6 ms·

This is why I refuse to buy anything after a certain date when it comes to cars. Luckily I have the ability and resources to maintain and fix my own vehicle.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I'll continue driving my loud gas guzzling 19mpg car for as long as I can keep it going because these ultra connected new cars are abominations
- version_five 3y ago
  The real impetus behind electric cars is vendor lock in and monitoring. It brings a clean slate to the currently robust repair market.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    It truly sucks that they require a pound of flesh here, you can't have this nice thing without selling your soul. There is nothing that prevents them from respecting the user and allowing repair.
    - version_five 3y ago
      Greed? It's a pretty textbook case for regulation.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
        Greed is fine but ideally we would also have competition where one can vote with their wallet for a less connected old-school car.
        version_five 3y ago
        Ideally I agree. The issue seems to be that barriers to entry are too high. There is so much regulatory capture in the automotive industry, everything is arrayed in favor of incumbents.
  - Tanoc 3y ago
    That's a minor reason. The major reason is profit margins. It costs a lot less to make an electric vehicle than an internal combustion vehicle because the drivetrain and control systems are so much simpler. Since Tesla made electric vehicles seem more "premium" that also set up the expectation to the buying public that electric cars should cost more. So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000. That's also the reason why sedans, stationwagons, hatchbacks, coupes, and minivans are being phased out in favour of trucks, CUVs, and SUVs. Despite costing as much or less to manufacture, public perception allows the manufacturer to charge more. That said, considering that most repairs are done to transmissions, fuel systems, and body panels (interior and exterior), cutting out everything but the body panels also cuts into the profits of dealership service centers. That's beginning to drive up the costs even more because the dealerships are padding the lot sales price with their markups to cover the loss that happens in the service department with EVs. People are starting to want a direct sales model like Tesla does, but that causes even more problems because direct sales cannot account for local market conditions or quick economic downturns the way dealerships can. Plus you get the problem of "When the hell am I getting my car back?" when it needs repairs or service because you have to ship your car off somewhere far away where they'll get to it as the backlog allows. A la Rivian and Tesla. Neither the customers or the manufacturers want a Rivian/Tesla repair center situation.
    - belltaco 3y ago
      > So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000 Automotive gross margins don't seem to reflect those numbers. Tesla's are around 25%.
    - fomine3 3y ago
      I don't know how you ignored battery costs
      - Tanoc 3y ago
        Hilariously batteries, even being as expensive as they are, cost less per produced vehicle than an ICE drivetrain thanks to emissions and crash regulations. In the U.S. very single engine and transmission combination for a given vehicle has to be tested individually for both fields. That drives the cost of any new generation of a given car up considerably. Chrysler/FCA/Stellantis kept ancient LX cars alive with just facelifts because paying the penalties was cheaper than testing new vehicles. We don't get a lot of cheaper world brands like SEAT or Japanese kei cars because of that, too. We lost the Focus and Fiesta in North America because Ford foolishly spent that money on the cost-amortized EcoSport instead. The companies believe it's too expensive to "federalize" these cars, and so they just don't bother with them. Meanwhile Volkswagen rushed the id.Buzz right over the Atlantic the moment they finished it because they only had to test one configuration. Same with the Fiat 500E and the Toyota bZ4X. No EPA emissions testing and only a single NHTSA test round make those EVs so much cheaper than testing the twenty six of the Toyota RAV4 or the twelve of the Volkswagen Transporter.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    But vendor lock in and monitoring is happening even on non-electric cars, and there's nothing inherent to electric vehicles that requires the lock in and remote monitoring compared to any modern ICE.
- _moof 3y ago
  A friend works in environmental science and his advice when it comes to cars and climate is to keep your car for as long as possible, regardless of gas vs. electric. Obviously YMMV but generally speaking the emissions "cost" of manufacturing and delivering the car in the first place is huge, and the way the numbers work out, it's better to amortize that over as long a time as you can than it is to frequently buy a replacement, even if it's electric.
  - 1270018080 3y ago
    I like the idea that plug-in hybrids are the best choice. Battery supply is the limiting factor, so 100 plug-in hybrids that can do 50 miles of electric driving are overall better than 10 electrics that can do 500 miles. Especially since basically 99% of drives are under 50 miles.
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      Plug in hybrids would be the best choice if anyone actually plugged them in. Most PHEVs here in Norway are leased and exist only because they are cheaper than the petrol version. The leasing companies say that only a small fraction of them are ever charged.
  - avar 3y ago
    Your friend may understand environmental science, but clearly not economics. If you don't keep your car you'll sell it. You won't be moving the needle on how long it'll take to amortize that initial manufacturing cost, it'll just happen with someone else driving it. Likewise if you don't buy a new car someone else will, you're not going to move the needle on the overall supply. I don't recommend buying new cars, but if you consider the above it's pretty much pollution-neutral. All you're really doing is paying a premium in order to be the first in a long line of owners to drive that vehicle.
    - PopAlongKid 3y ago
      You appear to be making an unfounded assumption that regardless of how many owners it has, any given vehicle will remain on the road the exact same number of years. If an owner decides to keep and maintain their car longer than they would have in the past, that car will stay out of the junkyard longer and therefore reduce the need to produce new cars. They will use some of the money they would have spent on a new car to keep the old one going longer, and still pocket the rest of it as savings.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  There are plenty of 50-60 mpg (uk) cars around that don’t even have Bluetooth.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  You speak of new abominations, however grandfathering old abominations is just as bad for society. Could you at least make it not so loud?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    > Could you at least make it not so loud? My aftermarket exhaust is louder by design.
    - pierat 3y ago
      Consider it a chav announcement.
hef19898 3y ago
Ah, some aircraft I know ran on Windows, including blue screens of death during flight. A switch Win 3.11 solved that.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  There are trains still running on the German rail with their displays running Windows 95/98. The embedded world in general is nuts. Unless absolutely necessary, nothing gets upgraded once a system works.
  - bondarchuk 3y ago
    That sounds like the opposite of nuts. What would be nuts is to do a whole bunch of work to upgrade something that's already working for literally no reason at all.
    - rurp 3y ago
      Seriously! It is crazy how many software products I use have gotten categorically worse over the years.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      The problem is, once you ossify, you can't upgrade for whatever reason or extend functionality because the build tools will get lost or won't run on modern stacks any more. Or, say, some industrial machine - you might wish to allow network connectivity so that the vendor/service teams can get notified once a sensor detects signs of upcoming failure such as vibrations. But you can't connect it to your network, or have to take it off your network once the vendor's security support has passed, because otherwise you're just asking hackers to establish persistence on the system.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Why would that be nuts? It's not connected to the internet and it works. So why change it?
jwells89 3y ago
The unfortunate thing is that sticking to older cars forfeits a lot of safety improvements that've been implemented in the past decade or so, which is more of an issue every day with giant SUVs and trucks having come to dominate the roads. It's something I've been grappling with lately, with a potential car purchase coming up. I really don't need much more than a mid-late 00s sub-compact Toyota or Honda of some kind but not going with something made in the past ~5 years feels a bit like a gamble.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I'll continue driving my loud gas guzzling 19mpg car for as long as I can keep it going because these ultra connected new cars are abominations

version_five 3y ago
The real impetus behind electric cars is vendor lock in and monitoring. It brings a clean slate to the currently robust repair market.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  It truly sucks that they require a pound of flesh here, you can't have this nice thing without selling your soul. There is nothing that prevents them from respecting the user and allowing repair.
  - version_five 3y ago
    Greed? It's a pretty textbook case for regulation.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      Greed is fine but ideally we would also have competition where one can vote with their wallet for a less connected old-school car.
      - version_five 3y ago
        Ideally I agree. The issue seems to be that barriers to entry are too high. There is so much regulatory capture in the automotive industry, everything is arrayed in favor of incumbents.
- Tanoc 3y ago
  That's a minor reason. The major reason is profit margins. It costs a lot less to make an electric vehicle than an internal combustion vehicle because the drivetrain and control systems are so much simpler. Since Tesla made electric vehicles seem more "premium" that also set up the expectation to the buying public that electric cars should cost more. So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000. That's also the reason why sedans, stationwagons, hatchbacks, coupes, and minivans are being phased out in favour of trucks, CUVs, and SUVs. Despite costing as much or less to manufacture, public perception allows the manufacturer to charge more. That said, considering that most repairs are done to transmissions, fuel systems, and body panels (interior and exterior), cutting out everything but the body panels also cuts into the profits of dealership service centers. That's beginning to drive up the costs even more because the dealerships are padding the lot sales price with their markups to cover the loss that happens in the service department with EVs. People are starting to want a direct sales model like Tesla does, but that causes even more problems because direct sales cannot account for local market conditions or quick economic downturns the way dealerships can. Plus you get the problem of "When the hell am I getting my car back?" when it needs repairs or service because you have to ship your car off somewhere far away where they'll get to it as the backlog allows. A la Rivian and Tesla. Neither the customers or the manufacturers want a Rivian/Tesla repair center situation.
  - belltaco 3y ago
    > So an electric vehicle costs $9,000 to make compared to an internal combustion engine vehicle costing $14,000, but the EV sells for $60,000 while the ICE one sells for $46,000 Automotive gross margins don't seem to reflect those numbers. Tesla's are around 25%.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    I don't know how you ignored battery costs
    - Tanoc 3y ago
      Hilariously batteries, even being as expensive as they are, cost less per produced vehicle than an ICE drivetrain thanks to emissions and crash regulations. In the U.S. very single engine and transmission combination for a given vehicle has to be tested individually for both fields. That drives the cost of any new generation of a given car up considerably. Chrysler/FCA/Stellantis kept ancient LX cars alive with just facelifts because paying the penalties was cheaper than testing new vehicles. We don't get a lot of cheaper world brands like SEAT or Japanese kei cars because of that, too. We lost the Focus and Fiesta in North America because Ford foolishly spent that money on the cost-amortized EcoSport instead. The companies believe it's too expensive to "federalize" these cars, and so they just don't bother with them. Meanwhile Volkswagen rushed the id.Buzz right over the Atlantic the moment they finished it because they only had to test one configuration. Same with the Fiat 500E and the Toyota bZ4X. No EPA emissions testing and only a single NHTSA test round make those EVs so much cheaper than testing the twenty six of the Toyota RAV4 or the twelve of the Volkswagen Transporter.
- vel0city 3y ago
  But vendor lock in and monitoring is happening even on non-electric cars, and there's nothing inherent to electric vehicles that requires the lock in and remote monitoring compared to any modern ICE.
_moof 3y ago
A friend works in environmental science and his advice when it comes to cars and climate is to keep your car for as long as possible, regardless of gas vs. electric. Obviously YMMV but generally speaking the emissions "cost" of manufacturing and delivering the car in the first place is huge, and the way the numbers work out, it's better to amortize that over as long a time as you can than it is to frequently buy a replacement, even if it's electric.
- 1270018080 3y ago
  I like the idea that plug-in hybrids are the best choice. Battery supply is the limiting factor, so 100 plug-in hybrids that can do 50 miles of electric driving are overall better than 10 electrics that can do 500 miles. Especially since basically 99% of drives are under 50 miles.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Plug in hybrids would be the best choice if anyone actually plugged them in. Most PHEVs here in Norway are leased and exist only because they are cheaper than the petrol version. The leasing companies say that only a small fraction of them are ever charged.
- avar 3y ago
  Your friend may understand environmental science, but clearly not economics. If you don't keep your car you'll sell it. You won't be moving the needle on how long it'll take to amortize that initial manufacturing cost, it'll just happen with someone else driving it. Likewise if you don't buy a new car someone else will, you're not going to move the needle on the overall supply. I don't recommend buying new cars, but if you consider the above it's pretty much pollution-neutral. All you're really doing is paying a premium in order to be the first in a long line of owners to drive that vehicle.
  - PopAlongKid 3y ago
    You appear to be making an unfounded assumption that regardless of how many owners it has, any given vehicle will remain on the road the exact same number of years. If an owner decides to keep and maintain their car longer than they would have in the past, that car will stay out of the junkyard longer and therefore reduce the need to produce new cars. They will use some of the money they would have spent on a new car to keep the old one going longer, and still pocket the rest of it as savings.
dontlaugh 3y ago
There are plenty of 50-60 mpg (uk) cars around that don’t even have Bluetooth.
1970-01-01 3y ago
You speak of new abominations, however grandfathering old abominations is just as bad for society. Could you at least make it not so loud?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > Could you at least make it not so loud? My aftermarket exhaust is louder by design.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Consider it a chav announcement.

hef19898 3y ago

Ah, some aircraft I know ran on Windows, including blue screens of death during flight. A switch Win 3.11 solved that.

mschuster91 3y ago
There are trains still running on the German rail with their displays running Windows 95/98. The embedded world in general is nuts. Unless absolutely necessary, nothing gets upgraded once a system works.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  That sounds like the opposite of nuts. What would be nuts is to do a whole bunch of work to upgrade something that's already working for literally no reason at all.
  - rurp 3y ago
    Seriously! It is crazy how many software products I use have gotten categorically worse over the years.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    The problem is, once you ossify, you can't upgrade for whatever reason or extend functionality because the build tools will get lost or won't run on modern stacks any more. Or, say, some industrial machine - you might wish to allow network connectivity so that the vendor/service teams can get notified once a sensor detects signs of upcoming failure such as vibrations. But you can't connect it to your network, or have to take it off your network once the vendor's security support has passed, because otherwise you're just asking hackers to establish persistence on the system.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Why would that be nuts? It's not connected to the internet and it works. So why change it?

jwells89 3y ago

The unfortunate thing is that sticking to older cars forfeits a lot of safety improvements that've been implemented in the past decade or so, which is more of an issue every day with giant SUVs and trucks having come to dominate the roads. It's something I've been grappling with lately, with a potential car purchase coming up. I really don't need much more than a mid-late 00s sub-compact Toyota or Honda of some kind but not going with something made in the past ~5 years feels a bit like a gamble.