New cars are great...

watson387@sopuli.xyz to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 1818 points –
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I have zero desire to own an Internet-connected car wherein I can't "own" it without abiding by the rules set forth by the auto manufacturer. BMW recently killed their subscription seat heaters but who knows what Egon Smells is cooking up at Tesla.

In my defense, my 13 year old car died earlier this year and I needed a new car fast. I was completely unaware these systems had gotten as bad as they have until after I bought it.

I figured we're not going to have much choice in the future. We'll be driving cars under End User License Agreements that already send tons and tons of data about us back to the manufacturers.

As much as I love technology, I hate the way it is being used. Car companies don’t make enough money selling cars so they need to collect and sell driver data? It’s dystopian.

They make plenty of money, they just want more money

Capitalism requires obtaining more capital than ever every quarter or you’ve failed as a company. They’re getting to the point they have to violate the customers privacy in order to chaise ever growing profits

Capitalism only works in a growing company in a growing market. Once you’re reached a plateau it maxes out your client base you can’t go any higher other than artificially.

It seems to still be working for the mega corps now stealing and selling our private info, no one is stopping them and they’re taking in extra millions from it. Their original business may plateau at a certain point but then they branch out to more business models/types by using the money bucket from the original successful business

What’s funny is that that only really applies to publicly owned companies where anyone can own shares of the company.

But thats rhe name of the game, enough is never enough.

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Don't you love it when it makes you read a disclaimer and click "accept" literally every time you get into the car if you want to use your infotainment center? Who's the asshole who came up with that brilliant idea? Whoever he is, fuck him!

I suspect that's a hedge against getting sued for one reason or another. The disclaimer always seems to be designed to absolve the manufacturer if you, e.g., follow the GPS until you drive into a lake.

But! The one on my boss' Tacoma he just bought dismisses itself after the vehicle has been in motion about 5 seconds, though. I think that rather defeats the purpose. (What it dismisses to in this case is a nag screen begging you to subscribe to the navigation "service," which he has not done. That sort of thing really makes me want to see about where to buy a cruise missile.)

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My Subaru and every other car I’ve been in the disclaimer goes away if you don’t click it. I have clicked accept in two years.

Our Honda puts up a notice that essentially says "I understand that I need to keep my eyes on the road". Yeah, no shit, Honda. But what's dumb is that it won't go away until you tap accept, so it ends up causing you to have to take your eyes off the road and pay attention to this stupid disclaimer screen if you forget to close it before you start driving.

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Hey friend, you are not the one who needs a defense, IMO-- You're just the end user caught up in the nonsense. Enjoy your new car as best you can, and just make decisions that make the most sense for you.

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Egon Smells

I dislike the guy as much as everyone else but i really wish this stupidist name bullshit would die.

Shit like that annoys me as much as "tRump".

I despise him, hope to never see him near DC again, and will be happy to see him found guilty. But when you say things like that it just makes you look stupid.

"tRump" is just lazy.

It's not lazy... It's extra effort to intentionally show one's disrespect for these despicable motherfuckers.

I respect your opinion and can see where you are coming from.

However, fuck him.

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who knows what Egon Smells is cooking up

Subscription for brakes is on the table

I once had a car salesman try to talk me out of ABS because the one on the lot didn’t have it. He literally told me “ABS? You only need that in an emergency!”

I replied with “I only need headlights at night and seatbelts in an accident but I want those, too.”

I can totally see them charging extra monthly charges or even a charge every time you activate the ABS.

Clippy says, "It appears as if you are trying to stop! Do you want help?"

Why would anyone buy a Tesla? Fuck that

I have a Tesla. It's great. I've received dozens of new features OTA. There are no subscriptions (except a very reasonable $10 for additional cellular connectivity, that I do not pay for). It's the best car I've ever owned.

Also Fuck Elon 👍

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I can't imagine it's a Tesla or it wouldn't say anything about keeping the engine running.

Either way, fuck all this bullshit. Every day I grow less and less likely to part with my old beast BUT the near doubled and still rising price of fuel will probably force my hand eventually.

I just went on a touring holiday and fuel was easily the largest component of my budget.

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Unfortunately most modern cars are built this way.

After extensive 6-months search of new car, I concluded that you have to compromise.

I went with Nissan pathfinder and the software isn’t mature yet. Engine runs rough with misfires when idle. The car assembled with misaligned parts.

Nissan knows and wouldn’t fix the issue.

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While I like driving. I hate all the shit modern car manufacturers put in modern cars. Sure they're more efficient on fuel than older ones. But we should be able to have that without needing the car to be tracked and data collected, we have in the past.

I feel like all these driver aids are also making people worse at driving. They need to do less, so they pay attention less.

On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It's somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.

Sure some cars have google assistant, Siri or Alexa. But I actually get so frustrated when trying to tell my phone to navigate somewhere or just simply change the song. And that's just the phone! The amount of times I have to pull over because it glitches out, or just fails to interpret some or all of what I've just said (sure it's better than voice assistants used to be, but it still breaks regularly) is still too high. The amount of times I regularly tell it to do something, only to find it was still processing the activation voice command, and therefore was initialising the VA screen, and not listening to a word I said after the initial activation is infuriating.

I love technology, but the technology has no place in cars if it detracts or distracts from the act and safety of actually driving the car.

/Rant.

On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It’s somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.

That's, a damn good point.

Android Auto has a good interface for integrating its functions into a car touchscreen, but it's not controlling anything "important".

I agree that all the traditional car controls should be actual knobs and buttons. I rented a car once and they gave me a Tesla, and I couldn't stand how all the controls were behind its touchscreen. I never felt the need to buy a Tesla, but that one experience turned me off from them entirely.

The more I learn about Elon and how Teslas actually work, the more I feel justified in never falling for his hype train.

A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away

That’s the reason why I don’t like listening to music on smart phones. Want to skip a track? Fish the phone out of your pocket, turn the screen back on, find the skip button, tap it, wait a second until the garbage app acknowledges that you’ve pressed it, turn off screen, put it back.

While on my 2000’s phone it’s just pressing one of the physical buttons.

Want to skip a track? Fish the phone out of your pocket, turn the screen back on, find the skip button, tap it, wait a second until the garbage app acknowledges that you’ve pressed it, turn off screen, put it back.

I had a HTC Touch Pro smartphone 15 years ago, and it had an optional headphone cable with buttons on it. You could use the buttons for pause/play, next track, and previous track, without having to get the phone out of your pocket.

I never really saw something like that again for wired headphones. I did sometimes see headphones with buttons on the headphones themselves, but often they just have play/pause.

Bluetooth earbuds today have this feature. Havent met any headphones that do this but it might have also been a gesture

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Sometimes the updates aren't even worth it.

Toyota said my prius needed an update so I installed the app for it. All the update did was remove fucking features that were usable in the car. Used to have the option to use Pandora from the console but it got removed randomly by an update.

Then they installed an Alexa search page that glitches my console if I every select it.

Basically I'm saying FUCK TOYOTA

For bonus anger.

Amazon pays Toyota about $1 per vehicle that Alexa is installed on.

So you made Toyota an extra dollar for your pain.

My 2015 Subaru Impreza has a shitty entertainment system. At least it still connects via BT, but they removed the screen mirroring really early on and the app had ~1 star on Google Play for a long time (probably still does). Thankfully it's not integrated with the features of the car in any meaningful way. I could swap it for any other head unit. No sure how that will work with modern cars where the AC, lane departure, and everything else goes to the stereo.

The real issue, as you point out, is there is nothing to force them to continue supporting it or maintain its features once us poor suckers have bought it.

If it's anything like my MIL's 17' Forester, you flat can't replace the headunit without disabling a lot of car features. I believe the land departure/EyeSight still works, though.

Thinking for a second it wasn't a typo, a land departure feature would be excellent, either flying or amphibious mode.

I'm trying to manifest flying cars into being, apparently.

Sounds like getting the 2016 model of Prius was a good call on my part. Of course, it was 2019 when I did it and that model wasn't substantially different, but that sounds awful.

Yeah 2017 model here :/

Entune is the worst Toyota dashboard ever. It'll randomly crash and reload the dashboard while driving sometimes. (once or twice every 3 months)

I haven't had that problem, but it does do this weird thing where it sometimes messes up pairing with the bluetooth on my phone and plays everything super fast.

Granted not a software update but my dad's Cadillac got recalled once and all they did was make the ceiling buttons harder to read that was the one time he ever obayed a recall

ceiling buttons harder to read

How?! And also, why?! I don't get it. What was the point of doing this?

How they made the buttons so recessed that you need to move your head directly under them to see what button is what. Why it's a Cadillac ATS this car is the physical incarnation of mildly infuriating and I have no idea why my dad loves it so much when both me and my mom find everything about that car mildly infuriating I guess they just found another way to make the car mildly infuriating

I really REALLY hope someone at some point starts a gasoline to electric car conversion company at some point.

I love my car because it has just the right amount of technology: Bluetooth connectivity for calls and music. That's it. That's all I need.

Yup. Unfortunately, since most people seem to prefer the dystopian futuretech, all auto manufacturers are going to employ it. Just like with cell phones. The last phone I know of with 16:9 aspect ratio and no blighted hole punch or notch was in 2018. There's a market full of us luddites who prefer the old ways, but we're invisible to manufacturers because it's more profitable to make something that more people want to buy, and we're forced to buy that garbage as well anyway.

You forgot about the programmed obsolescence.

Yeah, it goes further than just designing the hardware to only last a few years, all of these electronics ensure that the car is fucked as soon as the necessary online services go down. Meanwhile a well-maintained '93 Geo Metro, driven in the south where they don't salt the roads every year, can last decades.

I've had my 2010 Mazda 3 for 13 years now and I'm taking every precaution to keep it as long as I can.

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There are some positives and negatives to the desire for old form factors. Secondhand phones from 2018 cost much less than new ones but lack some of the new features like… I can’t think of any.

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There are likely a lot of complexities here.

Battery tech will need to improve greatly and be minimalized. EV batteries are currently massive, heavy, and generally engineered as long, wide, flat modules to be installed beneath the floor so they keep the center of gravity low and the vehicle balanced. That's not really possible in an ICE vehicle with all the frame molding around existing exhaust and drivetrain components, and you most likely can't just have some sort of modular battery and motor unit that you just drop into the engine bay, as that would put a ton (literally) of additional weight on one end and mess with the balance.

The draintrain components may need to be replaced or the motor outputs modulated to prevent the torque from ripping it apart.

Power steering and brakes will need to converted to electric assist. AC and heat would need to converted to electric.

Older cars (early 00's and older) with cable throttles will need to be retrofitted with drive-by-wire, or use some sort of adapter module that connects the cable and converts it to digital inputs. Same with brakes.

All of the electronics (lights, wipers, windows, locks, radio, etc.) will need to be rewired since there's no longer an alternator.

Probably will need upgraded suspension and brakes to handle the extra weight.

There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking about or not even aware of. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to happen outside of rich enthusiast circles, which is terribly sad, because I completely agree with you. Basically everything made after around 2010 is total dogshit.

Aaawwww Man. I hate to admit it but you're absolutely right. It's so much work it might not even be worth it.

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the only tech i need in my car is an aux port. i will forever buy used cars from before 2010 but after around 2004ish?

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Honestly, I figured that they collected data. But I didn't think the extent of it would be stuff like my sex life and genetic data. How the hell do those work?

They track you and then different kind of tools are trying to profile you based on your data. Similarly how ads work on the internet. Saying your car collect data of your sex life more like means they collect absolutely everything about you and then they run it through different software to profile you then sell all this data for extra profit. If you daily drive to a school they will assume you have a family and kids. If you go to a random apartment complex once a week after your kids went sleep they will assume you have a mistress. Its all based on location data and the stuff you enetered during registration.

They can also track who your devices are near. If your phone sits next to someone else's in an office building for nearly 8 hours a day and they know that persons job they can infer yours, especially since departments tend to sit together. Ad companies often assume recurring groups of people share overlapping interests (hence why their together multiple times) and will push out ads based on what other people around you are interested in to see if you are too.

Interesting. Makes a lot of sense, though it sucks that it's all based on assumptions because it sounds like it can easily be mistaken for a lot of things.

That's how most of them work. I got baby toys for a friend's baby and the Internet started trying to sell me all kinds of baby things. You listen to a lot of podcasts about craft beer? They assume you're a 40 year old white dude who needs beard oil.

I'm betting the sex tracking is more about the pressure sensors in the seats for the seatbelt warning system.

I’m guessing if you talk about that stuff in your car, it send that data home.

Oh that makes more sense.

My mind went to a completely different approach, collecting your data when you fuck someone in the car. Length of sex, moaning volume and pumps per minutes is what I was thinking of.

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I LOVE HAVING CAR DEPENDENCY. I LOVE PAYING FOR LESS EFFICIENT TRANSPORT AND ALL OF MY OWN MAINTENANCE AND FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF HAVING MY DATA SOLD. I SPEND EVERY MOMENT NOT DRIVING WISHING I COULD BE BEHIND THE WHEEL AND DOING NOTHING ELSE BUT FOCUSING ON DRIVING WHILE ON MY WAY TO [CONSUME] AND MAKE DATA FOR [BRAND]. PLEASE, NO PUBLIC TRANSIT, I LIKE MY FREEDOM THANKS.

Personally, as a non-car owning person, I love how I have to stick to the narrow patch of walkway next to roads where I get to inhale exhaust fumes whether I like it or not, have to stop and yield to oncoming traffic when looking to cross the road, and leave my life and personal safety in the hands of people I don't know and pray they pay attention and don't hit me.

I hate it as a driver. I would love to walk or bike more, but I'm far enough from anywhere I want to go that it doesn't make any practical sense to. I strongly dislike driving everywhere, and I wish our pedestrian and bike infrastructure (and public transit) didn't suck so bad. I wouldn't mind using the bicycle gutter, if I had one, but I'd be very nervous to let my kids use it because I don't trust the magic paint strip.

Suburbs really suck in this regard. I get a choice between a 15 minute bus that comes every 2-3 hours to get to my local train station or walk 1:30 minutes along the same road with zero footpath for the majority of the journey on a 70kmh road.

I drive a hybrid in rural areas, and I try to always flip the car into electric only mode when I see a cyclist coming up so they don't have to inhale my tailpipe. I'm sure it isn't much in the grand scheme, but I hope they at least breathe a little better.

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"Please do not turn off the engine during installation"

Tell that to my empty gas tank.

That’s the most ridiculous part to me. Why isn’t this able to continue off the car battery? It should be do not disconnect car battery if anything. I hope there’s some sort of fail safe to prevent it from bricking that doesn’t involve a factory reset or dealer visit.

It's because they don't want the car battery running flat during installation. Kind of like how your phone requires a minimum battery charge to update

Yeah but shouldn’t the power usage for the infotainment system be similar to a cell phone at this point with similar hardware where it really shouldn’t be possible to run a car battery dead during an update?

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I’m extremely curious what would happen if I just shut it down and left it as usual while it is updating but I’m not ready to test it out yet. Lol

If the programmers have any competence, the update will just fail and you'll have to restart the process.

They would need something like an A/B partition once it starts writing otherwise it's gonna be soft bricked. Car manufacturer programming are usually terrible so I doubt they have any solutions implemented lol

So that sort of happened to me on the previous gen of this infotainment unit.

I used the app to turn on the car and it keeps the car on for a short time, I started the update but it took way longer than I expected and the car shut off halfway through.

It seems to me that the unit is kept in some low power standby mode, when I turned the car back on, it just continued from where it stopped.

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I'm kind of surprised that car technology is so awful. How the fuck am I paying $35k for a car and they're still like "lets run the UI off a potato via the least responsive touch screen possible"? At some point I'd rather they just gave up on providing a UX themselves and just ran everything through Android Auto.

I don't mind having a UI for things like navigation or android auto. What gets me is why do things like climate control need to be buried in a UI? If my windscreen starts to steam up mid-jourmey, the last thing I need is to take my attention off the road to change the climate settings in the UI where dials and buttons will do the job much faster without needing to take my attention off the road.

Yes! I hate having everything in the UI. I'd much prefer a physical control set for A/C and even basic volume control at least.

You can't sense a flat touch screen, but we are really good at sensing knobs and switches. It's much safer for the driver to feel for a control rather than look at it.

My 09 VW CC has knobs for bass, treble, and mid, in addition to volume. Seat heaters, AC, everything is tactile and I can operate anything without looking.

I know it's manufacturers wanting to save money, but it's so annoying that we're going backwards. Touchscreen is a form of input. Just because it's higher tech doesn't mean it should replace tactile inputs in all applications ffs.

If my windscreen starts to steam up mid-jourmey, the last thing I need is to take my attention off the road to change the climate settings in the UI where dials and buttons will do the job much faster without needing to take my attention off the road.

This is why ill never get rid of my 2009 Tacoma. Three knob AC controls are the pinnacle of UI engineering. One knob for fan speed, one for temp and the third for vent/airflow selection. The backlight on one of my knobs has burned out at this point, but i dont need it....Can adjust the AC without taking my eyes off the road.

When it was ubiquitous, this meant i could do this in any car. Borrowed my inlaws FORD F-150 once, had to pull over to figure out how to turn off the goddam heat. It had BOTH a touchscreen and series of dash buttons but there were so many it was hard to figure out what did each thing while driving. I also had to update their dang infotainment, it wouldnt work on some random USB device, i had to go get a USB-A 3.0 device to get it to work at all and even then it was idling in my driveway for an hour and a half. Even tried just doing it via WiFi...nope

Yeah, my 2017 KIA has a touch screen for controlling navigation, radio, android auto etc. but climate control is controlled with buttons and dials like you described. It's modern enough to the point it feels safer than an older vehicle might, but I don't think I want a vehicle more modern than this.

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I'm waiting for the day we have linux cars

It's not Linux, but there's an open source project available where you can build your own engine ECU with an Arduino https://hackaday.io/project/4413-speeduino

I get it, but I don't feel comfortable putting my car in the hands of an Arduino.

Nothing against the open source software at all. It's the fact that the Arduino is a consumer experimentation board, not an automotive rated component. I'm concerned for the reliability of the Arduino under the operating conditions of an automobile.

Pretty much every car is running Linux at this point.

That doesn't mean it's open and non shitty.

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They gotta get better collection systems of that sweet sweet sex you're having in your car

https://youtu.be/OYcmF9IAJbU?si=gS1v5LQQskrbpIdj

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://youtu.be/OYcmF9IAJbU?si=gS1v5LQQskrbpIdj

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Fuck yeah good bot

These videos never seem to play for me on mobile. It launches in Firefox and then just spins endlessly.

I love piped as a concept but it rarely ever works for me too

I absolutely cannot stand Subaru's infotainment system. It's actually the primary reason I'll never get another one.

I'm still driving a 2016 Mazda, so sorry if this is a dumb question, but with these new cars are the infotainment systems integral with the car's functioning?

I've always thought of the head units as replaceable but seems like they are more integrated nowadays. Especially with EVs

Pretty much yeah since rearview cameras are a legal requirement now

Most vehicles will have these kind of screens

I'd be curious about what kinds of modifications people have been able to do with these. I imagine most people would want to avoid bricking their $50k car by pulling apart their dashboard and fucking with the internals, but someone somewhere has had to have been unhappy enough with the hardware/software on these things to make an attempt at switching it out, even if in part.

Owning something that expensive and not being able to modify it to the way I like (and cutting out the manufacturer from data harvesting/control over the system) is a personal kind of hell.

Ugh I hate rearview cameras. They're nice for people who can't turn due to limited mobility but I prefer to be facing the direction I'm going and do the "turn and put hand on the other head rest" move. It would be fine, but some car manufacturers have decided rear sightlines don't matter at all now "because you have the camera" so they take that option from me and make reversing more dangerous.

I've got a 2013 Mazda 3 and it was very easy to replace the radio, but my understanding is that way more stuff goes through it in modern cars, especially if they have touchscreen controls for some things.

Looking for a new car and have been looking at Subaru. So I'm genuinely interested in what specific thing bother you about the infotainment system.

Got a 2023 Outback in February. The processing power is nowhere near what it needs to run smoothly. Once the car is started it is best to just not touch any buttons for the first several seconds to let it catch up. It is like dropping back two phone generators and watching it struggle to keep up with a newer OS. The transmission must run off a processor two generations further back because the time difference between my big ape foot stomping on the loud pedal and anything meaningful happening is measured in countable seconds.

The transmission must run off a processor two generations further back because the time difference between my big ape foot stomping on the loud pedal and anything meaningful happening is measured in countable seconds.

Does your Subaru have a CVT? It's a belt drive transmission and when I had an (older) Subaru it was one of the first CVT units, and felt a bit laggy when you asked it to do anything with alacrity.

Yep, my first. I was expecting the lag of the CVT and can feel it engage. There is a noticeable lag between the pedal being moved to one spot and the CVT beginning to work. So it is GoFaster = (TransmissioncComputeTime + CVTEngage) when each is about one full second. Two seconds sounds and feels unsafe when coming from a 2004 WRX.

Oh, and if you change your mind and move your foot during the two seconds, the timer resets.

My Buick had the same delay with the transmission. It took a lot of getting used to, and was one reason I went with a high performance car afterwards. I'm super happy with her Kia K5 now.

They are notoriously bad. And they don't get fixed. Got my Subaru and

  1. The radio defaults to SiriusXM every time I turn on the car, even though I do not pay for it and do not want to.
  2. Android Auto and Apple Car Play would cut out regularly
  3. Eventually the entire system would just randomly crash and reboot frequently throughout a trip.
  4. Found out there was a TSB out on the radio for frequent issues, and had to get it warrantied.
  5. Even with the new radio, I have occasional issues with Apple Car Play freezing
  6. I can't have both an android and iPhone connected at the same time, because I won't be able to use Android Auto, I'm forced into Car Play

And on the new cars Subaru made the screen narrow and tall. This effectively reduced the amount of screen space for Android Auto/car play in comparison with prior years.

Add to that the entire display is now needed for HVAC, heated seats, etc and do you really want to depend on a glitchy computer that frequently crashes?

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Where the FOSS cars at?

Exactly. Just slap a few electric motors on those wheels and maybe an inflatable horse for the lulz and you're good to go.

These electric motors, you are winding the coils yourself from a FOSS design? And the batteries to drive them, we going with voltaic piles, or a lithium refinery?

Yep. Have to travel a bit for the lithium, but it's worth it to be free from the enshittification of daily life. Mining and smelting the copper myself too.

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Which car manufacturer ? So that I can avoid it.

All of them, soon enough. Light bulb companies realized a long time ago that selling quality products is a self-defeating game, you want either planned obsolescence, or sell a "service" through a permanent subscription model.

We seriously need strict regulations to reign in this bullshit.

Subscription anything needs be illegal unless it's an active service being provided.

Screens should be flat out banned in cars. Fuck your infotainment and sale features, I don't care. If we agree that phones too dangerous to use while driving (and they are), then a having a fucking tablet glued to the dash is literally no different. Plus, we're still in a global chip shortage, we should be conserving them for more important things.

Self driving features can fuck right off. It's absolutely mind-boggling how these systems are allowed on public roads with zero regulatory oversight.

Most active safety features are bullshit workarounds for shitty design and engineering that create massive blindspots. They also create lazy, complacent drivers who become dependent on tech that subject to equipment and logic failures. Good visibility can't just suddenly stop working.

Anything bigger than a sedan or station wagon should require a special license for industrial and ag use only. Fuck your compensation-mobiles, they're literally killing us in more ways than one.

None of this will ever happen because we know who really owns our governments.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Screens should be flat out banned in cars

Can't say I agree. The appearance of GPS was a game changer for me and a lot of people. I still remember the old days where every time I picked the car in an unfamiliar place was a gamble. I can't even count how many gas I wasted going in circles looking for a reference. Found road works? I'm fucked again, I guess.

No, I don't miss those days at all. Now, if you want to tell me infotainment screens need strict regulations, that's another story. Nothing beyond android auto apps, radio and options that only work in a full stop should be allowed. But "voting" with your wallet works. When I bought my car I was indecisive between 2 of them. The fact one of them had most stuff in a infotainment that was below the driver FOV made my choice easy. The one I bought has most buttons as physical ones. Only the radio isn't. The screen is small and I can use it without taking my eyes off the road (which I only use for google maps, spotify and taking calls).

It's also our responaibility as buyers to know what we're getting. I see a lot of people complaining about stuff in their car they should've known while they were still in the looking phase. If you can't research the car you're buying before you buy it then you deserve all the disappointment.

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This looks like a Subaru. That being said, from what I've parsed, their privacy policy looks better than most. My 2021 hasn't had any obnoxious OTA updates. The worst it does is push easily dismissed service notifications. No secret codes on how to reset a light.

How does this update even happen? Are owners connecting their car to internet?

I'd like to know this as well...

If not, are they using some always on GSM data connection or something?

Doesn't sound like something I'd want unless there's somehow an actual significant Value Add proposition that I'm just not seeing.

Yeah, pretty much all new cars have some amount of cellular connectivity. Usually you can't actually use it without paying some subscription, but the manufacturers use it to push updates.

Sounds like some shit I'd want to remove or disable as soon as the car is paid for.

I mean, I don't like my car updating but I'd rather things get fixed than not. Software recalls are a huge headache in the auto industry, and being able to just download an update that fixes something is way easier than going to a dealership and having them use very specific tools and software to update the car/modules.

It's also used for anti-theft features for a lot of newer cars, if your car is stolen it can be remotely disabled entirely. That's really what's more scary in my opinion.

Not interested in any of that here.

In over 32 years of driving and having owned dozens of cars I've only ever had one stolen.

It was 29 years ago and was actually my (now ex) girlfriend's car and even that one only got stolen because I had a spare key to it in my glovebox and forgot to lock my truck's doors that night.

Yikes, do you get a new car every single year?

I'm more of a "buy something reliable and drive it 'til it breaks" type.

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Which is interesting to say the least given that most cars from the past few years use LTE radios which will eventually work about as well as cars from the early 2000s with OnStar.

See what happened to all the Hyundais and Kias with 3g.

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It is a Subaru. I know it has a radio in it but I don’t pay for the service. I actually don’t know if it’s using its own radio or the connection on my phone. I’ve had the car for most of the year and this is the first update I’ve seen. It took about 10-12 minutes. As I have no patience, sitting in my driveway waiting for it to finish drove me nuts, but for the most part it was painless. It’s definitely something I don’t want to have to get used to.

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I love my Subaru. But the infotainment system is awful. It's slow and unresponsive, it frequently takes a few minutes to warm up to even be usable, which means usually when you can use it you're already moving. It's absolutely impossible to do anything outside of the touch screen.

The car is great, but that computer is a piece of crap

My mom has a ‘16 Subaru and the infotainment has been such a hassle. I had to constantly keep repairing her Bluetooth. It was so bad that my daughter, who has wanted a Subaru for years decided against one simply because of the infotainment.

My ‘15 Mitzu (love her so much) also has a full shit infotainment system. It’s super slow, Bluetooth has a 1.5 second delay (try watching anything on your phone while waiting for someone with that delay!) and also constantly drops connection and re-pairs.

I’ve got a BT-to-3.5mm jack BT adapter that connects INSTANTLY, sounds fantastic, and has NO DELAY.

…the got dang car doesn’t have A 3.5MM JACK WHY THE FUCK

It has sadly only gotten worse. Still not as bad as the Nissan I had, but it's pushing it

She ended up getting a 2016 Nissan Rogue, but it did not have an infotainment system. It is a fairly simple system with Bluetooth connectivity for audio. I wish more companies would give us the ability to modify the systems, especially after they abandon them (my 2015 Toyota Tacoma’s last map update is from about 6 months before my truck was built.)

My Subaru made me drop Android and buy an iPhone. I hate the phone, but the infotainment system works drastically better. Android Auto was hot garbage.

Just out of curiosity, what android phone did you have before switching? I haven't hadany issues with Android Auto the few times I've used it in a rental car. My car is too old for it but it's going to be a variable in my next vehicle purchase which admittedly is very far away.

Android auto in isolation is generally fine. I've owned an aftermarket head unit that offered android auto and it worked flawlessly with my pixel phone.

When I bought a Subaru crosstrek, android auto using the same phone was terrible. It constantly disconnects and has strange audio issues all the time. Apple carplay works fine with my partners phone.

There is something about Subaru and their implementation that is total shit for android auto specifically. I wouldn't recommend them for a good android infotainment experience.

Wireless android auto has a huge difficulty connecting to my Subaru, it was co developed by Toyota and uses Toyota software though. 95% of the time I restart the head unit and toggle Bluetooth on my pixel they will connect though.

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I've also never had an issue with Android Auto, my issues with the console are all exclusively within the computer itself

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Yeah these infotainment systems are trash. I think the Subaru one is made by Denso. Like, Denso makes spark plugs and shit, stay in your line Denso! Thank fuck for Carplay/Android Auto.

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Why a car have to be connected to internet?

so the manufacturer can connect to your personal info

At least on the Gen 5 Outbacks the only way to do updates are offline via usb. Gen 6 might let you do it over wifi, not sure for those.

I have a Gen ?? Outback. It's a nice 2002 and I just replaced the stock stereo with a new Bluetooth one so it's dope. Running this thing until it dies.

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New cars are great a cancer on society

There, FTFY

While the need for cars is cancerous I wouldnt blame it on the tech, cars are fun. The problem is lots of companies realized they could make lots of money and fucked us over starting about a hundred years ago, atleast here in the US.

And this is why the end user should be able to jaikbreak cars. Has anyone made an open source software for cars anyways?

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Why the fuck would the engine be on?

To ensure that the update process finishes without interruption due to weak battery - if that happens it can brick your car. Tbf you can also just connect the battery to a power source and keep the engine off. Depending on update and car updates that take a few hours are not unheard of

This is such extremely poor engineering that it throws me into a rage. There is nothing to prevent them from installing the update in the background progressively while driving and then just switching to the new version in one swift atomic operation (like changing the name of a directory) when it's ready

There's two major things limiting them actually. Bad software developers and using the barest possible minimum on processors and RAM to run the systems.

I wonder if cut backs on the processing power had any relation to the chip supply chain issues over the past year or two?

Probably has more to do with the extreme penny pinching most auto manufacturers do

We both know that this will never happen. For the same reason why you can get a 300k$ car, and have an infotainment system that runs at 3fps. They don't have any incentive to make it run better

That's additional work. Easier to tell people to run the engines.

It's a mix of piece coat optimization and a lot of creep in what used to be a pretty lightweight process throwing it into the ditch.

The things that run software in cars largely fall into one of two camps: MCUs and SOCs. Think Arduinos and Raspberry PIs. Background programming, with an active and inactive partition, is absolutely possible on a SOC. They're even file based, so you can do all kinds of clever things. Cars tend to not have many SOCs, so it's not a monumental task to pitch having them each coat a little bit more for extra storage/processing. The biggest hurdles here are automotive grade and the very long development cycles. These both mean that the hardware is 3+ years old when it launches.

MCUs tend to have monolithic software builds (think literally everything gets compiled into a single .exe). There are a million billion of these things in a typical vehicle from most automotive OEMs. It's... very hard to make them all have more capacity because you would take that cost and multiply it by 40 or so to get all the MCUs on a vehicle 'upgraded' for extra capacity.

If this all sounds a little crazy, it is. From two angles. First: do we really need as much software control in cars as we do? Marketing departments seem to think so. Second: the reason why there are so many small compute units in a car is the slow migration from mechanically controlled components to electrically controlled on. Back in the 80s the majory of automatic transmissions shifted based on a very complex mechanical system (look up a transmission valve body if you're curious). Moving that to electronic control meant adding a computer to control that functional. Now take this and multiply it and you'll kind of see the wreck in motion. Most OEMs are moving toward more centralized compute (fewer, larger, and smarter control units), but new electrical architectures take a lot of time/effort so it's slow going.

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Because oil companies pay them to keep it running sarcasm

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Oh man, i've never been able to get over the: "i really want to play a game now that i have 30 minutes to spare and some energy left" ah fuck, 60gb update...fine i'm off to bed then.

Can't imagine what i would do if a car update would come with the worst possible timing like having to take your partner to the hospital for an emergency.

My Charger's Irratainment system decided to update during traffic in Dallas rush hour (I don't live there) and it took my navigation with me until I could regoogle my phone enough to use that.

My car is the same. I want to install a map update in my Ford, but it's 22GB and according to the manual it'll take 1-2 hours.

Why tf would a map update be 22GB? What is it, a CP2077 patch / DLC?

Literally downloading the map of the entire world.

Map of world, and world's language packs so you can use voice instructions in any language.

Which will be useful to roughly four or five people out of their userbase!

Is there no option to download it on a PC and use a flash drive to install to the vehicle? Or are they saying install time is 1-2 hours because the hardware is that bad?

That's what I am doing. It'll take 1-2 hours with engine running to unpack and install the data from a USB drive.

If I want to update the map in a 2016 Toyota, I have to pay the dealership about $200 to do so.

Ouch, I doubt anyone would he looking forward to babysitting their idling car for 2 hours, just to install a navigation update 😭

Older vehicles and standalone GPSes allowed people to just order a physical pre-loaded SD card, insert it into the appropriate slot, and that's your maps sorted with no idling or babysitting.

While it's nice that there's no longer the excess physical electronic waste with the SD cards, I find it hard to see the cloud alternative as an improvement

This is so backwards from my ID.3. When I get an OTA update, we get a message and have to deliberately update it, but it wont start until we’re out of the car and it’s locked.

Those shiny reflective screens are terrible.

There are like $5 matt screen protectors that help with this. Annoying that it's not applied in factory.

I 100% refuse to buy a car unless there's a jailbrake option. I don't want to get an update while I'm trying to get to work

But its just 20min to update bro. Any you will get all the juicy spyware and tracking.

I have a 2004 F-150 and a 2002 Mitsubishi Spyder. Think I'll just hang on to those.

Depending on the country you might not be able to do that. In some countries you have strict emission guidelines where cars older than 5 years need to be certified that they output emission below a certain threshold. It's good for the environment, but if you live in a place that has shit public transportation it can force you to get new cars and spend much more than required to have a car that suits your needs.

You should be ok with up to 2018 models

Same, which is why all* my cars are 15+ years old and I have no real plans to replace any of them, except possibly with different similarly-old ones.

* I own too many cars.

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Nah, I'm jailbreaking my car if I get one that does this shit. I forced Windows to fuck off with their updates and I damn sure can tell my car manufacturer the same.

You're lucky that can be done remotely now and no longer requires a trip to the dealership.

You say that. But really, if there was no OTA capability, (including on star,) then there would be no need for frequent updates.

And there’s certainly no call for disabling the vehicle during an update.

That completely depends on what's updating, and I haven't seen software updates as frequent occurrences. The frequency may be something I'm missing, of course.

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If it required a trip, I could just not go. Forced updates should be a felony with real prison time for company executives.

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and that's why I dont want to buy a modern car (2010+)

too much going on. old cars are so much simpler. what's the ac set to? cold. Bluetooth? cables are so much more reliable

New cars have all sorts of privacy issues too. I think it was the Mozilla foundation that released a report recently that claimed every single modern electric car harvests as much data as they can about their users and sells it.

I have a 2017 Nissan versa and it's like a fleet trim or something. No power anything (locks or windows) no computer touch screen system, not even a chipped key! Manual transmission and gets almost 40mpg. What you want is out there, it's just hard to find because the car manufacturers won't make as much margin on them.

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WTF,

I don't care if it's just the infotainment system.

Engine (prime mover) should be off for any update on any vehicle.

I'm just wondering why you felt the need to include "(prime mover)"

Did you just like typing it?

Because it's a main source of active power that can be re-directed.

A battery on an EV can be too, in which case the main contactor should be verified disconnected prior to any software update. But typically people don't refer to that as the 'engine'.

So prime mover encompasses engines and main batteries.

So the motor on a fuel based car is the prime mover, but the battery on an electric car is the prime mover, rather than the motor?

I'm guessing then that you would call the tyres the terrestrial contact devices? 😂

Yes. The primary source of power.

It's not like I'm making shit up out of thin air. This is typical nomenclature for safety systems.

If you have an air system, the prime mover would be an pressurized air tank or accumulator.

Properly recognizing the prime movers of a system and defeating them correctly is part of safety.

Agreed, it’s a waste environmentally, on my pocket book, waste of time (do you have to babysit this thing while it’s updating?) and is unnecessary wear and tear on the engine.

The electrics stay on on my car when you turn the engine off, until you open the door. I don’t see why that behavior can’t be overridden until the update is done, and then turn itself off.

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While it may never be a reality, just imagine this: open source cars. The world would be a better place.

This is interesting. My Hyundai when it gets software updates (usually just updating the built in GPS) tells me the update can continue even when the car is off. Didn’t realize not all new cars could do that.

Shit car? My Hyundai Palisade lets me start the update and turn off the car and walk away for the ~1 hour update.

The what now? What the hell takes an hour to update on a car?

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This is why I refuse to buy anything too far from 2010 or earlier