3 ms·

What happened in the early 2010s? 1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run bet

What happened in the early 2010s? 1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run better more of the time 1990s widespread adoption of more advanced emissions control systems - for reliability i'd say this is only a backwards step - none of these systems are required to propel the car down the road but many of them can stop a car from driving. They are additional complexity, weight and cost for limited functional benefit (in this generation, fuel economy improvements were fairly small compared to the leap from carbs to EFI in the previous gen). 2000s widespread adoption of on-car networks, the emissions diagnostics technology introduced in the previous decade was now no longer the primary use of on-car networks. Now your car stereo knew how to increase its volume as your road speed increased etc. screens became larger and colourful. Onboard software (typically bug ridden) became a security risk. 2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though

close04 1y ago
> What happened in the early 2010s? I'd say Tesla built a futuristic computer on wheels, with huge screens, always-on internet connectivity, smarter remote features than most other cars, etc. The car itself was exotic enough by being an EV and that drew attention to these other features too. Everyone else started to emulate them for better or worse. For now these things are modular because it was the cheapest way to build them. If manufacturers get over the hurdle of cost and find a way to have everything more vertically integrated (think Apple) then we'll lose all access to tinker with the hardware which might be a couple of black-box chips, or the software. This is probably what Apple was trying to sell as a smart car to car manufacturers. They might have dropped those plans to focus in CarPlay and have the phone be that "smart car". Hopefully some brands go the other way and make a dumb car where the brain is entirely the phone but that's handing out a lot of their agency to the phone manufacturer.
numpad0 1y ago
2010s, in software, vertical integration, and digital feudalism? iPhone?
- CraigJPerry 1y ago
  Hmmm, but I think that was already happening in the early 2000s. It definitely accelerated in the late 2000s. I worked for a deutsche telekom subsidiary in 2004 and they had a brand new BMW e65 7 Series all liveried up in corporate branding, advertising internet connectivity on the move. At the time i thought that was the ultimate car but i never managed to borrow it... £10 per megabyte as i recall.
MrGilbert 1y ago
> 2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though I haven't done it yet, but maybe looking into the EU mandatory regulations would make sense. eCall, for instance (a feature that will call for help if you crashed by contacting an operator), was made mandatory in new cars in 2018. The initiative gained traction at around 2013.
layoric 1y ago
Software updates and data collection. Eg, my mums Toyota Corolla 2018 already has a disabled infotainment button because of dropped support. If it was a 2019 it would have been eligible for an update, but not for 2018. Lots of cars from the same period are collecting and sharing data to various different companies from weather to insurance. Personally I don’t want monitoring or software updates, and definitely don’t want any cloud dependencies.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  Lots of cars from the 90s and 2000s have obsolete tech that doesn't work like certain vintages of car phones
  - burnt_toast 1y ago
    Car phones weren't common place and were typically only available in some higher end luxury cars. I wouldn't exactly call that lots of cars.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      A minority of cars yes, but so many cars - even luxury cars were made that it still amounts to a lot of cars.
themafia 1y ago
> What happened in the early 2010s? According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance and were more likely to trade in their vehicle for a new one. So they stopped optimizing for that segment of the audience and started making disposable cars. Truthfully, industry watched the government bail out the banks, require next to nothing in return, and demanded no prosecutions for illegal behavior. The writing was pretty much on the wall. Industry realized it no longer needed happy customers.
- CraigJPerry 1y ago
  >> According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance Nah the motoring industry has been saying that forever. Just to back that up, I inherited a ton of the "Car Mechanics" magazine here in the UK. Just for fun I've just pulled a random 1960s one - November 1965, 2 shillings it cost. Flicking through, firstly i'm struck by just how many adverts there are, there's 1.5 pages of advert per 0.5 page of content and the adverts are commonly absolute tat like antifreeze additives that surely do nothing useful. Anyway, by page 35 we've found our first nobody maintains anything anymore story: "Transport Tests", top right hand side - a column railing against "defective lorries on the road", "49% of trucks stopped were defective" - i knew no matter which magazine i pulled, there'd be something in there decrying a lack of maintenance these days (in 1965...). >> So they stopped optimizing for that segment Again, i don't think you're accurate here. There's nothing a mechanic loves more than to gripe about the engineers who foolishly designed a car to be harder to service. It's a time-tested complaint of the mechanic. Today with all the tight packaging of various systems i think there's often a point to be made about ease of repairability but even when engine bays were gaping empty holes in the 50s and 60s that you could literally stand in (in some cases) with plenty of access space while you worked, there were models of cars derided as "hard to work on" because of lack of optimisation for maintenance. Packaging is hard. If the decision is between optimising for sale (aesthetics, packaging etc) or for maintenance, the design engineer is going to lose that battle in the drawing room. I think market forces have changed how manufacturers view servicing over time though. If you're doing fleet sales, and your product requires an oil change every 8k miles and the other manufacturer is every 20k miles, then the company purchaser who cares not a jot about mechanical sympathy and a whole lot about a bonus for saving the firm money, applies a pressure to the market to reduce maintenance costs over the first 3-4 years that a vehicle is leased for. And so today i own a van with an absolutely absurd oil change interval of 25k miles.

close04 1y ago

> What happened in the early 2010s? I'd say Tesla built a futuristic computer on wheels, with huge screens, always-on internet connectivity, smarter remote features than most other cars, etc. The car itself was exotic enough by being an EV and that drew attention to these other features too. Everyone else started to emulate them for better or worse. For now these things are modular because it was the cheapest way to build them. If manufacturers get over the hurdle of cost and find a way to have everything more vertically integrated (think Apple) then we'll lose all access to tinker with the hardware which might be a couple of black-box chips, or the software. This is probably what Apple was trying to sell as a smart car to car manufacturers. They might have dropped those plans to focus in CarPlay and have the phone be that "smart car". Hopefully some brands go the other way and make a dumb car where the brain is entirely the phone but that's handing out a lot of their agency to the phone manufacturer.

numpad0 1y ago

2010s, in software, vertical integration, and digital feudalism? iPhone?

CraigJPerry 1y ago
Hmmm, but I think that was already happening in the early 2000s. It definitely accelerated in the late 2000s. I worked for a deutsche telekom subsidiary in 2004 and they had a brand new BMW e65 7 Series all liveried up in corporate branding, advertising internet connectivity on the move. At the time i thought that was the ultimate car but i never managed to borrow it... £10 per megabyte as i recall.

MrGilbert 1y ago

> 2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though I haven't done it yet, but maybe looking into the EU mandatory regulations would make sense. eCall, for instance (a feature that will call for help if you crashed by contacting an operator), was made mandatory in new cars in 2018. The initiative gained traction at around 2013.

layoric 1y ago

Software updates and data collection. Eg, my mums Toyota Corolla 2018 already has a disabled infotainment button because of dropped support. If it was a 2019 it would have been eligible for an update, but not for 2018. Lots of cars from the same period are collecting and sharing data to various different companies from weather to insurance. Personally I don’t want monitoring or software updates, and definitely don’t want any cloud dependencies.

calvinmorrison 1y ago
Lots of cars from the 90s and 2000s have obsolete tech that doesn't work like certain vintages of car phones
- burnt_toast 1y ago
  Car phones weren't common place and were typically only available in some higher end luxury cars. I wouldn't exactly call that lots of cars.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    A minority of cars yes, but so many cars - even luxury cars were made that it still amounts to a lot of cars.

themafia 1y ago

> What happened in the early 2010s? According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance and were more likely to trade in their vehicle for a new one. So they stopped optimizing for that segment of the audience and started making disposable cars. Truthfully, industry watched the government bail out the banks, require next to nothing in return, and demanded no prosecutions for illegal behavior. The writing was pretty much on the wall. Industry realized it no longer needed happy customers.

CraigJPerry 1y ago
>> According to the industry people stopped doing maintenance Nah the motoring industry has been saying that forever. Just to back that up, I inherited a ton of the "Car Mechanics" magazine here in the UK. Just for fun I've just pulled a random 1960s one - November 1965, 2 shillings it cost. Flicking through, firstly i'm struck by just how many adverts there are, there's 1.5 pages of advert per 0.5 page of content and the adverts are commonly absolute tat like antifreeze additives that surely do nothing useful. Anyway, by page 35 we've found our first nobody maintains anything anymore story: "Transport Tests", top right hand side - a column railing against "defective lorries on the road", "49% of trucks stopped were defective" - i knew no matter which magazine i pulled, there'd be something in there decrying a lack of maintenance these days (in 1965...). >> So they stopped optimizing for that segment Again, i don't think you're accurate here. There's nothing a mechanic loves more than to gripe about the engineers who foolishly designed a car to be harder to service. It's a time-tested complaint of the mechanic. Today with all the tight packaging of various systems i think there's often a point to be made about ease of repairability but even when engine bays were gaping empty holes in the 50s and 60s that you could literally stand in (in some cases) with plenty of access space while you worked, there were models of cars derided as "hard to work on" because of lack of optimisation for maintenance. Packaging is hard. If the decision is between optimising for sale (aesthetics, packaging etc) or for maintenance, the design engineer is going to lose that battle in the drawing room. I think market forces have changed how manufacturers view servicing over time though. If you're doing fleet sales, and your product requires an oil change every 8k miles and the other manufacturer is every 20k miles, then the company purchaser who cares not a jot about mechanical sympathy and a whole lot about a bonus for saving the firm money, applies a pressure to the market to reduce maintenance costs over the first 3-4 years that a vehicle is leased for. And so today i own a van with an absolutely absurd oil change interval of 25k miles.