Comment on Fuck cars
vivendi@programming.dev 1 day agoSo much easier UNTIL one of the six million proprietary silicon bullshit breaks (or planned obsolescence) and you’re SoL without official manufacturer support.
EVs are a maintainability and reparability nightmare, despite not needing maintenance as often
Overspark@feddit.nl 1 day ago
How is this different from any other modern car?
vivendi@programming.dev 1 day ago
90% of your power train is proprietary electronics that are designed to be opaque and break of you try and “tamper” with them
Most of an ICE car is tangible, rather widely replicable, blocks of metallic alloys
Overspark@feddit.nl 22 hours ago
EVs are at their heart really simple machines. You have a battery, a battery controller, some kind of thermal management for the battery (can be passive but active is better), and an electric motor that isn’t much more complex than the one in your vacuum cleaner. All these parts are readily available, so you can easily convert an ICE car to an EV with parts you can buy yourself. For some popular cars there are even kits available these days, and conversions of old-timers are really taking off. If there’s a kit with clear instructions a conversion can sometimes even be done in a single day.
An ICE car is literally orders of magnitude more complex. There are far more parts, far more computers to control all those parts (in a modern car that is), far more cabling to connect all these computers and far more opportunities for things to go wrong. ICE cars even spontaneously catch fire more often because of all the cabling and complexity.
You’re probably thinking of a few specific brands, like Tesla, that are very hostile towards self-servicing, and in those specific cases you are right. But most EVs from established car manufacturers are just as proprietary or non-proprietary as their ICE brethren, just with less complexity and less parts. And of course older cars that don’t have any computers in them are immune to this specific kind of complexity as well.
vivendi@programming.dev 20 hours ago
A highly complex system with support systems to prevent it from literally blowing up (mmmmm tasty lithium)
A seriously complex piece of model specific code that is usually proprietary and has hardware level bricking fuses (so fuck you if it has a fault)
And also, all the other management shit like regen braking and what have you.
You’re doing a “reduction”. If you reduce literally anything to such high abstraction it seems simple. Yes, quantum physics is also " just " an observation of a continuous system, nothing to it mate
ICE cars can be completely reassembled with a couple of wrenches. The most proprietary thing in the whole system is the ECU, and you can swap that and whatever if you wish to do so.