Good post. And that's why if I ever by a car it'll be older and not require a proprietary computer sensor to maintain.
That and I have a hard time with the new "smart" driving technology. I was in my friend's Subaru last week and it beeped anytime he did anything remotely out of line...
My uncle was showing off his new car to me - it had all the fancy bells and whistles of "modern" cars, including a sensor for everything. The same day, one of the sensors told him a tire was low on air. He filled it up at a gas station and ended with a blowout on the highway (up until then the sensor still said it was "low"). The damage to the car was minimal, but it wiped out the "blind spot" sensor on that side of the car. Needless to say, these sensors are ridiculously expensive to replace.
I hate that cars are bloated with superfluous components that always break before the car itself does. That said, there are some gadgets that I would miss on a fully mechanical car. I'd be happy to find a manufacturer that could balance that correctly.
having a system that can detect the current state of all safety-related components of the car seems like an unreasonably high bar. humans are driving around right now with bald tires, loose lug nuts, bumpers held on by scotch tape and a dream, the list goes on.
I get that it's not just emergency breaking. My point though is that by 2022, all new cars are going to have both the sensors and the processing hardware needed to do this. So most new cars will probably have this sort of functionality, even if they're not required to by this specific industry agreement. (Lots of cars already have this, including ones that aren't even that expensive, e.g. pretty much any Subaru.)
Honestly, as someone who's been involved with designing some of the internal systems and seeing how effective they can be, the large majority of the time a car either has the potential to be able to detect or already knows where the problems are located. The facilities to detect that are simply not in place or exposed to end users/techs in enough detail.
Agreed. That's why I bought an old car and restored it to new state rather than to go with the more current crop. A couple of near misses on account of software bugs that tried to kill me were enough to convince me to opt out, and that's before I got into tracking the vehicle and sending other data.
>there's still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips.
I disagree with this statement - at the very least for safety. Modern safety systems are leagues ahead of anything from even 10 years ago - and microelectronic machines (MEMs) and all the various sensors and processors are key to making that possible. It's not just the obvious things like pedestrian and car collision detection and brake assist - it's also things like sensors that can better time the deployment of airbags.
Cars are only getting safer and safer. (Though there's obviously the problem with trucks and SUVs, but that's a side discussion)
Another aspect is fuel efficiency. In the name of fuel efficiency, many new systems had to be developed and older ones made more complex. We can't just have fixed valve timings anymore - we need varible valve timing. We can't just shoot out exhaust, we use EGR. And again, these systems need advanced sensors and processors more often then not. This complexity hurts the reliability of cars somewhat. But it's worth it to not only increase power, but also improve fuel efficiency.
Also, this isn't true at all:
>The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write.
I guess finite state automata just don't exist.
The rest of this article seems like a mess that almost doesn't deal with cars. There are some real, legitimate complaints with some modern cars. Some automakers have gone the route of touchscreens where physical controls would be far better for a variety of reasons. Subscriptions for features that don't cost the automaker anything after the fact is also awful. But the article rants on about (in my view) unrelated topics so much that it detracts from more concrete problems.
It definitely fails Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." As long as you assume "stupidity" to include stupid things about the mathematics of our universe like coordination problems, design by committee, and the tragedy of the commons...
There's a very slow, very week feedback loop that may be too weak at the moment to fight against this trend: the customers who are dealing with and worry about perpetual sensor failures and computer issues at 150,000 miles are not the same customers who are buying the car off the dealership lot. Meanwhile, the people with brand new vehicles are not worried about those problems, they're only slightly (and only long after it's too late) worried about the eventual resale value. I trust that my old Toyota and Subaru will still be dependable and repairable for many years, but I won't buy an old BMW or Mercedes because my family and coworkers have too many horror stories of expensive, exotic gadgets that have gone bad in mysterious ways.
But we're 40 years removed from the bad old days of the 80s and 90s when those imports were decimating the lethargic Big 3 in quality and cost, which is more like the time scale on which consumer attitudes like that began to be formed. 2018 laws regarding rearview cameras are really new in comparison to a cultural thing like that.
I disagree. I have been waiting 3 months for parts, in the mean time my sensors collision don’t work and I have constant annoying dash messages saying my sensors don’t work.
Exactly. If they don't want us to buy the old cars, make good new cars, meaning, without all of the unnecessary and poorly implemented tech. The burden isn't on me to change and what's more, adding all the bad stuff is extra work, so they should just stop.
I have a modern car (2019) and the auto braking, collision and lane drift alert is a nuisance. False positives are common and there is no way to disable most of it. Some of it can be turned off but as soon as the car is restarted it resets to the default. I've even had the car emergency brake and come to a complete stop in the middle of the road due to a phantom collision. As soon as I pay it off I am going to sell it and roll back to an earlier model without all this mandated, modern tech and keep the older car rolling till I die. We will become like Cuba keeping 50's cars running into the 70's or even the 80's and this time it won't be due to the commies but the fascists.
There are people driving 50 year old cars today back when those cars were utter trash brand new. Every time I read a new story about some horrible thing a couple of engineering students were able to do to a "connected" car with a couple of lines of code and the right knowhow, I appreciate my old 300 even more.
If every new car is connected, I'm not buying a new car. Simple as that.
What drives me nuts about those auto engines loaded with sensors is that all that info gets hidden behind the "check engine" light in cars, even in modern cars with big LCD displays.
No, I don't want to plug something into an OBD-2 and bluetooth to a phone/laptop. Put the FUCKING INFO ON THE SCREEN. Speaking of protectionism, don't want your customers knowing what is actually wrong with the car...
reply