> The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight
Decent catalytic converters require an array of sensors, ECU, and ability to fine control the engine inputs to work - without them most large cities would become smog ridden hells.
There's no reason technology has to be user-hostile. You can still have an ECU and screens and everything. When it breaks the screen can be used to tell you exactly which sensor input is out of range. There's no reason parts need to be serialized and learning a new part can only be done once.
You can build a modern vehicle that's still repairable.
Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
For example rear taillights are different in Europe vs the US.
Another is that higher trims of my car have a rear climate zone which has a different fan and actuators for air flow that the module needs to know exist.
> Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
So are different intervalls of oil change between Australia and Europe - and yet, even in the 90s, people were able to keep that in mind.
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out. If that mindset would have existed in the 60s, 70s, then there would not be a "true to OEM" aftermarket available for car parts. We need to get back to that.
We got taught to be helpless by the industry, so they can help us out.
industry is pretty damn good at figuring out what customers actually want, instead of just what customer say they want and then don't actually buy.
cars are the way they are because that's what the overwhelming majority of car buyers actually want. The average driver doesn't want their car spitting out error codes, they want a check engine light to tell them to take it to a mechanic, and any information beyond that is confusing.
Are you sure that's what customers want, or maybe it's what dealers want?
The check engine light tells you nothing. It tells your local mechanic nothing. Do you can't get the problem fixed easily or cheaply.
What it does, is force you to take the car to a dealer, who has the specialist, proprietary equipment needed to interpret the fault. And these gatekeepers will charge you a fat premium for that.
So no. I don't think this design choices are driven by a desire to serve the customer.
the check engine light tells you there's an OBD code available to be read. you can buy a reader for $20 on amazon, or your local hardware store, or i've even seen them at gas stations. you don't need "specialist proprietary equipment" that "gatekeepers charge a fat premium" for. this isn't magic.
most people take it to a mechanic instead, because that's what they'd rather do.
Not entirely correct. OBD only mandates emissions information to be made available in a standardized way.
There are plenty of proprietary codes that might set a malfunction light and not show up on an OBD reader, or not be interpreted by it.
(there are tools that reverse-engineer the proprietary protocols that can show those codes, but they aren't $20 - more like $200 and up)
I really don't see why you're defending hiding information. Even for someone who doesn't want to mess around and would just take it to a dealer, making the information available without the need for a code reader will not hurt in any way.
Even if I get the DTC codes out of the OBD - and then? Without the manufacturers service manual, I'm lost at interpreting the codes. For older cars, these manuals are somehow "obtainable" through "sources", but do not expect the manufacturer to help you out if, in fact, you are interested in fixing your own car.
If the industry was actually good at figuring out what the customer wanted, gm wouldn't be cancelling carplay.
The industry makes cars more expense because it makes them more money. Some consumers want big and flashy. Some want cheap and reliable with enough space for cargo and passengers. Only one of those is being served currently. The rest of the industry is drifting to the up market with even the base trim being too expensive for many consumers.
Looking at current sales trends isn't adequate to gauge consumer demand for products that don't exist because they can't be purchased and something else has to take it's place.
Sure, but the reasons programming requires proprietary software accessible only to the dealer via some kind of online access are depressing: laziness, greed, and crime.
Making software that's usable by independent shops and consumers costs money, eliminates business lock-in to dealers, and boosts the gray/black market for broken or stolen parts, so the only reason manufacturers do it at all is when they are required to by regulation.
It takes more effort to implement proprietary protocols and codes in addition to the globally mandated obd2 protocol. You can extend obd2 with additional codes that could be read by a simple device. It costs money to run servers that check your license to read those proprietary codes. It's not laziness.
The black market on stolen parts isn't affected by this. Catalytic converter are stolen and resold all the time and swapping one doesn't require anything more complex than a socket set and a new gasket (assuming the thief didn't use a cutting tool, but then you just weld). Cats also get sold for scrap, so not sure what the software lock is gonna do for that.
Hellcat engines get swapped all the time. ECUs get flashed by the black market regardless of the software locks.
But what we see this proprietary software get used for is blocking the ability to swap brake pads and block heated seats.
> Making software that's usable by independent shops and consumers costs money
sentence before “calling BS”?
> The black market on stolen parts isn't affected by this.
Cars have more parts than a catalyst, and the used parts market is absolutely, 100% affected by software adaptation locks. You can watch the price of used engine control modules, instrument clusters, and infotainment modules rise as soon as aftermarket tools come out which bypass protections, and the tools to do so are worth a significant sum of money.
> Hellcat engines get swapped all the time
Yes, all protections are eventually bypassed, especially weak Stellantis ones, but that doesn’t mean that the goal wasn’t anti-theft, just that the goals were badly achieved.
Anyway, I think we broadly agree that vehicle diagnostics should be more open, but discounting crime and “security” as objectives doesn’t work, because they’re the main arguments used against regulatory efforts to improve the situation.
EDIT: I read again and I suppose you are arguing that diagnostic tools don’t or shouldn’t cost manufacturers money to make; I simply can’t agree with this argument, any software has a support and maintenance cost which scales with the type and number of users.
Didn't miss that making software costs money. The point is making it protected costs more money and mainly hurts independent repair shops and consumers. Afaik, manufactures can set obd2 codes outside the mandatory codes, but still compatible with the protocol. If they elect to not do this in favor of creating their own protocol, I think we can agree that it costs more but does not have any benefit other than to the manufacturer and dealer network.
I do agree that diagnostics need to be open. I discount security because at the end of the day, an engine is a bunch of metal. Put a haltec on it and all that security means nothing. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have immobilizers, strong encryption in our key fobs, etc. Security should be to keep the car and the contents from being stolen in the first place. But a flat bed bypasses all security as does a chop shop. So given that low value of bcm to ecu and similar "security" once a vehicle has been stolen, I'd rather be able to swap a good engine into a good body and keep a car on the road rather than in the junk yard.
Sorry for the hot take of bs. I own both of my cars outright and the industry trying to keep me from fixing what I own has me a bit upset. The security argument in the parent post sounds a lot like the "don't give our keys to China" propaganda.
> afaik, manufactures can set obd2 codes outside the mandatory codes, but still compatible with the protocol.
No, and I think this misunderstanding drives a misunderstanding of the economic factors. There is no universal automotive diagnostic protocol that manufacturers simply are choosing not to use. There is UDS, but it isn't universal in a meaningfully useful way.
This is actually pretty nuanced: road cars _have_ to support a minimum subset of DoCAN / ISO 15765-4 in most regions (for example, since 2006 in the US). This defines very specific emissions-related parameters and codes which regulators read to perform compliance inspections. It is extremely limited and does not provide for meaningful programming, adaptation, or "extended" diagnosis in any way. Additionally, ISO 14229 is only required for emissions critical control modules, so everything else (ADAS, infotainment, body control, sensors, etc etc) can live in whatever proprietary place it wants.
Next, there is UDS (ISO 14229) which can run alongside over the same transport layer (ISO-TP / ISO15765-2), but it's a separate application protocol and there's no reason manufacturers need to support it; they already paid some of the cost by needing ISO-TP for OBD, but it's not the same application layer. This defines common actions like "read identifier" or "start procedure," but does not define in any way what these identifiers or procedures _are_.
And finally, due to regulation in some regions, control modules need to support specific diagnostic tasks and especially module reflashing using a hardware dongle whose drivers have a specific set of DLL exports called J1939 (designed to decouple manufacturer dongle hardware from diagnostics, but not effective), which effectively means those modules must be accessible over CAN for these specific actions.
Even if manufacturers choose to use UDS (to save themselves money on developing their own software, usually, to your point), everything on top of UDS is completely proprietary; besides a few common local identifiers like VIN and some part numbers, each diagnostic parameter set is specific to each individual control module. That is to say, something like "boost pressure" will not be the same local identifier or byte-to-value translation formula across even ECUs in a single product family. And, there is no standard manufacturers could choose to employ at this granularity even if they would like to, and it would be very difficult to make one; it would need to be a discovery-oriented protocol rather than a prescriptive one, since each control module will necessarily have different internal variables depending on its chosen control strategy.
In Europe, things are closer to standardized by accident. European vendors have broadly adopted AUTOSAR (a massively overcomplicated architecture specification for vehicle control modules). A side effect of building on this framework is that most control modules produce ASAP2 / D-ODX definition files for diagnostics. So for European cars, there could be a chance of making a standardized open diagnostic tool if manufacturers were required to provide the D-ODX files for their control modules... which, they're not; most of their dealer tools work off of some recompiled and obfuscated form of D-ODX like the MCD format used in ODIS.
Anyway, even in this ideal world, this doesn't work worldwide; AUTOSAR has mixed adoption in the US and China and virtually no adoption in Japan or Korean manufacturers. Outside of Europe, manufacturers almost always have manufacturer diagnosis protocols which range from UDS-esque to completely made up.
> If they elect to not do this in favor of creating their own protocol, I think we can agree that it costs more but does not have any benefit other than to the manufacturer and dealer network.
Again: most of these manufacturer protocols were made before _any_ standard existed whatsoever, and even today there _is no_ standard protocol beyond 15765-4/WW-OBD which would allow a "generic" / "open" diagnostic tool to exist. So, there is a definite benefit to manufacturers in maintaining "internal" protocols when they already existed which goes far deeper than trying to screw the little guy: they don't have to do anything! Which goes back to laziness.
Some examples:
* Modern Fords generally use UDS, but they have two CAN busses exposed on the diagnostic connector, one that they call HS-CAN which is also the standard OBD bus, and a second called MS-CAN which is proprietary and used for other control modules. This wasn't done to screw over independent shops but rather because they already had a 125kbit CANbus for body control modules and didn't want to spend the effort to integrate everything through a gateway.
* GM have a system called GMLAN, which is a single wire variant of CAN that's actually standardized as J2411, but they have their own diagnostic protocols on top of it. And again, it's not that they set out to screw over shops, it's that they built the system they wanted based on the design criteria they were given. Making a homogenous "open" system would again cost money here.
This is a hot take from me too - I am really annoyed by the recent trend where enshittification drives a weird second-order enshittification: because some corporations act in bad faith some of the time, there is an assumption that all decisions are made with the sole goal of screwing people over. In addition to being caustic from a cynicism standpoint, this trend has eroded curiosity. Rather than doing research and development, people would rather rage against a mysterious "opponent." To be clear, I actually think your comment was a very weak example of this, it's certainly no Apple thread - but since this is a place where I have a lot of knowledge, I figured I'd chime in :)
So the screen can ask for the programming data to be entered or loaded from a USB stick given to you when you buy the vehicle. There’s no reason this can only be done with a proprietary tool you often can’t get legally at all and have to resort to piracy or reverse-engineered aftermarket options. There’s also no reason this can only be done once and then the module is junk.
Hardware differences can be autodetected in some cases.
That’s just a bunch of “if”s. And they are already programmed. But instead of coming directly built in on the vehicle you need to purchase a very expensive tool that hooks on the port and then tells you what the vehicle should tell you in the first place.
The solution to city air pollution is a different vehicle with a different drive train: an EV. The C15 is a workhorse for farmers and craftsmen not for shopping trips and driving the family to visit granny on the other side of town.
What do you mean, at a practical level, when you set out your "priority list" above? Are you referring to the use of congestion charges to discourage private motor vehicle use?
Not OP, but I don't think congestion charges are the most important part here. It's more about what type of infrastructure to prioritize resources and work for. Basically, the idea is that the town or city should not spend money on building parking, for example, and instead spend it on bike lanes, or two more busses, or some extension to the metro line.
It’s entirely dependent on the situation. Some areas, additional charges work best. In others, it’s possible/necessary to redesign road and street layouts to prioritise higher-density modes of transport and physically discourage low-density modes like cars. This might be priority lights for public transport, lowering speed limits and narrowing streets. In some contexts, it’s necessary to completely disallow cars with things like bus lanes, bike/pedestrian-only areas. Separated tram/metro lines, too.
Most of this infrastructure, in practice, also aids emergency vehicle use as they can usually fit down bike lanes and are obviously able to fit in bus lanes.
EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and will for the next 10-20 years unless one is OK with a tiny battery. And heavy weight means more pollution from wheels that produce particles that ends up in lungs. Note brakes also pollutes with asbestos but EVs typically have regenerative braking so I think brakes pollutes roughly the same in a heavier EV as in ICE car.
I compared the weights of EVs versus ICE, and they were surprisingly close. Most of time, the differences were in the 15% range, and then you find exceptions like the Hummer, which is 30% heavier. I'm sure it comes as no surprise That the heavier the vehicle, the bigger the difference in ICE versus EV weight.
While I think lighter weight vehicles of all types would be a big win, I fear that ship has sailed. I think we have an opportunity to reset vehicle size both from a desire for cheaper and simpler vehicles. Look at cost and weight of the BYD EVs and the new pickup trucks from Slate and Telos.
Overall, I find the slightly increased weight for an EV to be an acceptable trade-off. Brakes last longer, tires, depending on make, are about 10% shorter life at most and overall maintenance is much less. Since I keep my cars until the body goes toes up, I have a much lower carbon footprint. than the 3yr lease route
If you give the difference in weight as a percentage, it is sort of surprising that the percentage is higher for heavier vehicles, right? Or at least I don’t get it. I’d expect the EV to be a constant factor heavier, a total weight of combustion_vehicle*1.1 or something.
I wonder if it's sorta like the rocket equation. A heavier vehicle requires larger batteries to move the extra weight with a comparable range as a smaller vehicle, but the batteries are heavy too, so you need even more battery to move the heavier batteries.
It's exactly that. Battery = heavy, heavy vehicle = short range. I wonder if ICE vehicle weight is calculated with a full fuel tank? Gas / Diesel is also pretty heavy and large vehicles have large empty spaces to be filled with fuel.
I had a 2010s Civic and moved to a Model 3. The curb weight difference was only ~3-400 lbs (about 10%), but the larger battery capacity, large SUV offerings are significantly heavier than ICE options (the F150 Lightning is about 2,000 pounds heavier than an ICE F150, for example, 5,000 -> 7,000 lbs.).
The 8th Gen Civic in heaviest config was about 2900lb. The lightest model 3 is about 3500lb. 600lb best case. The lighter config Civic was 2500lb (not usdm iirc) vs the heaviest model 3 being 4000lb.
The tire pollution is true, but the brakes hardly get used on an EV. They are almost for emergency use only. Mine has a special mode to disable regeneration for a while so you can use the brake pads to clean the rotors.
The difference in tyre wear is so marginal it's probably unmeasurable - less than the difference between running at the correct pressure and forgetting to check your tyre pressure.
ICE vehicles also have exhaust pipes which pollute some too...
I love the idea of these tiny EVs. Apparently the EU's making some legislation for them so that they can go without much of the expensive 'safety' equipment such as driver tracking.
Parking cars in cities not designed for them is a nightmare, but getting around with a car is so much faster than public transport, even if your city's is fairly decent.
Hybrids are even better, super tiny batteries with an ICE on standby.
If you scale size as well (like a motorcycle but e.g. as a tricycle for safety), you can realize some major efficiency improvements (doubling or tripling energy efficiency).
Which is why, bicycles should be the focus of transportation improvement.
tangential: people also underestimate the convenience of public transport being a one-way trip, meaning you can go from A>B>C>D>A and never have to go back to a previous spot to pick up a part of your luggage that you left behind.
Personally, when not being a tourist, almost all my trips are home to some place and back again.
Public transport is great, but if you're going to a less good part of the city, or even just a place that's unfamiliar, and less frequented, it might be a bit more difficult to get around.
And public transport travel distances can be patchy based on where the stops are, especially if you're going to the outskirts of your city.
Also when having to be present in the office, that extra 15-25 mins (x2) it takes to get to and from the office adds up quickly.
Engine control alone can be self-contained. The Ford EEC IV of the 1980s had its program permanently etched into the Intel 8061 CPU, and was designed to last 30 years. It did. I finally sold off my 40 year old Ford Bronco, which was still running on the original engine and CPU.
This is my exact same sentiment. I’m cautiously excited about the upcoming Slate Pickup[1] - I can see it being my go-to if I leave NYC, but it still won’t hit like the XJ Cherokee I drove before I gave up cars for the city.
Looks interesting, I wonder to what extent they really want to make cars DIY-able again (as they state). On the one hand, they mention servicing is "easy" — just turn to their partner repair shop chain! On the other hand, there's Slate University and mention of repairability. I haven't followed development of this at all, so I'm genuinely curious. Hope it's not just "you can swap in and out our proprietary modules".
I really want to like the slate but their speakers and tablet holder concept actually are awful. Just a super basic off the shelf din rail hole and aux in and slap the most basic touch screen with physical control stereo you can find in there that does air play and car play works for me.
Who cares. Literally every discussion of vehicles someone has to bring up infotainment systems. You know that getting your dopamine drip is not what a vehicle is for, right?
If I have to drive 2 hours or more every day or 12+ hours for work a few times a month (not in a long time anymore for either), it better be fucking enjoyable.
I like the idea of a slate but the truck bed just makes no sense at that size. I don’t understand why it’s not defaulted to another row of seats or hatchback, with the option to convert to truck. 5 ft bed without extension is kind of pointless as a bed, but huge as a trunk.
That's effectively what it is, but reverse. You buy it as a truck, and can buy seats & cap and turn it into an SUV. I see it as the closest thing you can get to a kei truck in the US without importing. Relatively cheap, good payload capacity, (better than a lot of trucks out there) effectively unable to tow, 5-foot bed, which is the same or larger than most mid-size trucks, and a tiny form factor.
It's certainly a niche vehicle, but it looks exciting if it can fill you niche.
I worry about the Slate truck being DOA with expiration of incentives for EVs. Someone please tell me I'm wrong, because if they do deliver as promised, I'll be excited to buy one.
For me, I'm hoping it fills the mid-90s Isuzu Pup sized hole in my heart.
This is why late 90s cars are objectively the greatest ever built. You had ECUs, cats, ABS, disc brakes, airbags, power steering, and conventional automatic transmissions. Everything that makes a modern car safe and reliable, but none of the high tech digital BS that has infused things nowadays.
ESC (electronic stability control) didn't become common until about 2010 to 2015. It makes a really big difference for safety -- EU estimates are that it's saved more than 15,000 lives. Let's backport that one too. :)
My 2004 RX-8 had decently solid ESC, but it was a “high-end” vehicle at the time. It’s definitely something we want to keep in our idealized vehicle (but let’s also keep the “disable ESC so I can have fun” button)
I was going to make this exact comment. The RX-8 had excellent stability control. Saved my ass at least once going too fast around a 90 degree corner. It also behaved really well on icy roads. It was pretty incredible for a rear wheel drive sports car, especially impressive at the time compared to every other car on the road back then.
I bought my first real wheel drive car in 2014. Still have it. It's not a race car. About 170hp. It struggles at the smallest curves. Good thing it has traction control and esp. Except all the front wheel cars I had before, one even slightly more powerful and smaller, never needed any of that. Never ever buying a rwd again. (Enthusiast forums of the brand tell me I don't know how to drive RWD. Skill issue. :D)
Rwd is definitely sketchier in certain circumstances, especially going uphill in low traction. Also pretty bad in the snow generally. but I’ve only had issues going around corners when it was very wet and I was driving faster that the speed limit. If you are running into traction issues driving normally (ie not flooring it) I would recommend having your tires and alignment checked, even with RWD that should not be happening in my experience.
In reality many 90s cars are phenomenal rust buckets due to issues in the adoption of water-based paints, cars which actually still have tangible amounts of steel in their panels are basically golden samples.
What do the sensors do? There's not much you can change in the catalytic converter so I assume it's just reading temperature? So I assume it's changing the fuel/air combustion ratio according to the cat's temperature?
Not a motorhead but IIRC a combustion with too little oxygen produces soot (pollution) and one with too much oxygen produces NOx pollution, with a sweet spot in the middle. The exhaust oxygen sensor allows the ECU to adjust the air/fuel mix to hit the minimum pollution spot, instead of estimating it.
There might also be a catalyst temperature sensor or something.
It's not a "whole bunch" of sensors, it's a few sensors and it's not some inscrutable magic, it's somethijg someone could replicate in open-source if they had equipment and time. We really need to get away from the mindset that proprietary stuff contains inscrutable magic. It's often worse quality than the open thing. However, it does have the right connections to be allowed to be put in a car that drives on the road.
These are photos of the Indiaman service, operated by Garrow-Fisher starting in 1957. The Wikipedia article conflates details of this service with another one, the Albert, operated by Albert Travel, which started in 1968. I noticed the discrepancy because the photos are of a single-decker bus, not a double-decker.
> "Resident experience is hurting as a result," said Jeff Holzmann, COO of RREAF Holdings, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm with over $5 billion in assets. "Instead of you calling your landlord to discuss a problem, you're calling a call center that gives you the runaround."
I'm not sure I understand the difference between "Wall Street" buying up all the property and real estate investment firms like RREAF doing the same, or come to that the guy down the street buying a few properties to rent out.
A small company or single investor can buy up a large percentage of local available property and be just as bad a landlord.
They’ve just realised that AI won’t be in the PC, but on a server. Where Dell are heavily selling into - “AI datacenter” counted for about 40% of there infrastructure revenue
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