[HN Gopher] When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?
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When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-09-08 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| lionkor wrote:
| I'm not surprised, not sure how anyone is thinking that devices
| that tie you to one company completely are a good idea
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If I want my watch to support streaming audio and make phone
| calls without carrying my phone around - it kind of does.
| cebert wrote:
| I'm in the market for a new vehicle and would like to purchase an
| EV. However, I also have a fear of the software becoming obsolete
| or no longer supported. I tend to keep my vehicles for a long
| time, my current vehicle is 12 years old.
| johnea wrote:
| Like in the above comment, this isn't specifically an EV
| problem.
|
| All modern cars have this failure.
|
| I just bought a used 2023 Nissan Leaf. It's the last model year
| of the original design, and has many tactile mechanical button,
| not jut a tablet on the dash. It's also totally self sufficient
| WRT cloud connectivity.
|
| I'd highly ecommend this model and year...
| kccqzy wrote:
| The Nissan Leaf has an air-cooled battery. Literally any
| other EV's battery will outlast the Nissan Leaf's in terms of
| degradation.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I have an EV but I think of it as an appliance. I don't worry
| about the software becoming obsolete because the software is
| complete by the time it comes out of the factory. When I test
| drove the vehicle I found its state of software satisfactory
| and I would not need any new software or even need any support
| for the software. I also like the UI enough that I don't mind
| seeing the same UI for the next ten years without succumbing to
| the latest design fad.
|
| I understand that some Internet-required features (such as
| viewing real-time charger availability in the car) will
| certainly become unavailable. But I'm prepared to use my phone
| to do the same thing.
| ggreer wrote:
| The important thing is to get a vehicle that is popular enough
| that there will be future demand for maintenance. That way even
| if the manufacturer goes under or drops support for that model,
| other companies will take up the mantle. This threshold is
| surprisingly quite low. There were around 2,400 Tesla Roadsters
| made. Although Tesla has dropped support for them, Gruber Motor
| Company will repair or maintain them.
|
| I think that's the only model that Tesla has dropped support
| for. The original Model S from 2012 is still supported by
| Tesla, and still gets software updates. Of course you won't get
| new features like self-driving improvements, but they still
| ship bug fixes and stuff like Spotify support. They also do
| maintenance and repairs, though I'm pretty sure all of the
| vehicles from that era are outside of warranty coverage.
|
| There are millions of Model 3s & Model Ys around. If you buy
| one of those, you'll never have to worry about finding someone
| to do maintenance or repairs.
| mook wrote:
| Gruber appears to be in Arizona; I couldn't tell from
| skimming their website if that means they can't service
| vehicles in, say, Seattle?
| avtolik wrote:
| In Eastern Europe there are a few places that an emulated Tesla
| server software is being run. And you can buy a car, say from
| US, and they will patch (hack?) it to use their server. I don't
| know how good it is feature wise, but it is good enough that
| the cars drive around.
|
| So to your point - you can probably use a car after the
| manufacturer is gone or stops supporting a vehicle. But this
| comes with a risk of trusting these not very legal enterprises.
| oblio wrote:
| > In Eastern Europe there are a few places that an emulated
| Tesla server software is being run.
|
| Probably by the same people running third party WoW servers
| :-p
| pornel wrote:
| Modern gas cars have all the same touchscreens, with the same
| software, and the same apps talking to the same servers.
|
| EVs are equated with being computers on wheels, but that's just
| because barely any BEVs existed in the pre-software era, so
| there aren't many people who vow to never upgrade from their
| 1976 Sebring CitiCar.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Of course, this trend such as "software defined vehicles" is
| happening with all cars, not just EVs.
|
| The main problem points for incompatibility are places where the
| car interfaces with software outside of itself. As that software
| gets updated or APIs change, the car can go out of date. I think
| chargers and automatic payments might be the most important one
| there.
| ggreer wrote:
| Chargers and payments are a solved problem. The charging ports
| are standardized (NACS in North America & Japan, GB/T in China,
| and CCS2 everywhere else). The protocols for automatic payment
| are also standardized. Some EVs made by other manufacturers
| lack support for the payment protocols, so Tesla has started
| rolling out credit card readers to their Supercharging stations
| as a fallback. So even if there's a new automatic payment
| standard, in the future you'll be able to use a credit card to
| pay.
|
| The first generation Model S still works just fine at
| Superchargers. Any EV you buy today is even more likely to have
| support a decade from now.
| breerbgoat wrote:
| And that's why no one should be buying any Chinese EVs except
| BYD. (if you absolutely have to buy a Chinese EV). All Chinese
| car manufacturers except BYD are losing money with every car
| they sell, and insiders agree that every other Chinese EVs
| except BYD will fold or go into bankruptcy.
|
| Why did Chinese companies jump into the car industries
| producing cars when they didn't have the know-how before?
| simple, rent seeking. Chinese government was offering
| incentives to do so. https://reason.com/2023/08/23/chinas-e-v-
| graveyards-are-an-i...
|
| A "life and death race" has begun to unfold in the world's
| largest market for electric vehicles -
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/24/business/china-ev-industry-co...
| neverkn0wsb357 wrote:
| "Beijing has rolled out new EV subsidies to help keep struggling
| companies afloat."
|
| This seems like an odd approach. If you're gonna site maintenance
| as the concern, then what you're saying is you're concerned about
| the consumer; meaning if the company is gonna go bust, you should
| take the money that you'd spend keeping these companies afloat
| and give them directly to the consumer to replace the car.
| johnea wrote:
| The article isn't conclusive, but I read this as meaning they
| were keeping the companies open long enough to issue firmware
| updates, that make the cars viable in offline mode.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| That depends on what you mean by work. Most will surely still
| work as cars always did but will no longer get updates to
| software or to maps.
|
| As far as I can tell my Tesla S will continue to work even if
| Tesla and all the charging stations disappear. But the navigation
| system will be much less usable and many features of the
| entertainment system will stop working (Spotify, TuneIn).
|
| And if you buy from a company that produces a very large volume
| of cars then at least in some cases third parties will step in to
| support the vehicles for a fee.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And this is one reason I will never buy a car that doesn't
| support Apple CarPlay and Android Automotive
| mook wrote:
| You probably want a car with Android Auto instead of Android
| Automotive. Yep, it's totally dumb that those are two
| separate things with very similar names. The former is a
| CarPlay equivalent, where your phone projects a screen. The
| latter is logging into Google directly from the car
| independent of your phone.
| ashildr wrote:
| Too bad if the DRM-server that knows that you paid for Apple
| CarPlay/Google Auto is turned off...
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Tesla's own navigation will not work, yes, because it uses
| things like the live availability of superchargers to decide
| where to stop for charging along the way.
|
| But why won't Spotify work? Isn't it just a web app?
| mrweasel wrote:
| My dad has a "smart" radiator. For 5 months he couldn't control
| it remotely because some server in Norway was down.
|
| There should be some escrow system for software and service for
| something as expensive as a car. When Saab Automobile went
| bankrupt in 2016 a number companies where quick to announce that
| they'd be able to source or manufacture replacement parts. You
| can build a brand new 2CV from replacement parts, with an
| electric motor, and I'm almost certain you can do the same with a
| VW Bettle.
|
| All the "smart" stuff leaves us a risk of having to discard brand
| new functional vehicles at a huge environmental impact. Unless
| you drive a lot, it's better for the environment to maintain an
| old Saab, compared to buying a new Chinese EV.
| api wrote:
| There is no reason this stuff needs to be dependent on the
| cloud at all. It's a mixture of self-serving reasons like
| wanting to sell subscriptions and the fact that modern
| developers are so steeped in the cloud that they can't imagine
| how to do things any other way.
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I built some custom EVs & drove many miles with them. I used
| hacked/reverse engineered OEM parts for them.
|
| While the servers going dark might be annoying, you still have
| access to your cars hardware, giving various attack vectors in
| making your car "go" again.
|
| - CAN protocol between components is relatively straightforward
| to reverse engineer, and on a fundamental level all modern EVs
| work "the same"
|
| - you/someone can put a new circuit board into the remote-
| disabling component and tell the rest of the car "everything is
| fine, please drive"
|
| - depending on how much the OEM has invested in preventing this,
| it might get harder, but it will always be possible (last resort,
| swap to new brainboard)
|
| - I am not aware of encryption being deployed between vehicle
| components, between the media component & the remote server,
| sure, but the actual drivertrain parts are sending straight-
| forward unencrypted messages between each other
|
| So, all that said, this is of course a worry for the consumer
| (liability as well when modifying the car of course), but if you
| control the hardware and enough other people have the same car as
| you I believe they will be reverse-engineerable.
|
| You can check my submissions, I am making a video series about
| how modern EVs work, also check out openinverter.org community.
|
| One more anecdote: Fisker Ocean was in a similar place recently
| and I started looking at their owner groups to see if there would
| be a business case for me to get more involved, but I haven't
| pursued it further.
|
| So in the same way that "life will always find a way" in Jurassic
| Park, I think if you bought something that enough other people
| have bought, someone will hack it/share a solution (albeit
| voiding the warranty in the process).
| echelon wrote:
| While I don't doubt your enthusiasm, I don't want my car
| experience to feel like Arch Linux. I want something I treat
| like an appliance or utility to _just work_.
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I am with you of course.
|
| What I am highlighting is that if enough people are affected
| by a bankrupt OEM, it is not the end of the world to fix them
| so all is not lost in that case.
|
| I also don't think it is a particularly smart idea to have
| your car needing to chat to the mothership before it decides
| to do it's job of driving you somewhere. At least for the
| consumer I see limited benefits of this trend.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| It's definitely too much work for everyone to repeat and
| duplicate.
|
| The obvious solution (to those of us here) is open-source and
| right-to-repair requirements.
| yencabulator wrote:
| The "just work" people are the reason for the prevalence of
| phone apps and cloud services in so much today's gadgets, and
| that dependency on services is exactly why all these things
| fail as soon as the company who made them fails.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I'm in the same boat, which is why I've soured greatly on a
| lot of things internet-connected. Internet connectivity
| almost always means needing perpetual updates (whether for
| security or just for keeping up with remote APIs changing).
| The economics don't make sense for providing that for free
| forever, so anything under that model _must_ be either a
| rental /subscription or isn't built to last.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| How far can you go with these modifications before the vehicle
| is no longer street legal? I suspect that even minimal changes
| might cause an issue there?
| janosch_123 wrote:
| Depends, but it's possible: All vehicles I built were signed
| off by the licensing bodies & fully insured. We told both the
| lawmaker and the insurer about all our modifications and with
| some paperwork it was possible.
|
| The community I linked above is full of people doing this
| kind of stuff. Some if it illegal, some of it legal.
|
| Jailbreaking an EV I haven't thought about yet, but if the
| original manufacturer is bust, and you can show some degree
| of care to the licensing body I am sure it's negotiable.
|
| Obviously it would be better to not be in this position in
| the first place, but problems are fixable.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Yes, for sure. Thanks for your response, the info you share
| is very insightful. Hopefully I will never have to use it
| :)
| oulipo wrote:
| for e-bikes at least, it seems that Bosch e-bikes use AES
| encryption between their controller and the battery, to prevent
| third-party batteries, perhaps you have knowledge about this,
| or how it could be possible to circumvent?
| janosch_123 wrote:
| I can't crack encryption I am afraid. Got a link? It's the
| first I hear about this.
| ronsor wrote:
| You'd probably have to extract the encryption key (which has
| to be the same between all controllers and batteries,
| otherwise it wouldn't work).
|
| Depending on the hardware this can range from needing to
| attach a debugger to JTAG, to dumping a flash chip, to
| decapping a microcontroller at the hardest.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Yikes, how is this even legal for a EU company.
| elif wrote:
| I don't think the average fisker or lucid purchaser is willing
| to do 500V hacking. In fact, I would wager the DIY fisker/lucid
| community might be less than 6 people.
|
| I admire the spirit but I just don't think hackers will do much
| with $100k bricks beyond salvage components.
| janosch_123 wrote:
| Absolutely. But they may be willing to pay someone to swap a
| component. EV hacking is a small community still, but with
| more of them on the road every year more and more people get
| interested. If $100k are turned into a $0 brick and you can
| turn it back into $100k there is a commercial as well as
| academic interest there.
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| I never understood the liability aspect of vehicle repair from
| a manufacturer's standpoint. The common refrain seems to be
| that these new vehicles are not serviceable without the
| dealership/manufacturer. It seems to be a narrative to drive
| out the owner from repairing vehicle or independent repair
| facilities.
|
| The liability seems to be the same as historic vehicles, for...
| vehicle repair. So why is this any different?
|
| The burden of proof is on the manufacturer to prove that a
| modification caused damage to the vehicle.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I'm also surprised nobody (well the press and regulators):
| Why are you allowed to design vehicles whose safety is
| brittle enough that it can inadvertently undermined by an
| independent mechanic?
| from-nibly wrote:
| Yea but the burden of action is on the victim to have a more
| expensive lawyer so it doesn't matter one way or another.
| teunispeters wrote:
| CAN bus is in many ways too difficult to encrypt. (not that it
| can't be, it's just got way too small a packet size). Nothing
| prevents manufacturers from getting complicated though - eg
| "knock three times on this ID, then request info from this ID
| then .....". (example from an old Shadowrun netrunning campaign
| idea)
|
| I'm working in EV charging domain. EV chargers that comply with
| ISO 15118-20 may prove difficult to get working once more (due
| to key signature requirements). Otherwise, all should continue
| working as long as the charging protocol they use continues to
| be supported. And that said, the EV charge managing component
| should be replaceable.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| The 2015 "Jeep Hack" (affected a huge number of Fiat Chrysler
| cars) was actually one of the coolest moments of hope &
| inspiration for me. Ok, so the embedded OS isn't linux, but it
| still runs good old FreeDesktop D-Bus? You can just RPC to the
| window & tell it to roll down? You can just RPC to the head
| unit & adjust the volume? Nice.
| https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
|
| I'd assumed everything was some terrible impenetrably dense
| proprietary cruft, but oh, the whole system runs some standard
| well known protocols that would be super super super great &
| convenient to use, if we had network access to the car? Yeah,
| nice.
|
| Wouldn't it be so great if someday things actually got better.
| The "Hack" was, oh, you can engage the parking break if you get
| network access. Oh no! So the response is that now we for sure
| will never be empowered useful-to-ourselves consumers again. It
| sucks that the low-trust society keeps dominating, that it
| keeps overshadowing the can-do is-possible universe, that
| making possible is forever dwarfed by Fear Uncertainty and
| Doubt.
|
| The one really bright spot of the past, in my view, was
| Webinos, which was a super cool IoT system that had some
| automotive interest. Notably, unlike most systems, it kept
| users sovereign, let devices (like cars, or car
| windows/stereos) expose themselves up to user-specified
| gateways, securely without intermediaries. Didn't make it, but
| I have yet to see anyone with 1/5th the promise, with anywhere
| near as low-ickiness as modern devices.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| In the modern world, not everything needs to be connected to the
| internet or smartphones.
|
| EVs, solar inverters and wrist watches are definitely one of
| them.
| greenthrow wrote:
| That's 3 things.
|
| Most people want modern infotainment systems in their cars with
| up to date traffic data in the navigation system.
|
| I like having my inverter online, I can monitor it and change
| the settings from anywhere.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Eh, I imagine most folks are happy to be able to plug their
| communications device into their car and use for up to date
| navigation.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| This reminds me of a story of a hiker (or 2) who rented a car
| through one of those apps that immediately unlock the car for
| you, and then you just park somewhere.
|
| Well, the place they parked had no cell phone reception, so they
| couldn't unlock the car there and leave (how they locked the car
| is another question).
|
| From the article
|
| > He also couldn't see his car's mileage and charging status on
| the dashboard.
|
| I'm assuming this is in the app...
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| I used Polestar's app as a key for my car for a few weeks. I
| think everyone does! "Wow! I don't need a car key? So
| futuristic!"
|
| All it took is one trip to the Salton Sea where either my phone
| or car didn't get cell service and I'm never making that
| mistake again. Which is especially weird because Polestar
| claims that the digital key works using Bluetooth, but the auth
| itself must be done over the internet or something.
| LUmBULtERA wrote:
| Does Polestar not give a backup key? I ask because Tesla uses
| a phone key too, also claiming it will use Bluetooth and does
| not need connectivity. But, Tesla does advise you to keep
| their card key backup in your wallet, which always works.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 17 months with a Tesla and I've never been locked out.
|
| Sure I do have to take my phone out of pocket maybe once a
| month (not unlock screen), but I blame Apple here for going
| into some weird power saving mode.
|
| This is a solved problem. Problem is Polestar, not the
| concept.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I understand (though I'm not super happy about) auxiliary
| functions like apps or services not working when a car company
| shuts down. But shouldn't most of this software be "baked into"
| the car and not require a server somewhere to operate?
| eh_why_not wrote:
| This issue has been a plague in the area of Toys and Games. Good
| luck finding a good toy that does not *require* an app to run.
|
| Every year I have little gremlins asking me to "fix" a toy
| someone brought them the previous year; the app doesn't
| work/update anymore - and the toy is a brick.
| blooalien wrote:
| So, is someone missing a great startup idea here maybe?
| "Jailbreaking" supposedly "defunct" EVs, and / or custom
| firmwares, etc? Could be profits to be had?
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