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In fact, I think some supercar makers already do something like this--they make you sign a contract limiting how soon you can sell your car or even mandating th
by tikhonj 14y ago
In fact, I think some supercar makers already do something like this--they make you sign a contract limiting how soon you can sell your car or even mandating that you allow the company to review and control whom you can sell the car to.
Of course, this only works for really expensive but limited edition cars. If there is a several year waiting list just to get the chance to drop half a million on a car, the car maker can get away with almost anything--the customer is obviously willing to go through a lot of trouble! This is designed to stop people from flipping supercars.
Also, there is a very important difference between a voluntary contract and an abuse of copyright law. Now, if every car maker mandated such a contract on every car, it would be a big issue even if it was ostensibly voluntary. In a free market, some other company not mandating such a contract would emerge; however, markets rarely function perfectly. I think this is an interesting parallel to the whole safe boot nonsense: if there was more diversity in the market it wouldn't be an issue, but the market is heavily dominated by a handful of companies, so it is an issue from a purely practical standpoint.
- excuse-me 14y agoOn the other hand, suppose a group of car makers all coincidentally decided to impose this - purely for safety concerns. And while they couldn't ban after market parts, they could make the engine not start if the new brakes/mufflers/cat didn't give the correct crypto response to the engine management system. And just imagine that congress would bow down to the car makers (that it had just bailed out) and rule that you couldn't modify the engine computer - in the interests of safety of course.
- rdl 14y agoI think the Nissan GT-R had some components like this, actually.
- tikhonj 14y agoDid it? All I heard was that it had certain components hand-built and customized to each other (like the engine and the transmission). However, this is an entirely mechanical issue: since it wasn't really mass-produced, each motor and gearbox is different, so replacing them is going to be nontrivial. Of course, I'm not an expert, and could certainly be missing information on other components of the GT-R. Either way, it's useful to keep in mind that the GT-R is a really crazy car :P.
- rdl 14y agoI know they were trying to prevent it from being "chipped", and putting cryptographic interlocks in major components is the best way to keep the ECU from being completely replaced.