Phones are supported well beyond their average ownership lifetime.
Are they?
My hunch is that “average ownership lifetime” for mobile phones is MUCH lower than you or I (or anyone who is careful with their phone) probably expects. There is probably a too-big segment of the market that is trading in yearly for a newer model.
By communities, but not the manufacturer. Custom ROMs is the only way to keep it up to date for long enough for the hardware to become too old to be worth it.
No custom ROM for cars anytime soon.
There’s plenty of custom ROMs for cars from all major manufacturers, you just don’t know where to look.Google “ECU remap” or “dpf delete” for an idea. ECU remapping has been done by bold individuals ever since there were programmable ECUs, around 1985.
Apart from engine/drive line tinkering, there are also plenty of third party software that can tinker with body computers for “lifestyle” adjustments.
Is it easy and accessible? No. Because of environmental laws - and vendor lock in - you can’t generally and easily dick around with the control software in your car. But it does exist.
I know, but there us as quiet war going on between the chippers and manufacturers. EV is a new battle front and we the consumers are losing right now.
Law makes need to join this century and get involved ensuring competition and longer product lives.
Some certainly are. Most consumers keep their phones 2-3 years. Many are supported well beyond that.
Many now. Up until recently it was pretty common for manufacturers to leave you SOL after 2 major Android releases.
Supported in the sense that “We will update your device and deliberately slow it, break it, or brick it because fuck you.”
I think people are missing the fact that the features of this VW are going away because they run on 3G. What can a car manufacturer do? Correct me if I’m wrong, you can’t just drop a new antenna to fix the problem.
Cars routinely last 15 years and that’s geologic time compared to tech. This isn’t just a problem of greed or lack of foresight.
What can they do? How about making the cellular models modular? 3G goes bust? Swap the modem for a 4G one next time the car is in for service.
this should be part of car safety and legislated by the govt, no?
in the uk it would be part of the MOT to see that your software is up to date and working
Just like they legislate vehicle size, headlight brightness, and enforce fuel economy standards?
Headlines now are now not even now proofread now
To be fair, I used the Lemmy auto-generated title. They did fix the title that actually displayed on their website.
But thanks, I fixed the post title
Just another way to force you to buy a new one
How is the 3G sunset not solvable by just swapping out a modem module for an LTE or 5G one and maybe installing some new modem firmware? A lot of cars are running a Linux kernel under the hood, so I’d think it’s pretty well swap and go
I think the question is not if it’s solvable, but ‘who pays for it?’ and ‘who can be held accountable if things go awry?’
The company that didn’t see the 3G sunset coming, I would think. I know auto moves slow, but damn…4G was out for what, 4-5 years before development likely started on the 2019 model year?
Ah, if only car hardware was modular and standardized… And if you had access to your infotainment system beyond touching the pretty buttons…
Imagine something as outlandish as user serviceable infotainment systems. Like they used to have in the old days. I’m hanging on by a thread to my basic 2014 car which still has a double DIN slot I can put my own system into…some day
Are these buttons in a room with us right now
Give me my buttons back
I’m lucky enough to never have owned a car without buttons - My newest car was a '19 Benz and they LUCKILY were pretty slow about hopping onto the touchscreen bandwagon
However, in my comment I meant on-screen buttons anyway, as that seems to be the norm nowadays :(
Hopefully that’ll change, iirc the EU discussed about requiring physical buttons for the highest safety rating a few months ago. Idk how that turned out but if it passed there’s hope
I love it when politicians in a democracy are doing things for the people.
It’s not just cars. Anything with electronics (appliances, smarthome devices, healthcare, transportation) that is designed to last more than three years will hit a wall.
The host devices are designed to last 10-15 years, but the electronics will be out-of-date in 3-5 years.
The processor manufacturer will have moved on to new tech and will stop making spare parts. The firmware will only get updated if something really bad happens. Most likely, it’ll get abandoned. And some time soon, the software toolchain and libraries will not be available anymore. Let’s not think of the devs who will have moved on. Anyone want to make a career fixing up 10-yo software stack? Where’s the profit in that for the manufacturer?
So as an end-user, you’re stuck with devices that can not be updated and there’s still at least 10-20 years of life left on them. Best of luck.
Solution: go analog. Pay extra if you have to. They’ll last longer and the ROI and privacy can’t be beat.
The problem isn’t analogue Vs digital, or even software controlled or not. It’s about the design assuming:
- The manufacturer will always exist
- The manufacturer should be the only one to maintain the device.
- The manufacture will define what the owner will do with the device.
An analogue device can be at fault too. Proprietary parts. Construction techniques which don’t allow for dissambly without destroying things. All that stuff.
…but you’re right. Buy the items that let you service them, that don’t rely on cloud servers and software updates, that use standard parts, etc, etc. Right to repair legislation is good too, but the companies understand purchasing power more. So educate those around you too.
A lot of what’s driving these decisions is the mass switch to subscription models. Everything’s designed so you have to keep coming back to the manufacturer.
It used to be making a high quality, standalone product meant you could spend less on customer service and RMA’s. Now they’ve figured out they can sell you service contracts and make money off you being locked in.
While I’m not in love with proprietary software nor APIs from the start, I would accept some policy/regulation that would require smart device manufacturers to open-source the drivers after some given time.
Too many devices become obsolete software-wise then become e-waste not too long after. At least by open-sourcing you allow others to at least use the hardware, and the manufacturer benefits by saying “we didn’t just brick everything” while people who actually care to support it can do so.
Analogue doesn’t have firmware that can reject a device based on id.
So you can reverse engineer a replacement part if you absolutely have to.
Yes and no. My “smart” TV is still doing just fine a good decade since I bought it… by never connecting it to the internet.
Hopefully self driving cars take over the world and all the idiots get off the road anyway. No one will have to be concerned.
I would hope for public transport and cycle paths but the public have repeatedly shown to be against that.
The public are usually very for that after it’s been implemented. They hate it before, assuming you include people who live outside the area where it’s being built but imagine they might want to some say drive there in “the public”. It’s much more of a mixed bag if you don’t.
Until it needs to be funded. A large part of the public think public transport should be entirely funded from tickets and if it isn’t profitable from that it should be shut down and turned into more space for cars.
Where as the true profit of public transport is in other things. E.g. the land valuation around a railway station is way higher than it would be without. The public also seem to be against land value taxes.
The worlds doomed by idiots.
In general for me, I think mission critical systems breaks, engine etc should be physically isolated from the infotainment system. Infotainment systems should also prioritize using off the shelf hardware and running stuff like android, also prioritize android auto and apple car play, since these can be updated without automaker input for the most part.
Without right to repair, there will be planned obsolescence.
My Citroen EV developed an on board charger fault. It wouldn’t charge. The part was a “coded part” which meant it had to specifically programmed with my EV’s ID by Citroen at manufacture. It took months to finally be fitted and ready. So basically, not only does the coded parts system make service shit, but also means when the manufacturer is done making the part, the car is dead. You can’t swap parts between cars and there is no third party parts. It’s meant to be about car theft, but it’s very convenient it blocks competition and long product life…
If it was a carburetor (which EVs do not have), I’d be okay with a DRM. But boards? Is there an organized crime group that steals EV boards? Next time it will be funking wipers with DRM.
They DRM it all if we let them. We must not. It should going the other way. More open, repairable and upgradable.
How would carburetor DRM make any sense? Those are super common to take apart and rebuild or replace (like step 1 of every old restoration).
Then whatever is fucked in the electronics will be fucked forever.
Just like it has been for the last 20 years or so.
…linux cars? Pretty please?
God no
Vehicle control systems are overwhelmingly programmed in C, mostly from graphical design tools such as MATLAB Simulink via an automatic process. These are real time control systems which are quite different to an interrupt based operating system such as Linux. The many individual controllers must work in concert according to a strict architecture definition and timing schedule that defines the functionality of the vehicle. It’s not at all like a PC or phone, whose OS become irrelevant over time, with respect to their environment of other systems. The vehicle environment is the same environment that we inhabit i.e. the one with gravity, friction, charge and the other SI units. This is slowly changing with advent of self driving but, yeah.
Yeah but the infotainment system can be Linux based.
fine, fine, I learned 3/4 new things there, thanks for taking the time
This is correct. If using an OS, an RTOS like the Linux Foundation Zephyr OS is the right choice here.
These are real time control systems which are quite different to an interrupt based operating system such as Linux.
You do know you can operate the linux kernel in real time, right?
It’s not a hard real time OS though. Real Time Linux would be appropriate for some subsystems in a car, but not for things that are safety critical with hard timing constraints, e.g. ABS controllers.
Locked bootloaders should be illegal. Manufacturers should have to provide enough specs that third parties can write code that runs on the hardware.
Manufacturers should have to provide enough specs that third parties can write code that runs on the hardware.
“But Crowdstrike” would probably be an argument against.
“Security” as an excuse for self-serving bullshit isn’t new.
Sure, there’s a risk of breaking things. I can do that with a hacksaw and a soldering iron too, and it’s widely recognized that it isn’t up to the manufacturer of the thing to keep me from breaking it. We need the same understanding for devices that depend on software.
They no roll?
Cellular enabled cars are conceptually dumb. That’s a hill I’m willing to die on.
Crash-detection systems can use cellular to alert medical authorities, that and theft are about the only practical use cases i see for that.
I feel like these days the tech should be there to just leverage our cell phones for this. Most drivers have their phones paired to their cars now anyway, and perhaps some sort of emergency protocol could be created where a car could even connect through a nearby non-paired phone for an automated emergency call too. As for tracking - make cars have something like an air tag type function built in that can share both android+apple tracking networks. This is all a pipe dream anyway - there’s money to be made on connected car services so the shareholders won’t be for modernizing the approach anytime soon.
Makes no sense to me…but at this very moment I’m a hypocrite lol
Naw, I live in a hot as hell country I’m super jealous of people who can remote-start the air conditioning in their cars.
It should be an open interface like OBD2 though where you can choose the hardware/provider instead of being locked to the car manufacturer deprecating everything in 3 years to sell you a new car.
I cannot remote start my car. If it’s really hot or really cold, I go outside for a few seconds to start the car and then go back inside. It’s really not that big a hardship.
Two way alarm systems with remote start have been a thing for pretty long and don’t all require cellular connection. Some are just super long distance key fobs.
You don’t really need connected cars for that. My car has no smart features but still has a remote start capability. It uses the car remote to trigger it instead of cellular connection.
Assuming you park next to your house a WiFi connection on the local network would be everything you need. Relatively cheap compared to the car would be a repeater to extend it for people like me who park 30-50m away I agree with you assumption that this is car manufacturers creating software based planned obsolescence. An open source framework would resolve this concern even over cell networks but defeats the entire point of also pushing power windows and seat heating as a service.
Me when my car gets hack and remote controlled to drive off a cliff:
“Ahhh” D: sploosh
