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My previous car made it to 18 and I'm hoping to keep its replacement alive as long as possible to see what the track record of car companies looks like for life

My previous car made it to 18 and I'm hoping to keep its replacement alive as long as possible to see what the track record of car companies looks like for lifespan of their electric cars. It's not just the battery, they're increasingly turning into smartphone-like gadgets. And performance on that type of device never seems to get better as it stretches toward the end of its supported life. Even in the best case automakers are saying things like "we'll give it 15 years of android updates." On the one hand, that's not long enough, and on the other at that 15 year mark I half expect the car will take 30 minutes to launch the maps app because "technically gave you an update" doesn't mean "gave any shits about the user experience on 15 year old hardware." If anything, the battery is the part where there's a possibility of a 3rd party replacement/refurbishment market improving things. Not so easy to replace an EV's infotainment system as it was to swap a single DIN tape deck out for a bluetooth radio.

jandrese 3y ago
It gets even stranger when you think about how some EV companies are pushing autonomous driving so hard. Will the AI driving system be able to run on 20 year old hardware? Or will they have to cut people off and say "oops, the feature you already bought wasn't really possible on your hardware after all, only new cars will get the update." Tesla isn't the only example here, but it is the most egregious.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Meanwhile GM is pulling CarPlay from their EVs to make sure when your car gets older and the software is a huge heap of shit, you can't use the car's screen for maps from your 15-years-newer smartphone (or whatever smart-gizmo we're using in 15 years). Want better maps? Buy a new car! I have to hope people will turn around from that and buy their next car from someone other than GM.
saltcured 3y ago
The slow maps app won't matter much when the built-in modem is stuck on 4G or 5G which is being "turned down" in favor of allocating 8G etc., or even before that when it turns out that it depends on some deprecated cloud API and refuses to degrade gracefully. Sometimes I think of my first new car from 1997, which had a tape deck in the dash and an optional CD-changer in the trunk. I was happy to find an aftermarket adapter that converted the CD-changer cabling into an iPod adapter in the following decade. And of course such iPod integrations are all obsolete now. Sometimes I wonder if even Car Play or Android Auto will be just as anachronistic. Imagine if there had been popular Blackberry integrations in the heyday of that product line...

jandrese 3y ago

It gets even stranger when you think about how some EV companies are pushing autonomous driving so hard. Will the AI driving system be able to run on 20 year old hardware? Or will they have to cut people off and say "oops, the feature you already bought wasn't really possible on your hardware after all, only new cars will get the update." Tesla isn't the only example here, but it is the most egregious.

wlesieutre 3y ago
Meanwhile GM is pulling CarPlay from their EVs to make sure when your car gets older and the software is a huge heap of shit, you can't use the car's screen for maps from your 15-years-newer smartphone (or whatever smart-gizmo we're using in 15 years). Want better maps? Buy a new car! I have to hope people will turn around from that and buy their next car from someone other than GM.

saltcured 3y ago

The slow maps app won't matter much when the built-in modem is stuck on 4G or 5G which is being "turned down" in favor of allocating 8G etc., or even before that when it turns out that it depends on some deprecated cloud API and refuses to degrade gracefully. Sometimes I think of my first new car from 1997, which had a tape deck in the dash and an optional CD-changer in the trunk. I was happy to find an aftermarket adapter that converted the CD-changer cabling into an iPod adapter in the following decade. And of course such iPod integrations are all obsolete now. Sometimes I wonder if even Car Play or Android Auto will be just as anachronistic. Imagine if there had been popular Blackberry integrations in the heyday of that product line...