Also, a rash of power train control module failures leaves Freightliner trucks inoperable, and a shortage of spare parts sees commercial trucking companies turning to the black market for stolen parts.
During the T-top days of the 1980's, thieves were stealing the removable hardtop panels from lots of Camaros and Corvettes and cars like that. These could not be pawned for much since it was unlikely that a buyer for that exact T-top would come in looking for that one any time soon. Unless the shop developed quite a collection. Eventually they would be unloaded to the used parts dealers.
I went to a police auction where a lot of the recovered stolen property which went unclaimed was being sold along with their surplus vehicles, office furniture, etc.
There were loads of T-tops and naturally the used parts T-top dealers were there to pick them up at rock-bottom prices. They all knew each other.
They knew exactly which car model each one would fit and this had become an increasingly more detail-oriented business.
When a theft victim showed up to a used parts dealer, if the dealer did not have the exact part in stock (or in his network) he would tell the victim that it would take a few days to come in.
Basically, when an actual willing buyer was identified, if the part was not available already, it would be stolen to order from a compatible vehicle by street thieves who had become more detail-oriented over the years themselves.
This is why modern cars and tractors encode the VIN in computers and don't let you replace parts without dealer tools. You buy a black market part, even though it is perfectly good it can't be used without the dealer getting involved and the dealer tool can automatically check against a list of stolen parts.
Right to repair has the downside of not checking for stolen parts like that. Which is why it isn't the black and white issue most people think it is.
Not going out of your way to check for criminal activity doesn't mean it's any less of a black and white issue. "But you can't automatically check if the part is stolen" is just a very specific pearl you're clutching.
Exactly. Receiving stolen property is already a crime. We don't need some automated system that as a byproduct also prevents people from fixing their own cars.
Nice strawman but poor argument. What you're actually looking for is a system where the homebuilder has the keys to the home, which is as ridiculous on its face and trying to prevent people from fixing things they bought.
If this is an absolute priority (and it's not, because the costs inuced by theft are dwarfed by the the costs incurred by forced obsolescence) then just have a public challenge-response server with open source code so it can be maintained and secrets controlled by a government department paid for by registration fees.
You have to log ID, provide a small payment and it logs the VIN the item is being tied to as well as having a list of stolen parts.
No anti-repair steps needed so you can stop shilling.
The other business opportunity, complementary, is security devices to protect your parts, extra tricky huge locks and their lock-picking sets, secure parking lots along routes at premium fees and then of course a special platinum lounge thing with concessions. And marking parts with license plate numbers.[1]
Great alignment of incentives among the two excellent business opportunities.
[1] That last one I saw in Chile in fact like in 2001, stamping license plates on mirrors. Worse mirror of course. They also did windows, you wonder why, guess they had a glass stamping machine and not enough customers, wanted to get more money from the same customers. The dentist thing basically.
>The company will consider civil actions for software infringement against those involved in CPC theft and mismanagement.
What is software infringement? Does it mean copyright infringement? Stealing a piece of hardware isn't copyright infringment, although maybe some types of reprogramming it would be.
Kind of funny. I've heard people call copyright infringement theft before, but I've never heard anyone call theft copyright infringement until now.
I would guess that they're arguing that the first-sale doctrine of 17 U.S.C. § 109 does not apply since it was stolen, i.e., since they didn't legally acquire the hardware, they have no right to use any software thereon.
Seems like a stretch. The person interacting with the hardware need not know or care about the software. Under that same logic I think you could:
(1) Buy an alarm clock with an embedded chip
(2) Contained in the packaging was a link to a license agreement. You never read it and certainly didn't agree to it.
(3) A year later, weekday alarms are remotely disabled because you've used up your free trial. The license specifies $3/mo as the rate to continue being woken up on weekdays.
Courts are already not upholding a lot of this "reading this ToS constitutes agreement to all future versions" bullshit in modern software, and I doubt they'd be friendly to the idea that somebody can be beholden to a contract they had no good reason to even know about.
In that case, I think you'd potentially have a counter-claim for breach of implied warranty.
In your scenario, the buyer wouldn't have a contract other than they bought the clock and it was implied to work as a clock. You could have a claim for breaking the device, but the first-sale doctrine gives you copyright protection regardless of what you do to the clock.
In the article, thieves have no contract, so they have no right to anything to do with the devices.
Have you seen the recent rulings out of the Supreme Court? They’re ruling off of their feelings and poorly justifying their conclusions by working backwards and making stuff up from whole cloth whenever necessary.
Don’t take a random dudes word for it. These lawyers put their real names with their opinions when calling out the ideological hacks masquerading as Supreme Court justices.
> If software is licensed, and you don't comply with the license, you don't have a right to use it.
What law is this based on? If you say copyright law, then how can I be in violation if I have not made a copy? If you say contract law, arguing that the license is a form of contract, then how can I be bound by it if I have not signed it, agreed to it, or even read it?
Hmmm...that's a fair point. It would definitely be copyright law, but I'm not sure if it would actually work. I know downloading copyrighted material into RAM still counts as a violation, so the argument would probably be that running the software illegally copies code they have no rights to from storage to RAM.
> I know downloading copyrighted material into RAM still counts as a violation,
Maybe in some jurisdictions, but I’m pretty sure many places exclude copies necessary for the operation of the software to not be violations of copyright law.
I mean, extend the same reasoning to web pages. Your web browser downloads a web page (let’s pretend this does not count as a copy). It keeps the HTML in an in-memory cache. The browser then sends the HTML to its internal renderer, which renders the page. Boom, a copy of the HTML (or at least a derived work of it) now exists in the renderer. Have you now violated the copyright of the page author?
But to use software you acquire, you have to copy it into your computer's RAM and maybe hard drive. That's relevant to copyright law. To use this hardware device you stole, you don't need to do that. So it's much less clear copyright law would apply. Reflashing the device with new firmware though, then copyright law could apply.
For the same reason "finders keepers" isn't codified law. By that logic, nobody is allowed to controls the means by which their software is run. You don't get to decide if people have to pay you, or if people have to have your permission first, or if they're allowed to (legally) copy it, etc.
AFAIK, many jurisdictions have rules clarifying that any incidental copies, like installing it, or copying it to RAM, or to the various CPU and SSD caches, are necesssary for the operation of the software, and are therefore not counted as breaches of copyright.
If this was not so, copyright holders could sue all the router and switch operators in the world for copying pirated works by merely having the network packets temporarily in their packet buffers.
Yeah, I don't know the law about incidental copies and RAM and stuff. But I think we shouldn't lump that with using a dedicated piece of hardware, because I think there is a difference between the two. Whether that difference is relevant in the law, I'm not sure.
Wouldn't router and switch operators be considered distributors rather than publishers?
>Prior to the Internet, case law was clear that a liability line was drawn between publishers of content and distributors of content; a publisher would be expected to have awareness of material it was publishing and thus should be held liable for any illegal content it published, while a distributor would likely not be aware and thus would be immune.
Scribbling all over a book and rearranging the pages isn't copyright infringement, no matter whether you stole it, so rearranging or modifying sections of copyrightable material in any other physical item shouldn't be either.
No, but if you made photocopies of all the pages, rearranged and sold them it would be. Modifying software almost always involves copying. Some (older) technologies like punched cards allow modification without any copying. But if you're loading firmware from a device onto your laptop and using an editor, there are plenty of copies being made throughout the process.
I think that is far more literal a focus on copying than the courts have, they tend to think in terms of whether you are expanding the number of copies.
I think courts sided with an artist that destroyed an original in transfers making one new work. I think they would also tend to side with firmware users that move/modify copies but don't expand the number of production units running derived copies of the code.
More importantly courts are smart enough to realize that the act of copying a webpage to various caches on internet routers, then to memory of your computer, and your browser's cache files is not copyright infringement even though copies were made. It would be if you saved the source code in your browser and shared the webpage with others - but even then depending on details it might be called fair use if such a thing came to court.
The software for a given vehicle will be specialized for the engine and other powertrain components. It's likely that manufacturer tools and licenses are being used to change the programming on the stolen components.
We're still in the toilet-paper-hoarding stage. Also people are still reselling at 400% to 1000% markup.
Probably at least a couple years.
Imagine if a shipment of 100K Raspberry Pi 2 W Zero came in today. "Everybody knows" if you buy direct you can pay $5, and the lowest price for scalpers on Amazon for a 2 W Zero is currently $149 so you can probably actually sell for $130-ish and clear $125 of scalping profit per unit shipped.
Note there's not much risk... Put $500 of Pi on the credit card, get 100 units, if you can scalp FOUR at hyperinflated prices you broke even, even if the price craters to $5 tomorrow and you're sitting on 96 unsold units.
There's just too much money floating around for the shortage to go away. The only way for a manufacturer to crack the scalper market is to get financing so cheap they can out-finance the entire scalper "industry". But no cross-planet exporter can out-finance the consumer sector credit card printing press of cash, so the scalpers are semi-permanent and some technologies are essentially dead now.
Now personally I've written off the Pi and STM32 ecosystems. Everything in resale is either fake or falsely marked ("8GB" but its actually 2G, etc) or marked up to insane prices so those technologies are dead to me. Unfortunately there's still people trying to use those legacy technologies so prices on Amazon are $149 for a $5 product, but eventually those techs will be widely regarded as dead and then the market can clear and go back to normal. Overall I'm "enjoying" ESP32 products, at least those can still be purchased at a reasonable price...
OMFG, I thought this was a hypothetical at the start of this comment. Forget GPUs, $150 for a Raspberry Pi Zero??? And people say Bitcoin is Tulip mania.
Is that really how it works? The scalper will eventually want to sell the other 96 units, he has no benefit keeping them around. That should satisfy demand and eventually drive down the price.
> So how long does the microchip shortage continue?
In my humble opinion, there is no shortage. There is however a huge priorization and a control of the production to elevate the prices.
I guess some people in far east asia figured out they have power the same way as the founders of OPEP did in the 70's. Look at all the microchips based shit you can buy on aliexpress. Doesn't seem they are affected much by shortage.
From what I've seen Chinese manufacturers and component distributors built up big stocks when the tariffs/sanctions against China were announced a few years ago. Then when the recent events affected supply chains, they were sitting on decent stocks of popular chips and were able to sell them at 10x original price.
Since then the industry has been in a cycle of:
- Manufacturer finishes a batch of popular chip
- Everybody who uses that chip tries to buy next 3-5 year demand
- Popular chip is out of stock again
Don't forget scalpers. The market on Amazon is clearing for Pi 2 W Zero boards at a mere 2600% profit over retail price (higher prices are not selling), so people whom actually want to build something with a Pi are competing with people whom compare a 29% APR credit card vs 2600% per unit profit margin and buy everything they can get for resale.
Its classic hyperinflation market. Too much money chasing too little product. The only way to crack the hyperinflation would be to boost interest rates on credit cards over 2600% making speculation unprofitable or for the endusers to abandon the marketplace and let the price crash or boost the manufacturers production until they flood the market down. The CC interest rate thing would not sell well in an election year LOL. The manufacturers cannot outproduce the demands of the entire financial industry money printing press. The only option is market abandonment.
Manufactures should be aware of this. Selling to real customers as opposed to scalpers is better in the long run because when those scalpers realize the game is up they will flood the market. However us little guys who need just one, or maybe a few hundred are not big enough for the manufactures to talk to individually even though we are significant overall. The manufactures don't really have a way to get us supply that scalpers cannot get into. Big companies generally can get supply if it exists. That is a big if though, as there are real supply problems as well.
> So how long does the microchip shortage continue?
Warning: Paid Pessimist point of view (I've done computer security for far, far too long).
Indefinitely. It doesn't recover. Because (modern, leading process) microchips are the sort of globe spanning supply chain problem that works great, right up until it doesn't. Coolant for some laser is made in this country that's at war. Some critical surface processing chemical is made by that company that had a major power outage and their facility caked up with goo that has to be scraped out. Some semiconductor fab has a worker shortage. Or a water shortage. Or got blown to pieces when some other country tried to invade (TSMC would be nuts if they weren't wired with demolition charges and quietly sure China knew it).
There will always be "something" that interferes with the smooth generation of chips. And there will be some supply, but not as much as people hope for, and they'll be rough around the edges, and, besides, you can't get those surface mount resistors in any quantity right now for your design. And eventually, this starts impacting the funding of the companies working on the newest, latest and greatest process tech, and they don't have the money to continue pushing forward.
We're long past the point when anyone but the most well funded multinationals can even consider a leading process tech foundry - and there are only a few companies on the planet who can make the hardware for it. The supply chain for foundries is just as bad as anything else, if you have a couple billion to drop on one.
And at some point, enough people will find workarounds that don't involve modern silicon that (at least in my arc of the future) demand will drop, so you won't be able to justify the investment in a leading edge fab much beyond the current stuff. Throw a solid recession/depression in, and consumer electronics spending is likely to drop substantially - so there goes a lot of the leading edge demand for some while.
The question, "How much damage can an efficient, just in time optimized global economy take before it fails?" has been discussed for many, many years, and the pessimistic point of view as of now would be, "Less than it's taken and is going to take in the next few years." And at some point, things like "food" and "basic energy" are more important to keep working than the latest consumer toys.
I'm entirely aware this doesn't paint a pretty picture of the future, and it certainly doesn't involve us going to the stars in any quantities, outside perhaps some token boots on Mars. But it's the sort of ragged decline we've seen throughout history, and, I'd argue, that we're firmly in the middle of right now. "Rattling down the backside of the arc of empire, undergoing catabolic collapse" seems to better predict things than a lot of other mental models lately.
I mean it's not like most consumer hardware has to be on the latest nodes. The current hardware is more than enough for any consumer applications I can think of.
Maybe just need to reuse more hardware. Standardize and commodify replacement parts for mobile devices like framework/fairphone. Reduce the amount of IoT crap in toasters/etc. Use multiseat instead of thin clients. Upcycle old computers.
> I mean it's not like most consumer hardware has to be on the latest nodes. The current hardware is more than enough for any consumer applications I can think of.
Electron says, "Hold my beer!"
I would love to see lower software requirements, more long lived systems, etc.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is obsoleting... basically the last decade+ of hardware for Windows 11. It's an uphill fight.
Meh, I keep multiple electron apps, node processes, and chrome windows and tabs open at the same time, and they're really not at all CPU intensive (except for node running tsc builds or tests). It's the RAM usage that is annoying, and even that isn't too terrible.
Edit: of course, I'm running swaywm on linux, so my environment is generally pretty light as it is compared to Windows.
I generally try to use ARM small board computers as much as possible. They really struggle with running a bunch of Electron stuff at the same time, and while you can reasonably use some modern websites on them, it's amazing just how much absolute crap you can get rid of with NoScript/Ghostery/etc, and still have a perfectly functional website.
My massive, powerful, "Do absolutely everything!" computer in college was a dual Pentium III 866, with 768MB RAM. And a hex core, 2GHz ARM box with 4GB RAM can't do half as much, because of just how heavily bloated software is. I still write code, browse the web, chat with people... and I need radically more resources because that's what software development has decided is easy. Meanwhile, stuff like Hexchat for IRC just... uses no resources and works as wonderfully as ever.
I'm guessing RAM is your limiting factor. I've got about 20 tabs open across two chrome windows (separate profiles) and I'm using less than 3gb for my entire system. CPU usage is basically nil since I'm not doing much at the moment but typing.
Throwing slack / spotify / vscode / steam / whatever else on top of that could easily bump it up several more gb. VScode is pretty good, up until you start adding in language servers. The quality of the rest is really hit or miss.
Edit: Out of curiosity, I opened steam, and it immediately took up a little bit of ram, then by the time it finished "loading" it ballooned up to a gig- presumably because of all the fancy animated images and video players and what not the storefront needs. I could definitely do without those things, though I imagine they do correlate to more purchases (there's a name for it, I forget- something about moving images triggering a capture of attention going back to hunting / fight or flight response).
I strongly suspect that we have stopped trying to reduce bloat. The cost in engineering time cannot be sustained. As a dev I can't even afford the time to optimize my local development machine to reduce bloat.
> I mean it's not like most consumer hardware has to be on the latest nodes.
Maybe developers should take some responsibility and stop fucking writing code that's slow as shit and unusable on anything past their company-paid for macbook pros.
In an ideal society programmers would be sat down and given a seven year old mid-range laptop and threatened that if their program lags in the slightest they would be fired and blacklisted from the industry.
Nah. "Raspberry Pi Day at Google." One day a week, your dual Xeon workstation is replaced with a Raspberry Pi 4. 8GB. Overclocked if you want.
It is absolutely adequate to do a lot of things one wants to do. But it will show when you've done something stupid with CPU.
I'm still bitter that Google ruined the Blogger editor interface. Fancy, shiny new interface... that lagged horribly if you had a low power CPU and a bunch of photos in a post. The old interface handled it perfectly, because I wrote an awful lot of blog posts on an old Atom netbook with a nice keyboard.
But, yes, any new hardware performance is more than chewed up by new software abstractions.
Well they’ll just limit table rows to 6 instead of 10.
That’s what React does: Instead of showing a table of 200 rows, the performance of React is so poor that it’s a design trend to make you paginate through 10-line pages. So, soon 6, “for better performance”.
Pay for it my dude. Software developers are perfectly able and willing to develop efficient and snappy software if given enough time to do it.
The reason it is not happening is because market forces don’t favour those solutions. But since you seem to care enough to threaten, fire, and backlist them surely you care enough to pay for the craftmanship required to get what you desire.
This is the problem, and we can't actually do this because we have a shortage of even basic "blub programmers" who can get business logic correct. Developers who are able to produce basically correct simple code are expensive, how much more expensive are people who are able to build low-level secure and optimized code?
The auto industry buys bolts and makes pistons because the marketplace can't make pistons, roughly. They have the know how if the bolt marketplace collapsed to turn steel rod into bolts, maybe not as easily and cheaply as it can be done now, but if the bolt market died they'd make their own bolts.
The commodity microcontroller is dead. My guess is crappy "homemade" older-gen FPGAs made by GM for GM products will be the future of automotive ECUs and other automotive apps.
In 1980, $100M built you an entire fab. It costs GM about $300M to remodel an old assembly plant. They can either go out of business because 2022 chips are unavailable or build their own fab. Hmm I wonder what they'll do?
The nice part about building an older gen FPGA is it quite accurately emulates an older gen chip, usually using a lot more power and requiring a lot more silicon, but at least it works better than "next estimated shipping date 2024"
A fab is $5billion. I know of a large company (I'm not allowed to say who, but you might be able to guess) that when faced with some 16bit CPU going out of production considered building a fab - manufacturing is the core competency, so why shouldn't they make our own chips, and thus keep those old designs based in obsolete CPUs that still work just find running for longer. The cost of a fab was high enough they decided not to. Of course on hindsight if they had built a fab it would have opened just as the supply chain problems started, and the company would have made a mint.
I don't think GM will open a fab on their own. Too expensive for what they need. However a joint GM/Ford/Toyota venture seems possible (if it can get past anti-trust laws!), and that would find customers in the likes of Honda.
> Indefinitely. It doesn't recover. Because (modern, leading process) microchips
Most of our current supply chain problem is on trailing nodes.
Sure, there's not quite enough capacity on the leading nodes: there never is. It's a bit worse now than usual, but...
The big thing that's new here is increased demand plus some disruption on production has shown how little excess production exists for microcontrollers and various low-end ICs in consumer and industrial goods. It's difficult to justify building additional production on mid-end nodes, as margins are likely to fall back down in the future... but one can imagine various ways this nets out OK (e.g. countries deciding domestic production of these items is critical for national security reasons and supplying subsidy).
I've been trying to buy stuff and most of the money goes to the middlemen scalpers.
I made a mistake in a post above, I thought Raspberry PI 2 W were still retail priced at $5, like the old days of the zero (of course those were unobtainable by most people at $5 even in good economic times).
So the Pi foundation is selling for $15 and the market on Amazon has cleared everything for sale below $149.
It would be fair to claim, with some hand waving, that the manufacturer of the Pi boosted the price 200% from $5 to $15, but the scalpers are boosting the price from $15 to maybe $130 will sell and clear the market, so the scalpers are making (150-15)/15*100 = 766% lets round that to 800%.
So for every hyperinflated price dollar, about 20 cents goes to the mfgr and about 80 cents goes to the scalper.
In the long run this destroys middlemen-as-a-service. No matter how inefficient "big corporate" is, its gotta be cheaper than the scalpers, so people are eventually going to buy Pi 2 W zeros from raspi themselves for maybe $40 to $50. Onesie-twosie shipping is expensive for inefficient big corporate so thats maybe even a fair price. Then the scalpers and middlemen will die out with their $130 prices if raspi sells direct for $50.
Like anything, they finally see actual profits and increasing production likely won't increase those profits. So I don't actually see there being too much pressure to increase the production.
There is a reason why truck operators in Africa prefer the older trucks which don't have these fancy electronics. Servicing and parts are not a problem.
This whole business about semiconductors shortages affecting vehicle manufacturing is just ridiculous. Humanity has survived without these advanced electronics for ages.
What difference doesn't make if you don't have electronic geegaws in your vehicle?
That may have been true in the mid 2000's but not today. There was a lot of newer emission equipment back then and the truck manufacturers still hadn't figured it out.
But todays trucks are absolutely more fuel efficient and more reliable. The problem is if they do break, you need a mechanic with a higher level of education to fix them.
Might not be as efficient, but it probably isn't going to stop on the highway with a load of chickens in the beating sun because the diesel was contaminated (at least not right away).
You might not be able to brick your combine if someone steals it, but nobody can brick it while you're trying to get the harvest in either.
Bureacratic enforcement suffers, but who cares as long as the bureacrats get paid, right?
Collision avoidance that likes to have false alarms going around curves on wet, sub-freezing roads. Auto transmission that wants to downshift into redline going down hills. General unpredictable behavior on slick roads where it is pretty important to be able to pick your gear.
Partially this is the company’s fault because they turn off a bunch of stuff for “fuel economy”.
> It's not like arbitrary jackasses can get behind the wheel of these vehicles anyways... there is a reason a commercial licensing program exists.
The problem isn't "arbitrary jackasses", the problem is the relentless pace modern truckers are put through. Utterly insane demands for just-in-time delivery that have absolutely no margin left for inevitable delays or completely unrealistic schedules that many drivers compensate for by driving longer than allowed. Add on that drivers who self-medicate the loneliness on the road with alcohol, dope or other stuff and that explains a majority of the accidents that could be (or are) prevented with collision avoidance systems.
The remainder are irresponsible other motorists who think it's a great idea to merge 2m in front of a truck after overtaking it - yeah of course, the truck driver will be widely awake now, thank you very much...
> delivery that have absolutely no margin left for inevitable delays or completely unrealistic schedules that many drivers compensate for by driving longer than allowed. Add on that drivers who self-medicate the loneliness on the road with alcohol, dope or other stuff and that explains a majority of the accidents that could be (or are) prevented with collision avoidance systems.
Back in the 70s it was like that…
I first started driving in ‘98 and if you weren’t at one of the larger companies you could get away with a lot due to paper logbooks. Now it’s all electronic logs and GPS tracking so you can get away with basically nothing, gone are the days where you delivered the load and then made your logs look pretty — up until the DOT would start targeting specific companies so they would crack down on the drivers turning in falsified logs.
And drug/alcohol testing has been mandatory since the Reagan administration. People still do it but they don’t last very long.
One in a while they give me a load or two where I have to push it harder than I like but that just burns all my hours so they can’t do it very often if they want the truck to keep moving. In the before times you’d just rewrite your logbook and magically have enough hours to keep moving but that doesn’t work anymore.
Remind me again, what's your point of exposure to the American trucking industry?
It's kind of ironic that someone on a different continent feels as though they can speak authoritatively on the subject. This kind of hubris, albeit in the Diamler-Benz office rather than wherever you're sitting, is exactly how the half-baked tech features the person you are replying to is complaining about make it into the truck. Of course there's multiple parties at fault. The American bean counters have no incentive to not buy those features even if they make the job worse for the employees.
There was one time I was driving around the Atlanta Super Speedway and a car intentionally slammed on the brakes right in front of me. Without collision avoidance I would have slammed right into the back of him because the truck was breaking before I even realized what they were doing. Not that big of a deal though since the truck had a dashcam which would have shown them to be clearly at fault.
Other than that it is mostly just annoying and slams on the brakes for things like people turning (while you’re actively slowing down) or people slowing down on the exit ramp who are no longer on the highway. That last one I used to use to wake up my co-driver when I was running team when it was time to switch because, why not.
> Why does something with as much mass as a semi truck have the ability to wrest control away from the operator in the first place?
Because humans - even highly trained professional drivers (who are in general much better than the average person on the road) are terrible drivers that make mistakes all the time. Not to mention humans drivers are limited to two eyes looking in one direction (checking the mirrors takes your eyes off the road, so while you should it is a compromise), a computer has a lot more potential for inputs that humans cannot see.
Now I will admit that making safety programs that work right in all cases is a hard problem. However it is competing against an imperfect system.
Fact checking was hard before the internet became widespread. And proofreading even harder for things that look right at first glance. It took me about a minute to realize that idol should be spelled aidoru.
If Marshall McLuhan can learn to live with the wrong spelling of "The Medium Is the Massage", I think Gibson can forgive himself for a rough romanization.
I suspect it is not the module itself. There need to be some specific components in those modules that have a high demand. On a very specific application. Like ... Tanks?
I have to wonder if this is one of those somewhat "implanted" stories to get support for moving towards John Deere style DRM on some of their parts. That is, not that it's made up, but that perhaps the scale is being exaggerated a bit.
Edit: Yes, I'm aware there's some DRM. So far, though, not as locked down as the example of John Deere, cryptographic control that requires phone-home, etc.
The article implies the control units are coded to the vehicle's VIN at least to some degree and mentions Freightliner asks people to look out for logged errors indicating someone attempted to use a control unit from a different VIN. There's also mention of a separate password function. However, if there's a market for these units, someone's likely developed a tool to "re code" the control units.
But: "Moving toward" to DRM? At least in the passenger car market this started happening a long, long time ago.
ECUs and dashes on most VAG (VW Audi Group) cars are coded to each other and have been for around two decades if not longer, though in a fair number of cases you can re-pair them with a non-VW scantool and don't need the dealer, but it's usually a complex and very specific process.
Volvo Cars started DRM'ing the fuck out of every single component that sits on the vehicle's data bus in the mid-2000's after they got bought up by Ford.
If you replaced any component that had a bus connection - which includes things like headlights - you would have to bring the car to a Volvo dealer, who might or might not humor you if they were not the source of the part and the ones to install it ("gosh, we're just fully booked up, going to be two weeks before we can get to it..." etc) The dealer would connect the car to their terminal, which would in turn request an encrypted firmware image for the component from Volvo servers in Sweden, specific to your car's VIN and that component's serial number. That encrypted image would then be sent back and written to the control module.
When that server gets shut off, hundreds of millions of Volvo cars and parts will rapidly become useless save for their scrap value. This isn't a trivial matter; at least in the US, the average age of vehicles on the road is the oldest it's ever been, and given the country's worsening economic inequality, that trend is likely to continue.
> ECUs and dashes on most VAG (VW Audi Group) cars are coded to each other and have been for around two decades if not longer
The mid-90s electronics in my Range Rover will cope with swapping dashboards by programming the mileage to be whichever is highest between the BECM and dash. It'll moan about "ODOMETER FAULT" for a bit but eventually it'll just give up telling you and set them to be the same. While it's possible to reprogram them it's extremely nontrivial, and no commercial units exist that can do it - and the poke-and-hope brigade that offer "mileage correction" will almost certainly leave you with more problems than you started with.
The electronics in them are very similar to late-80s BMW E32 7-series with a bizarre mix of Motorola, NEC and Intel parts.
The average age of vehicles is trending up because cars are more reliable and just last longer. It used to be an event to roll over a 5-digit odometer. Now, 250K miles is just getting broken in.
One 1998 Range Rover here with 130,000 miles on the clock, the other with 270,000 - and the latter did 100,000 miles in about six or seven years since I got it.
There's a guy on my forum with an ex-police Range Rover the same age as mine that is now considerably north of 400,000 miles.
Sure. Those are examples of cars that post-date many of the significant longevity improvements (galvanizing, better primers, electronic fuel injection, ABS) that are helping to drive up the average age. You can think of that 1998 Range Rover as offsetting one 2022 car to result in the average of just over 12 years.
Our 2005 CR-V and 2015 LEAF also offset each other to arrive at the average age.
Longevity improvements introduced 25 years ago pull the average age up far more strongly than improvements introduced only 10 years ago and an improvement introduced just last year has an effect indistinguishable from zero.
Most rusted, or were discarded. They were forced to die.
There were loads of cars I, and my friends inherited, because the car was "old", a repair was $500, and the car was only worth $1k (this is the 80s, so 80s figures...), and the car had a tiny rust spot or two.
Yet that repair done at home, with a friend, could be done for 50 bucks and parts from a wrecker.
This is not survivor bias, these cars were in great shape, but instead for appearance sake, and "estimated value of the car" sake, people would throw it away.
I think there is likely a more throw it away culture overall now than in the 70s.
Cars started to last significantly longer when body rust-proofing improved (mostly in the 80s for American cars), when electronic fuel injection reduced fuel wash in the engines, and when anti-collision tech reduced the number of write offs of lower value used cars (ABS being perhaps the single biggest one, which prevents a lot of $2000 accidents from taking a $2500 used car off the road).
A carbureted, unprotected mild-steel car built in 1959, 1969, or 1979 was much less likely to be on the road 23 years later than a fuel-injected, galvanized steel 1999 model is to be on the road today.
We've mostly negated rust proofing improvements by using road salt that's more effective at getting everywhere and using salt in more places (you'll notice that the white crusted post-snowstorm hellscape was not a thing in the 90s or '00s). OEMs have gotten good at using plastic cosmetic trim to cover the initial rust points (wheel arches, rocker panels, etc, etc,) so that instead of needing attention after 10yr the problem can be ignored until a much later date when the rust finally makes it out from behind that plastic (and your car starts failing safety inspection if you live in an applicable state).
Agreed overall, though I think that last sentence is probably a very good thing.
If OEMs improve their product so that it does not require an expensive cosmetic rust repair at 10 years, but instead the cosmetic problem is hidden so the car lasts an extra 5-7 years before becoming a throwaway product, the consumer has a net win overall.
They have to be mostly open because someone getting a truck repaired is pretty likely to be in the middle of bumfuck Kansas and needs the truck moving right now so they don’t take a claim on a multi-$100k load.
I’m sitting in one of our terminals right now and there a lot more trucks than usual that are (maybe) waiting on parts to get back on the road. A lot of money tied up in those things not generating revenue parked in the yard.
Pretty much everything in transportation is being pushed in the direction of centralized control; hence, the focus on EVs and the push against biofuels.
The marketing is all "climate change", but the reality is that biofuel-based vehicles can, in theory, be manufactured locally with machine tools, and the fuel can be grown locally as well. I'd bet money that they're better for the environment, too. And no, not interested in some "study" from Harvard funded by people that have a deeply-vested interest in EVs.
Modern battery tech is complicated. Manufacturing has to be much more centralized. And has plenty of places to insert remotely-operated control mechanisms linking to cellular networks.
> biofuel-based vehicles can, in theory, be manufactured locally with machine tools
The excellent thing about electricity is that it's fungible. Electricity from a wind farm in the North Sea, a nuclear plant in the South of France or a Texan solar panel is identical as far as the electric vehicle is concerned. In contrast with bio-fuels if you can't make the right chemical soup for this specific model of engine well too bad, buy a new engine or undertake expensive conversion.
There are immediate practical advantages (many EV owners never spend any time putting "fuel" into their vehicle, unlike with ICE, since just charging it whenever it's sat around doing nothing is easy with electricity) but there are also large strategic advantages in terms of energy independence.
To get even the poor efficiency of modern internal combustion engines took a lot of careful engineering which would be undone by your "local machine tools" approach, so that makes the bargain even worse. In contrast it's easy to build high efficiency electric motors, and we've been doing that in many applications for years.
To the extent the answer isn't EVs that's because the answer is less car culture.
> In contrast it's easy to build high efficiency electric motors, and we've been doing that in many applications for years.
Playing devil's advocate: in the case of EVs, the hard part is not the motor, it's the battery. If it were easy to build high efficiency and high capacity batteries which are also small and light enough to be used on a vehicle, we'd have EVs everywhere long ago. (A second hard part is the power semiconductors, to convert the DC from the battery to variable frequency AC which can be used by these high efficiency electric motors.)
In contrast with bio-fuels if you can't make the right chemical soup for this specific model of engine well too bad, buy a new engine or undertake expensive conversion
Something like biodiesel is almost entirely a drop-in replacement, and diesel engines will burn a wide range of flammable liquids. Gasoline engines can be fairly easily converted to burn a bunch of other fuels too.
> diesel engines will burn a wide range of flammable liquids
Rudolf Diesel's engine will indeed burn lots of things to produce power. But the diesel engine in your 2022 car isn't just Mr Diesel's machine with nicer bodywork, it has been carefully fine-tuned for efficiency, ride, emissions and other considerations, including by using self-lubricating fuel injectors. If you use the wrong fuel on a good day you destroy those benefits and on a bad day you're also destroying the expensive engine itself.
Sure, but the biofuel is a lot more energy dense. People do buy large tanks of fuel so they can drive long distances where there are no gas stations. Think trips across Alaska, or Northern Yukon. Most of us live in range of a gas station and so just stopping for gas every few hundred miles is more reasonable than a large tank (which has issues), but you can do that. You cannot get nearly as much range out of a battery, no matter how large the trailer is.
It is true that if you need energy density then you want to carry fuel and not use batteries, although whether biofuel makes a good choice I'm dubious about.
'course if you're just driving a hundred miles to see Aunt Tilly, and then fifty more to see Grandma, and then a hundred more to see your old friend from high school, well, those people all got electricity, and as we saw the EV doesn't care that it's not that premium Supercharger electricity, it's all the same if you can wait. So stay the night.
Long distance wilderness trips are both (a) not something most people ever do, so we are not talking about a mass market product here and (b) not well suited to the typical private motor vehicle of today. Who is maintaining roads across the wilderness that so few people use there's no gas station ?
I didn't ask who built them 'cos that'll be the US Government or a State Government, both huge fans of building sexy new projects. But to drive on it a decade later it needs maintenance, which isn't sexy new infrastructure and I'm guessing if there's no gas stations there's no road repair budget. Which means now you need an off-roader, maybe a pretty serious one, or running out of fuel will be the very least of your problems.
Those 1% trips just outside a EV range are a problem. Liquid fuels are everywhere and fast. Charging infrastructure is still lacking, though if you plan at least most trips are possible. The time to charge is still ... though realistically you should take those breaks anyway most people don't
Aptera is less extreme than that, but still a lot more efficient than a normal car, mainly due to aerodynamics, plus light weight and three wheels. Take a glance at aptera.us and you'll see how far they took the aerodynamics.
They claim up to 40 miles of range collected per day, if you're someplace like southern California, and max out their panel options. The car is pretty flat and wide, which also helps.
If you don't have much sun available, you can plug into a regular wall outlet and add range reasonably quickly.
It just doesn't make any sense if you know anything about physics. Sun provides about 1kW of power per square meter.....at noon, at the equator, with no clouds.
Automotive solar panels like they use are about 20% efficient. Your average car roof is....let's be super forgiving and say 2sqm. So in the middle of the day, at the equator, you are generating about 400W of power.
The average EV battery is 50kWh. So you'd need 125 hours in full sun to recharge it fully. During a regular sunny day you'd get maybe.....2-3kWh back into your battery? So yeah, about enough to cover ~10 miles in a regular EV.
Sure it's better than nothing, but remember that this is in ideal conditions. In less than ideal conditions you are talking yeah, enough energy to cover a mile or two per day of charging. It's just silly.
Bear in mind too in winter the days are shorter, sunlight is weaker, and you're using *aaaaaaall* of the electrical goodies.
Even down south here at 56°N there's about five hours of sunlight in winter and as you get further north it just gets shorter. That's about enough charge to get the length of a supermarket car park.
This illustrates how inefficient cars are for individual transportation. An eBike takes between 10 and 20 Wh per mile. Gas is so inexpensive and energy dense that we just got unware how ridiculous it is to drive by car even on short distances.
You seem to forget that bar exceptions (people working on the road all day), most passenger cars are staying parked 99% of the time and use for small errands.
The aptera is also built to provide up to 1000miles in its highest spec out of one complete charge.
Right and how long does it take to charge that 1000 mile range in an average British city? A full year?
And I'm not forgetting it - I'm just saying that the overall gain doesn't seem to be worth it. The cost of solar panels integrated into the car would pay for a lot of electricity from the grid instead.
Right, if you need to fully charge then plug it in. You'll do that after a road trip. But if you live somewhere sunny and typically drive 20 miles a day, you can keep it topped up by just parking in the sun.
Some will find this worthwhile, others won't. Apartment dwellers without convenient chargers might find it handy. The comment I replied to advocated doing your own energy production, and if that's what you care about, grid power doesn't really compete.
The aptera is still plugable and you would still benefit from the efficiency even in sorry sad UK...And I have seen nowhere anyone saying it was for everyone. It only have 2 seats and limited luggage capacity for a start, it won't replace a family van.
I live in Andalusia where decent sunlight is all year and I would love a similar thing with 4 seats. With only 2 I don't really see the advantage over using my motorbike which is much easier to park.
I started by talking about solar collection on the roof of a building, which applies to any electric vehicle.
But Aptera actually has panels on the car. That would be useless on a Tesla, but the Aptera is far more aerodynamic and only has three wheels. They don't claim to fully recharge in a day, just to get enough extra range in a day to cover many people's typical driving needs.
No, I replied to you because you felt the need to hammer on the misunderstanding in the comment you replied to. The horse, it's dead, look, it doesn't twitch when I beat upon it!
Both of you had the opportunity to not assume the first post was stupid but passed on it.
Color me surprised to see that name again! I thought Aptera was dead and gone. I hope they fare better this time. The solar car route could be an interesting niche.
Firefighting is one of those absolutely basic parts of civilization who's importance is obvious to everyone. If people are robbing firefighters then social cohesion is completely dead.
Best I can think of is that parent commenter was referring to the fact that many fire and EMS vehicles use a Freightliner chassis/engine?
Our fire department needs a new ambulance. There is a two year waiting list for one.
The ineptitude of the automotive industry in dragging its heels relying on outdated semiconductor manufacturing is just mind-boggling, but so is the lack of action by the administration to order prioritizing parts and vehicles for public safety, followed by cargo and mass passenger transportation.
Can they do that? I mean they could buy things on the open market sure, but force sellers to sell (at presumably a lower price since if ambulance manufacturers aren't winning bids now they probably aren't paying the most) to particular consumers and not others.
Please rethink using "bad apples" in this context in the future. The saying about bad apples is a warning about the corrupting influence of a single corrupt person on a group.
It's always confused me, too. You don't leave rotten apples in your fruit bowl.
I’ve given this quite a bit of thought recently because, well…
The common usage of “a few bad apples” has changed to mean the group isn’t responsible, as a whole, for the actions of a few instead of the old warning about removing the bad ones before they corrupt the bunch.
Like during the “peaceful” protests a couple years ago. It was the “bad apples” who were burning police cars and looting stores, the group has no responsibility for their actions.
Not so for the Capital Insurrection though. They don’t get to claim “a few bad apples” and the people who were there to peacefully protest and merely held up a sign on the lawn were equally as guilty as the ones who entered the capital to forcefully stop the election results.
I hated the rioting of 2020 as much as the next guy, but it’s worth remembering that the bad apples doing the rioting because another group of bad apples kept killing black people and getting away with it.
You do have a point about the flattening of everyone who came to Washington on January 6th down into a caricature of the worst of them. That happens a lot in the media these days. See also, protestors, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, etc. One side highlights the worst of each group, and the other selectively highlights the best.
Sucks, but apparently everyone decided we have to pick sides about everything, and stick to them at all costs.
Many of these thefts are related to economic issues but they come and go. Here's the NY Times in 2008 talking about an epidemic of catalytic coverter thefts
That appears to be ramping up again. One of the people on a project I'm working with them on just had theirs stolen.
And it could total their car!
People driving used Hondas may find out insurance won't cover, or will want to just total used cars due to the converter being worth more than the paper value of the car, despite a used market valuing the car much higher!
Cost $1,200 to $2,400 to replace and due to the last round of this theft happening, the legal requirements are now stiff. One can't just go get one of these and install anymore. Has to be done in a shop, and there is traceability on everything. Expensive.
Yet the thieves can still somehow trade the metals.
> Yet the thieves can still somehow trade the metals.
It isn't hard to melt down the metals and extract the valuable ones. A proper factory can do a much better job (get more of the valuable metals out), but it is something I could profitably do in my backyard over a fire. I haven't looked into the details of refining platinum, but I doubt is is much different from any other metal. (when I looked into it I lived in an area with a lot of iron deposits, I've since moved and no longer have access to iron ore so that potential hobby is dead to me)
Once you have raw metals you can claim any source you want. Just form them into a ring and say you were saving it for your anniversary, but your wife left you - I'm sure you can come up with other ways to make it look like got a legal source.
I don't understand the legal requirement thing. In my state, I'm pretty sure I could put a straight pipe down there and I'd never have an issue. In fact, I'd probably look into it if it happened to me. That said, I know my state is pretty lax about that sort of thing. Curious how it's actually enforced in others.
You might need to install a downstream O2 sensor simulator to prevent an OBD2 failure to verify function of the (now missing) converter, but those are readily available for off-road use as I’m sure would be your application. ;)
The law changed to prohibit the sale of used converters for installation or the installation of used on a different car, but I can still buy a new one and install it in my driveway if I want. (You might have a law in your state to prevent that, I guess.)
