And an EV without smarts is legitimately just a golf cart.
Not really no.
There’s a gulf of difference between a car and a golf buggy.
And we can prove that by turning your argument the other way and saying: if that were true then ICE vehicles would just be petrol-powered golf carts.
Clearly that isn’t even a remotely accurate way of describing your average car
But the car is largely a black box when it comes to its electronics, and if I need to drive the car somewhere, I can't leave the black boxes at home; they come with me wherever I go.
> And an EV without smarts is legitimately just a golf cart.
Sounds fine to me.
Long term, cars will be leased based on driving behavior, and more critically, will be taxed based in driving distance and style.
A bit besides the point, but isn't it wild how inherently wasteful personal cars are? Every time the thought crosses my mind to get another one, if I don't stop at the cost, I stop at the fact that I'll have this giant chunk of metal sitting idle on the street or somewhere else nearly all the time. It'd be useful in an extreme minority of cases (for me), but I/we pay for it all the time by allocating quite a lot of space and money to them. The tires, the insurance, taxes, fuel, charging stations, driveways, parking garages, natural resources, air quality, ambient noise, senseless deaths, it's crazy. Granted, some aren't a result of idle existence, but c'mon.
Renting an arbitrary car periodically ends up being the most tolerable option. A small temporary expense when it's really needed or desired, and it's enough to remind me of the good and bad bits.
But I'm getting old. I've decided I want to use my remaining years of any strength to do more hiking, kayaking and camping, and for that I need a car every weekend. Rentals would be slightly more expensive than owning a second hand one. But I do wish car ownership were cheaper and more painless.
I keep my cars for a long time. 200k miles is the usual, and that has held true buying used a little ways north of 100k miles already on the board.
If we designed for very long car life, the waste equation would look different.
Toyota does, and there are a small number of people planning on half a million miles. Recently there is evidence Toyota is either struggling on this metric. Quality problems or deliberate design intent change?
If you live somewhere with decent public transportation and good car sharing infrastructure (eg. walk to a nearby car share and unlock the doors with an app or a card vs Uber to Hertz and wait for an hour to sign paperwork), then yes that's a viable option. For many places in the US and Canada, that's not viable unfortunately.
This is a weird thing to call out. I'd suggest a car is powered as much as a phone. I'm trying to decide for people that have a car and a phone which is more infuriating to not have power.
If you want an old car without all this crap, you can get one. But it pretty much has to be an ICE.
Meanwhile, third party motor controllers for Tesla motors exist, and the batteries aren't exactly magic.
There's really nothing about electric drivetrains that makes anything vastly more locked down.
A lot of diesels can run off of any vaguely fuel-like liquid you decide to put in them, so I'm sure sufficiently knowledgable people would keep those running, machining parts for them etc.
But electric vehicles are by far simpler than both of those, and generating electricity is easier than producing fuel you can shove in a diesel engine.
Expensive too. Your test harness is likely the car!
Cryptography is probably the real game changer here, secure boot, attestation, message authentication. Can’t exactly blame automakers for wanting those features, given the stakes, but that would make reverse engineering fairly impossible.
