For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
So, if I buy an expensive hardware product for something that can significantly alter my net worth, it is not unreasonable to expect it to last a few decades.
The analogy for this would be the same as buying a property/house. Just because it has a smart home module in it, doesn't make it the central USP of the house - people invest millions into it for the location and size (area), not for the software it runs on.
However, what's happening today is software is being pushed as the central USP of the car, kind of like how they did with phones - and that's not a good thing and which enforces my belief further that we need less software inside hardware products, not more.
If you brought the newly released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonah_(microprocessor) in 2006 - no Windows 11 or later, no Debian 13 or later, no Ubuntu 20.04 or later...
Some shops try to reverse engineer the modules and create clones, and that works a little bit, but it's a real problem. But that was for modules made in the early 2000s.
Now fast forward to today where the electronics is completely different and much less durable. You have basically PC motherboards being inserted into cars. I think people have not yet understood the implications of this in terms of their car's durability.
I've been talking to a guy with a 2007 Volvo and the upper electronics module failed -- it's in the rear-view mirror. Now, you can still drive that car, but he pulled one from a junkyard and tried to replace his -- now the CEM wont recognize the module. OK, with Volvo, you can crack the CEM pin and get it to accept the new module since the reverse engineering community has managed to figure that out.
But with modern cars? With the "software defined vehicle"? You are S.O.L.
When a mechanical part fails, you can fabricate a new part, and aftermarket vendors come and make replacement parts. But with software? The vendor isn't releasing the code. You can't make a replacement.
When they shut down 3g nobody thought about what it would do to "smart cars" that only had 3g modems.
Mine lost the ability to update and is now stuck with an out of date map, no remote start or preheating, no ability to check charge levels remotely, and a ton of bugs that will never be fixed.
When the software stops being supported it basically ruins the car for many purposes. For example, as someone who lives in a cold climate the ability to remotely preheat the cabin and turn on defrosters is an absolute necessity of most folks.
VW doesnt care to fix the issue so owners are stuck, forever.
Now its just a tablet glued to some annoying location and no physical controls. Do you expect a tablet to last 20 years battery notwithstanding, the touch to be perfectly sensitive for so long? Most people don't, for good reasons.
I don't see the point to pay a premium for a new car (it's not a tool for my work) so I always buy second hand. My Citroën C3 from 2016 never upgraded to the new backward incompatible Android auto from the late 2010s. I bought it in 2020 and I wasn't able to connect to it with my phone from 2019 which came with the new Android auto. BTW iPhones could connect. Last time I checked was 2024.
This particular problem is not important because I put my phone in a holder close to my wheel and I get a better navigator than my car could ever be with its 3 colors LCD panel, but cars can last much more than phones and stopping support at any time during their lifetime could be a problem. I understand that supporting a 2016 car in 2036 could be a problem too, so just give us the mechanical part with the firmware of engine, brakes etc and the usual knobs and buttons. Each passenger has a personal infotainment system in their hands and spend their time liking at it with earpieces in their ears. No need to duplicate that in the car.
I'm past 130k km now so I'll be looking for another second hand car a few years from now. I'm afraid that it will be from the middle of the worst period of the car dashboards. Maybe I'll be partially saved by looking at a low price point.
Now if there's no update, people can just hack your car via the internet or Bluetooth. While your infotainment can't access the ICU usually, they're connected via Canbus which has zero provisions for security, and taking over your whole car is usually quite easy from this point, as many have demonstrated.
And even if there's a fix, you have to drive to the service center who might not even update your car for free.
I'm just surprised how this hasn't ended in disaster already.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
There might be some cars this works on now, but it's going to be harder and harder to do over time as things get more integrated, and the more they realize they want that sweet location data money.
So a typical internet advice - don't listen to it uncritically, or not at all.
The mod is reversible, I don't see how this could ever be an issue. But as I said, do your research beforehand.
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
The last thing I need is Apple spying on me when I am driving.
The power of a tablet is far more than is required for an infotainment system. Make a standard, like we used to have for radios and regulate everything to expose all the controls via a standard connection. Standard parts for replacing and sizes for fitting.
The only way we can have nice things is by regulating. I don't want proprietary tyres either.
Cheap? No. But not overly expensive all things considered.
More software doesn't have to mean less value for the customer. More software doesn't have to mean your tools and devices are spyware machines. That's just the lie we've been told.
I see this being repeated for years, yet it is that way. And it is because technical possibilities doesn't matter.
As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.
Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.
And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.
This is such an underrated comment.
My "but your situation my change" and "gov can turn bad" arguments never hit. People are terrible at projecting themselves. That's why climate change is so hard to fight. It's too far and abstract.
Humans need to feel concrete and awful pain to realize their mistake and learn.
But I'm hoping the Trump situation is going to cause that. Now that the US is at the brink of dictatorship (some might argue it's already there), maybe American citizens will realize that putting their entire life on a centralized platform, having non encrypted communications and spying devices everywhere is a terrible idea.
I'm not very optimistic though.
And even if they do, in 3 generations, they will have forgotten. I have no idea how to fix this.
People feel that cars haven't really improved much in practical terms over the last 20 years. At least to the layman, they don't feel smoother, safer, more comfortable to drive. They just got more expensive, more cameras and crap like auto-start that no one asked for.
So at least the hope is to take some of the best parts of modern software manufacturing and apply it to the car. Tesla did this and is why it was the first successful car company that's been started in the past 50 years or so.
Cameras and electronics make the car much more expensive to repair.
But I'm confused, are you pro-technology in car or are you one of those that say "this exact level of technology is perfect, any more or less would be bad". I see this weird tech hater sentiment. For instance some are worried about technology taking blue collar jobs but if you suggest removing technology to create more jobs, they would be against that. Consider how many jobs the washing machine has taken. We could create millions of manual clothes washers if we got rid of them!
https://www.newsweek.com/automatic-start-stop-technology-new...
Also more unreliability, because software engineers often aren't real engineers.
> The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
The problem here is (probably) the internet, which gives management an excuse to slack on QA. If there was no chance to ever update the software, they'd probably do a better job. But now with the internet, they can say they'll just fix it in a patch later, but then never actually get around to doing that.
There ought to be a law that says car software may only be shipped on console-style non-flash ROM carts.
