4 ms·

Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked

62 points by Anon84 2y ago

arresin 2y ago
Genius use of stable diffusion for the article’s cover art. > its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed Ouch
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Bankrupt Fisker says it can't migrate its EVs to a new owner's server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41795075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41795075
LiquidSky 2y ago
That's pretty cruel of Cory Doctorow.
- crest 2y ago
  He's just pealing back the layers of absurdity. They intentionally released a totally broken by design product so now people don't have to guess if they're stupid.
  - Ruthalas 2y ago
    I think the person you are responding to was poking fun at the way the title is structure, which could be interpreted to indicate that Cory himself bricked the vehicles.
rurp 2y ago
This is a perfect example of why the market doesn't always produce the kind of product that consumers would prefer. Despite this sort of server integration being a terrible design for customers, investors absolutely love a platform like this for lock-in and rent extraction. A company needs funding before it can even start making a hardware project on the scale of a car, and it is vastly easier to obtain funding for a project like this than for one that would not screw over customers. Free markets are usually great, but they can have terribly misaligned incentives at times.
- floydnoel 2y ago
  the company went bankrupt- i think the market worked in this instance.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    By a narrow definition of 'worked'. There are a lot of bricked cars out there, unless someone cracks them or the new buyer can revive the systems needed.
    - KetoManx64 2y ago
      I don't think there's much "free market" here at all considering how much government money, tax breaks and other incentives are provided by the government for "green energy".
      - paulryanrogers 2y ago
        Markets aren't truly free without a government to ensure fair competition. Otherwise the biggest players just become a defacto government in their market. And society only has one environment in which to exist. It would be crazy to let companies destroy it just because they can afford to. Even Adam Smith doesn't advocate that markets be entirely free of all regulation. Gas companies are burning the world to the ground just to get a few more quarters of profit. They'll buy regulators and presidents of they have to. In fact one is openly selling himself to them at a bargain rate.
        KetoManx64 2y ago
        That's completely and utterly false. Governments corrupt anything and everything they touche and are the primary reason that monopolies exist. Why are there 3/4 major network providers in the US? Because they received billions of dollars in grant money from the goverment and did not have to compete in the market with prices. Do you know who is one of the biggest individual consumers of oil? Take a look at the military industrial complex. Want to know why Microsoft is so far ahead of Linux? Take a look at how much money the US government has paid to Microsoft/tax cuts/grants. Want to know why Amazon has no other competitors that are anywhere close to their scale? Take a look at the tax breaks it has received from different government institutions. The list goes on and on.
datavirtue 2y ago
Parts pairing is rampant in the automotive industry. Why isn't that banned in Oregon?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bediger4000 2y ago
> A "software-based car" gets to mobilize the state to enforce its "IP," which allows it to force its customers to use authorized mechanics... Doctorow has a good point here.
dzhiurgis 2y ago
What does being EV have anything to do with bricking it? Why was it bricked in first place? Cars don't brick themselves by entering tunnel or driving in wilderness. I get it, he has to keep stirring up controversy to stay relevant, but Cory sometimes looses his marbles over irrelevant crap.
- mikestew 2y ago
  I’m not even convinced that the cars won’t work without working servers. All of the links in TFA are behind a paywall I’m not going to bother working around, but is there any evidence that Fiskers need a home to phone in order to keep working? Or is it that one can’t remotely start the vehicle (as one example) without working servers? ‘Cuz $DEITY knows that “bricked” has a very wide range of colloquial definitions.
  - dzhiurgis 2y ago
    Wonder if we should have a dedicated agency that for keeping control server up. Allowing manufacturers to open/close your vehicles at whim sounds putting too many eggs at same basket. DMV is the one who knows who actually owns the car after all...
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      I expect government(s) to step in at some point and ban the practice entirely because it's such a foolish cybersecurity risk to have unnecessary single points of failure. It's basically a big red button that reads "cripple our economy, please" that our adversaries can hit at any time.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-major-speed-bump-as-fleet-sale-is-now-in-question/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-maj... Not all the links are behind paywalls. Fisker themselves are among the groups saying they don't know how to get the cars running again.
bathtub365 2y ago
Maybe before you launch a product over a certain price point you have to prove that you will be able to support it for a certain period of time. Kind of like how in certain jurisdictions you have to have money and plans set aside for environmental cleanup after natural resource extraction. These cars are now effectively e-waste far before they should be because there was no plan in place for long-term support. When working as a vendor with mature automotive manufacturers they’ll often evaluate your company to ensure you’ll still be around over the timeframe that they intend to sell or service cars with your parts in them.
tb_technical 2y ago
This is why I'll always buy cheap used cars - they already have a history of running. All they need is intensive oil changes and occasional part replacement for a couple years before I move onto my next used car. I avoid all the whizbang rent seeking bullshit just by driving horrible old cars. I really hope someone makes a conversion kit for the computer in these cars. It would suck to be out on a new car, and just have a brick sitting in your driveway.
- psd1 2y ago
  I occasionally read blogs about reverse-engineering auto computers, and it is clearly not simple. I don't expect even a popular model to be fully REd on the next decade, let alone a Fisker.
  - tb_technical 2y ago
    You're right! But rather than reverse engineer the cars computer, how about a complete aftermarket overhaul? You would lose some features, surely, but at least the car would work, no?
    - psd1 2y ago
      You've never stripped a car. I have. I don't want to underestimate what a driven person can accomplish, but I'd estimate a year of work for ten engineers with relevant experience. I think you'll have to poach someone from the target vehicle's maker, just to get the industry contacts to source the connectors. Minimum order 10k, obvs. You'll need to keep ~100 types in stock; I guess about €10m outlay. I think you'll have to print the cases, and you'll face issues with vibration and temperature range. How many flex cycles are you putting the parts through in testing? Are you testing for water ingress, salt spray? Or do it properly and get into injection moulding; add six months and another million or two. After you've spent 8 figures bringing the kit to market, I might be interested, if you can sell a kit for a '94 jag at a price point way below what I imagine your unit costs will be. But I'll be claiming from you when your parts fail. Then I'm going to warn people away, even if your customer service is excellent, because I've now lost acres of knuckle skin and snapped some of the interior trim getting to these parts.

62 points by Anon84 2y ago

Genius use of stable diffusion for the article’s cover art. > its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed Ouch

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Bankrupt Fisker says it can't migrate its EVs to a new owner's server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41795075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41795075

LiquidSky 2y ago

That's pretty cruel of Cory Doctorow.

crest 2y ago
He's just pealing back the layers of absurdity. They intentionally released a totally broken by design product so now people don't have to guess if they're stupid.
- Ruthalas 2y ago
  I think the person you are responding to was poking fun at the way the title is structure, which could be interpreted to indicate that Cory himself bricked the vehicles.

rurp 2y ago

This is a perfect example of why the market doesn't always produce the kind of product that consumers would prefer. Despite this sort of server integration being a terrible design for customers, investors absolutely love a platform like this for lock-in and rent extraction. A company needs funding before it can even start making a hardware project on the scale of a car, and it is vastly easier to obtain funding for a project like this than for one that would not screw over customers. Free markets are usually great, but they can have terribly misaligned incentives at times.

floydnoel 2y ago
the company went bankrupt- i think the market worked in this instance.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  By a narrow definition of 'worked'. There are a lot of bricked cars out there, unless someone cracks them or the new buyer can revive the systems needed.
  - KetoManx64 2y ago
    I don't think there's much "free market" here at all considering how much government money, tax breaks and other incentives are provided by the government for "green energy".
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Markets aren't truly free without a government to ensure fair competition. Otherwise the biggest players just become a defacto government in their market. And society only has one environment in which to exist. It would be crazy to let companies destroy it just because they can afford to. Even Adam Smith doesn't advocate that markets be entirely free of all regulation. Gas companies are burning the world to the ground just to get a few more quarters of profit. They'll buy regulators and presidents of they have to. In fact one is openly selling himself to them at a bargain rate.
      - KetoManx64 2y ago
        That's completely and utterly false. Governments corrupt anything and everything they touche and are the primary reason that monopolies exist. Why are there 3/4 major network providers in the US? Because they received billions of dollars in grant money from the goverment and did not have to compete in the market with prices. Do you know who is one of the biggest individual consumers of oil? Take a look at the military industrial complex. Want to know why Microsoft is so far ahead of Linux? Take a look at how much money the US government has paid to Microsoft/tax cuts/grants. Want to know why Amazon has no other competitors that are anywhere close to their scale? Take a look at the tax breaks it has received from different government institutions. The list goes on and on.

datavirtue 2y ago

Parts pairing is rampant in the automotive industry. Why isn't that banned in Oregon?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bediger4000 2y ago

> A "software-based car" gets to mobilize the state to enforce its "IP," which allows it to force its customers to use authorized mechanics... Doctorow has a good point here.

dzhiurgis 2y ago

What does being EV have anything to do with bricking it? Why was it bricked in first place? Cars don't brick themselves by entering tunnel or driving in wilderness. I get it, he has to keep stirring up controversy to stay relevant, but Cory sometimes looses his marbles over irrelevant crap.

mikestew 2y ago
I’m not even convinced that the cars won’t work without working servers. All of the links in TFA are behind a paywall I’m not going to bother working around, but is there any evidence that Fiskers need a home to phone in order to keep working? Or is it that one can’t remotely start the vehicle (as one example) without working servers? ‘Cuz $DEITY knows that “bricked” has a very wide range of colloquial definitions.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  Wonder if we should have a dedicated agency that for keeping control server up. Allowing manufacturers to open/close your vehicles at whim sounds putting too many eggs at same basket. DMV is the one who knows who actually owns the car after all...
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    I expect government(s) to step in at some point and ban the practice entirely because it's such a foolish cybersecurity risk to have unnecessary single points of failure. It's basically a big red button that reads "cripple our economy, please" that our adversaries can hit at any time.
- mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
  https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-major-speed-bump-as-fleet-sale-is-now-in-question/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-maj... Not all the links are behind paywalls. Fisker themselves are among the groups saying they don't know how to get the cars running again.

bathtub365 2y ago

Maybe before you launch a product over a certain price point you have to prove that you will be able to support it for a certain period of time. Kind of like how in certain jurisdictions you have to have money and plans set aside for environmental cleanup after natural resource extraction. These cars are now effectively e-waste far before they should be because there was no plan in place for long-term support. When working as a vendor with mature automotive manufacturers they’ll often evaluate your company to ensure you’ll still be around over the timeframe that they intend to sell or service cars with your parts in them.

tb_technical 2y ago

This is why I'll always buy cheap used cars - they already have a history of running. All they need is intensive oil changes and occasional part replacement for a couple years before I move onto my next used car. I avoid all the whizbang rent seeking bullshit just by driving horrible old cars. I really hope someone makes a conversion kit for the computer in these cars. It would suck to be out on a new car, and just have a brick sitting in your driveway.

psd1 2y ago
I occasionally read blogs about reverse-engineering auto computers, and it is clearly not simple. I don't expect even a popular model to be fully REd on the next decade, let alone a Fisker.
- tb_technical 2y ago
  You're right! But rather than reverse engineer the cars computer, how about a complete aftermarket overhaul? You would lose some features, surely, but at least the car would work, no?
  - psd1 2y ago
    You've never stripped a car. I have. I don't want to underestimate what a driven person can accomplish, but I'd estimate a year of work for ten engineers with relevant experience. I think you'll have to poach someone from the target vehicle's maker, just to get the industry contacts to source the connectors. Minimum order 10k, obvs. You'll need to keep ~100 types in stock; I guess about €10m outlay. I think you'll have to print the cases, and you'll face issues with vibration and temperature range. How many flex cycles are you putting the parts through in testing? Are you testing for water ingress, salt spray? Or do it properly and get into injection moulding; add six months and another million or two. After you've spent 8 figures bringing the kit to market, I might be interested, if you can sell a kit for a '94 jag at a price point way below what I imagine your unit costs will be. But I'll be claiming from you when your parts fail. Then I'm going to warn people away, even if your customer service is excellent, because I've now lost acres of knuckle skin and snapped some of the interior trim getting to these parts.