accurate observation, in the early days it was pretty easy to get to that number just by adding a 5MB hard drive to your IBM PC. By later in that stretch, you could still get up to $5K (and probably could today) but that's with configuring almost every state of the art option/add-on you can think of.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    Start with a top-of-the-line CPU and the nicest available motherboard in a soundproof case. Max the RAM. Add a fancy graphics card, a big fast drive and a pair of giant spinning disks, a big ultra-high-res monitor, and the input devices that you really want. Buy new, brand name, and not on a special sale. Et voila, one $5000 desktop machine. (If you put it together over the course of a year, buying reputable reliable parts on the best sales, it might be a $2500-$3000 machine, yes.)
emodendroket 9y ago
If anything I think it's the opposite. It's not like you're just going to turn around and buy a new car every couple of weeks.

Animats 9y ago

I know a lot of car guys lament that it's harder to work on a car today, but your average consumer is delighted by this. Right. I restore antique Teletype machines from the 1930s and 1940s as a hobby. Those are totally maintainable. Everything is attached with screws and locknuts, and you can remove and replace any part. There's a 200 page manual of adjustments. They require annual oiling with over 500 oiling points. Most take one drop of oil, but there are several oil fill points. In heavy use, there's an annual cleaning, which involves partial disassembly and a soak in a cleaning bath in a repair shop. I've restored five of these machines to full operation. Some are almost a century old. (Plug: some of those machines will be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose CA, tomorrow through Sunday.) Imagine trying to sell a printer today that required regular oiling. That would not be acceptable, even if it increased the life of the printer by a factor of 5. Teletype Corporation recognized this with the Teletype Model 33, the yellow plastic thing that powered 1970s minicomputers. Those were rated for one year of continuous operation un-oiled, three years if regularly oiled. Few people oiled them. They wore out much faster than the older heavy-duty machines. Today, it's easier to restore a Model 15 Teletype from 1930 than a Model 33 from 1970. The 33 will have worn out parts, some plastic. The Model 15 won't; it's all hardened steel and cast iron. There are heavy trucks built that way, but cars? No.

shostack 9y ago
As an aside--do you enjoy the oiling process? A little bit here or there could be a fun maintenance task. 500+? That just sounds tedious and not really fun for a hobby...
- addVenture 9y ago
  I'd recommend a read of The Practicing Mind to see how it might be different. A tedious task can easily be therapeutic if you go in with a "beginner's mind". It's kind of meditative, being present in the moment through the whole task.
  - shostack 9y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation--this is actually something I've wanted to learn more about as I struggle to get past the early stages of learning guitar.

deegles 9y ago

I sold my last car about 4 years ago, I don't expect I'll ever own one again. I think this will become the norm, especially if populations keep moving to cities and self driving cars become common.

emodendroket 9y ago
> if populations keep moving to cities I don't think that this has really happened that much. More young professionals want to go live in the city but mostly they've displaced others, and there seems to be more suburban home-buying happening in that group. Besides that, it's only a handful of American cities with really robust public transportation.
- bdamm 9y ago
  Yeah, if anything, for American cities all the evidence points to increased suburban sprawl with no end in sight. People too poor to own a car and pre-baby professionals may not need cars, but the rest of the American population generally does and chooses to do so.

emodendroket 9y ago

Most people don't want to work on their cars, true. I question whether the new, more complex cars are truly "more reliable" (how are we measuring and over what period of time? Compared to cars from when?) or that the average person is "delighted" that independent mechanics can service less and less of their cars.

aanm1988 9y ago

Arguments like this are the reason why things are becoming more locked down DRM riddled trash with no real concept of ownership. Why the internet is getting more and more siloed and full of walled gardens. Because it's easier that way and you don't really need to tinker.

joshu 9y ago

In a very different sense, cars do use shared parts and communication mechanisms such as canbus to decrease integration difficulty and cost. While I agree that it is not necessary for parts to connect to each other via standard mechanisms, I think the compatibility trend will increase over time. More and more parts will use standardized interfaces to each other, especially in terms of electronics, just to decrease costs.