
The Best Thing That Can Happen to Electric Cars Is What Happened to 1990s PCs - ourmandave
http://jalopnik.com/the-best-thing-that-can-happen-to-electric-cars-is-what-1795506063
======
pwthornton
This is the worst of the technological glibness from "car guys."

Modern cars are incredibly sophisticated devices with many different computer
systems running a lot of code. They all run real time OSes, which are quite
distinct from an operating system like Windows. They have to do their
functions correctly 100% of the time. Now cars are getting tons and tons of
sensors. RADAR, LIDAR, visual cameras, etc., all running sophisticated
algorithms.

There are massive safety reasons (not just to yourself, but to your fellow
man) to not tinkering with these systems.

I know a lot of car guys lament that it's harder to work on a car today, but
your average consumer is delighted by this. Cars are much more reliable today
than they were before. Most people don't want the freedom to work on a car
that constantly needs to be worked on because it is always breaking. They want
something that is reliable and with minimal maintenance just works every
single day.

Cars are also much safer, with much more robust safety technology. I'm a fan
of Jalopnik, and I like to stay up on the latest in car technology, but my
interest is from an average user standpoint.

Electric cars with self-driving technology is really exciting. I'm excited for
this future. I'm going to support it. I don't need a car to tinker with for my
everyday needs, nor do the vast majority of people. If I want a car to tinker
with, I'll get a project car for track use.

~~~
Animats
_I know a lot of car guys lament that it 's harder to work on a car today, but
your average consumer is delighted by this._

Right. I restore antique Teletype machines from the 1930s and 1940s as a
hobby. Those are totally maintainable. Everything is attached with screws and
locknuts, and you can remove and replace any part. There's a 200 page manual
of adjustments. They require annual oiling with over 500 oiling points. Most
take one drop of oil, but there are several oil fill points. In heavy use,
there's an annual cleaning, which involves partial disassembly and a soak in a
cleaning bath in a repair shop. I've restored five of these machines to full
operation. Some are almost a century old.

(Plug: some of those machines will be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk
Convention, at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose CA, tomorrow through Sunday.)

Imagine trying to sell a printer today that required regular oiling. That
would not be acceptable, even if it increased the life of the printer by a
factor of 5.

Teletype Corporation recognized this with the Teletype Model 33, the yellow
plastic thing that powered 1970s minicomputers. Those were rated for one year
of continuous operation un-oiled, three years if regularly oiled. Few people
oiled them. They wore out much faster than the older heavy-duty machines.
Today, it's easier to restore a Model 15 Teletype from 1930 than a Model 33
from 1970. The 33 will have worn out parts, some plastic. The Model 15 won't;
it's all hardened steel and cast iron.

There are heavy trucks built that way, but cars? No.

~~~
shostack
As an aside--do you enjoy the oiling process? A little bit here or there could
be a fun maintenance task. 500+? That just sounds tedious and not really fun
for a hobby...

~~~
addVenture
I'd recommend a read of The Practicing Mind to see how it might be different.

A tedious task can easily be therapeutic if you go in with a "beginner's
mind". It's kind of meditative, being present in the moment through the whole
task.

~~~
shostack
Thanks for the recommendation--this is actually something I've wanted to learn
more about as I struggle to get past the early stages of learning guitar.

------
squarefoot
From the article: "I want a future where someone can go to a junkyard and yank
a motor from a Tesla Model H (you know, the one with the T-top) and plan to
pop it into their Reatta EV knowing that the connections will fit. "

Good luck with that, and it has nothing to do with safety since even safety
can be standardized: there are no chances one can stick a HP cartridge into an
Epson printer; cars are no different. The tap based economics we live in is
based exactly on the opposite: find a potential source of revenue, then once
you have got/patented/bought it, close it behind a faucet and start asking
money to open it. Openness would destroy that practice, and the legal system
in every "western" country fights to enforce this exact behaviour. Also, being
called a communist after decades of well crafted negative propaganda doesn't
help.

~~~
Animats
_" I want a future where someone can go to a junkyard and yank a motor from a
Tesla Model H (you know, the one with the T-top) and plan to pop it into their
Reatta EV knowing that the connections will fit."_

There's no market for that capability in cars. Some heavy trucks do have it;
you can buy some heavy trucks and put in a Cummins or Caterpillar Diesel
engine. But for smaller cars, it's not worth the headaches.

Powertrain switches are not impossible. A routine student exercise in serious
automotive schools is to put an engine and transmission from one car into
another car, making the necessary parts. Stanford and Renovo put an electric
powertrain into a DeLorean and made it capable of autonomous drifting.[1]

Even in PCs, there's no market for that. 80% of desktop PCs are never opened
during their operating life, and the fraction for laptops is probably lower.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNIDcT0Zdj4)

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internalfx
The comments here seem pretty anti-build-your-own. I really hope people don't
start legislating that you can't build your own car. I build personal electric
vehicles now, and I have aspirations of building a car.

I hope legislators don't derail me.

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mzakharo1
Safety, risk of losing lives, is a factor missing from the constraints imposed
on PC manufacturers. Safety may play a larger role as an obstacle on this idea
getting real traction.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't see how designing cars in such a way that, say, batteries are
interchangeable would compromise safety.

~~~
acuozzo
The problem is that far too many people don't do product research beyond "Does
it fit?".

I've seen a good amount of destroyed audio equipment resulting from the owner
failing to do compatibility research beyond verifying that two components
could be connected together. "What's an ohm? Do I need one of those?"

I've seen people get the most baffled faces from not being able to pass a high
bandwidth signal through the hundreds of feet of hilariously thin uncertified
HDMI cable that they just ran through their walls. "But the box said high
speed!"

Interchangeable batteries in cars would mean that drivers are only one el
cheapo Amazon third party generic out-of-spec "compatible" battery away from
stopping at a red light next to a moving bomb.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't see how this is any different from now when any yahoo can buy car
parts from wherever and try installing them.

~~~
acuozzo
I suppose it depends on how easy it is to change.

When I read "interchangeable batteries" I imagine a pretty simple procedure:
open hatch, pop out old battery, put in new battery, close hatch.

When I read "install car parts" I imagine a procedure at least an order of
magnitude more difficult requiring knowledge and experience working on
automobiles.

Changing batteries is a task nearly all people have done at least once by the
time they start driving. If changing the batteries in your car is as easy as
changing the AAs in your Game Boy then I imagine many people would be willing
to do it without thinking twice.

~~~
emodendroket
If it is truly that simple then I think the risk of screwing it up is also
considerably less.

I mean, you know, it's not the same size and doesn't serve the same purpose,
but today people's cars have batteries in them and you can walk into Sears and
buy one. I assume the battery for an EV is huge and not conveniently located
though.

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pdelbarba
Does anyone have any history on what motivated the industry to commoditize PC
hardware? The current trend is in the opposite direction, with apple going
back to proprietary components and the mobile phone/tablet market is moving
further and further from user serviceable designs. Unless there's some
economic driver (being able to source from more suppliers?) I don't see this
happening.

~~~
mikestew
I don't understand your question. The original IBM PC was built using as many
commercial, off-the-shelf parts as possible in order to shorten time-to-
market. The hardware was commoditized from day one, by design.

~~~
pdelbarba
I'm asking how commoditized hardware come to be over earlier computers with
non COTS parts.

If this is the first modular computer, why was all that hardware on the
shelves in the first place?

~~~
cwyers
It wasn't the first modular computer. The big thing with the IBM PC is that
IBM didn't manage to have a single significant component that they licensed
exclusively; the most obvious culprit for this was DOS, which they licensed
from Microsoft. Other companies at the time had OSes they controlled the
distribution of. But Microsoft was able and very willing to sell any company
the rights to distribute DOS.

~~~
mohaine
Well, there was the custom BIOS that they owned outright. This was enough
until it was "clean room" cloned.

------
hunterjrj
I'm kinda-sorta excited by the author's idea, but there are (at least) three
major differences facing a would-be do-it-yourselfer between an automobile and
a 1990s-era PC that should temper his optimism:

1\. For many people, their automobile is their primary mode of transportation.
Tinkering with it and potentially making it unavailable for use is not
something many will risk.

2\. There is a clear difference in tooling requirements between popping in a
shiny 14.4k model (90s era, after all) and swapping out a piece of drive
train.

3\. Component cost

~~~
coredog64
> 2\. There is a clear difference in tooling requirements between popping in a
> shiny 14.4k model (90s era, after all) and swapping out a piece of drive
> train.

You'd be surprised at how easy it is to swap out weird and wonderful
drivetrain parts [0]. People put water-cooled drivetrains into vehicles that
were originally air-cooled. People put GM V8s into foreign cars that only ever
had small V6s or inline 6s.

There's a burgeoning industry in creating swap kits for putting EV drivetrains
into cars as well [1]. It's mostly settling on standardized components.

[0] [http://www.engineswapdepot.com/](http://www.engineswapdepot.com/) [1]
[http://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40](http://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Putting a chevy V8 into a V12 Jaguar was a common way to "fix" it.

~~~
qbrass
The company that pioneered the swap was named 'Jags That Run'.

------
madengr
At least the charging ports are standardized, somewhat.

Remember when car stereos used to be a standard size (DIN chassis), and you
could easily swap in new hardware? That went away with the advent of nav
systems.

Stuff is now too intertwined to be standardized.

~~~
marcosdumay
At least around here, that went away because thieves wouldn't go after non-
standard stereos, so people wanted the non-standard ones.

------
vvanders
It's a nice dream but I'd probably look to what's been happening in the Cell
Phone/Laptop space instead.

Weight and therefore efficiency is at a premium for EVs so deep vertical
integration will probably be preferred method of assembly.

------
shostack
This article seems to start with what may end up being a false assumption.
Namely that we will own cars as individuals vs. renting them from a
subscription service.

We see where Tesla is going with that, and I guarantee others are considering
the same approach. And to a degree, it makes some sense. Of course "owning a
car" is a concept that is deeply engrained in American culture and society. So
those who grew up with that will likely lament or fight its loss. Even people
like myself who understand the massive benefits to the environment, safety,
traffic, economy etc. will still miss the feel of driving down a windy
mountain road.

But those who will grow up in a world of self-driving cars? They largely won't
care. That time will be freed up for being on their mobile devices, chatting
with friends, sleeping, or doing whatever else it is they would do with that
time back.

Depending on how our economy goes, it could also make less and less sense to
own as has been the trend for a bit now. If you live in a dense urban area,
there's a decent chance today that you already decided to forego owning a car
in favor of public transit, car sharing services, or ride sharing like
Uber/Lyft because of the costs.

So in a world where reliable, well-paying employment is harder to come by, and
cost of living increases are outpacing wage increases, owning a car might just
not be as much of a necessity.

That of course brings its own set of issues when everything becomes a
subscription or on-demand services with regards to lock-in, privacy,
monopolies, etc., but that's another debate.

~~~
emodendroket
A network of rental self-driving cars? Isn't this just a more wasteful version
of buses?

~~~
zardo
No. Unless the bus in your town picks you up wherever you are and takes you
directly where you want to go.

~~~
emodendroket
It seems like it would be way less wasteful for these cars to take you to a
hub and then you ride a bus then just having them operate a car the whole way
through. I mean, hell, put privacy booths in the bus if you want.

~~~
zardo
It would be even less wasteful if you walked.

~~~
emodendroket
But the idea of tying this vast new infrastructure to some sort of public
transportation doesn't really decrease the efficiency of travel all that much.

------
itomato
There are parallels with what has happened with Kit Cars since The Fuel
Crisis, at least. You could build one today with plans from a Popular
Mechanics if inclined.

What we have today with tech advancents, build-out of infrastructure and
acceptance of the technology seems to have little impact on that "kit"
approach.

I think a better analogy might be the Pre-War Automobile Coach-builder. The
body was made by a different company than the drive train. Economies of scale
and the demand for cars changed that.

A new class of Automobile could arise if a company could farm styling out to a
famous house; Ghia for example, build a body from that design, and have an
opportunity to provide interior fitment and design to the degree of Bentley
and Rolls Royce, or down-spectrum toward Kia and Suzuki.

In any case, we're likely to see eddies like Water-cooled, UV-reactive power
converters and fiberglass monstrosities as seen at a 1970's Autorama.

------
payne92
Nice concept, BUT, when cars fail, people are hurt and/or lose jobs because
they can't reliably make it to work.

Cars are two orders of magnitude more expensive than PCs, and are not surfing
Moore's law.

~~~
emodendroket
I'm not sure I see why interchangeable parts talking to each other using a
standard interface means "unsafe."

------
JustSomeNobody
People have in some ways been talking about this for quite some time. I think
I remember reading something about having hot swappable batteries about a
decade ago. This way you drive up to a station, it lifts your vehicle into the
air, robots swap out your battery with another, fully charged one, and you're
off again.

I can't image Tesla, GM or anyone else getting on board with the idea though.
Much less extending it to include other parts.

~~~
ferongr
The issue I think is that battery packs are designed as stressed members of
the unibody to save space and weight, so they can't be made universal without
compromising on capacity and weight. With frequent replacement you'd run into
problems with fasteners and threads and liability issues in case of incorrect
assembly.

~~~
emodendroket
> liability issues in case of incorrect assembly

How is this different from a car today? If you go to replace the brakes and
you do it wrong it would be unsafe too.

~~~
ferongr
Generally, you only do brake-jobs one every some 10s of thousands of miles,
while battery replacements would be not only more often but also performed at
"charging stations" that would probably employ less skilled persons ("It's
only 20 bolts")

~~~
emodendroket
I don't know that battery replacements would be that frequent, nor do I think
gas station mechanics are unheard of now.

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squozzer
This isn't a bad idea. Beyond the concerns raised by other commenters,
building a personal car from commodity components may not happen because we'll
no longer own cars, but instead subscribe to a transportation service.

The cost of which might depend heavily upon the cost and serviceability of the
service provider's fleet.

If your market doesn't mind riding around in automotive version of a no-name
PC, the Lego approach might work very well.

------
ams6110
> it’s already being realized that electric drivetrains are becoming something
> of a commodity, and not the huge differentiator that drivetrains are in ICE
> cars

There's a big difference between the drivetrain in a Tesla and a Leaf.

Even if there weren't, I don't agree with the premise. The basic ICE engine
and drivetrain in a car is not a differentiator either, at least as far as
normal "family" cars are concerned.

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yuhong
I should also mention highway guardrails, where incompatiblity can harm
people: [http://kdvr.com/2016/11/22/colorado-inspecting-every-
guardra...](http://kdvr.com/2016/11/22/colorado-inspecting-every-guardrail-
system-for-installation-errors/)

------
emodendroket
It'd be cool but what's the incentive for any of the manufacturers to do this?

~~~
bryanlarsen
AFAICT, the car makers outsource most of their components to companies like
Bosch, Denso, Magna & Delphi. Standardization would allow car makers to avoid
single-supplier lock-in. Standardization would allow parts makers to expand
their markets.

~~~
RealityVoid
For what is' worth, I get a feeling part makers, the big ones, are content
with the market as it is. They are horribly inefficiend and morally outdated
and still make heaps and heaps of money.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I don't think any part of that last sentence is true...

~~~
emodendroket
I feel like _somebody_ is making money from crazy expensive OEM parts.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Making money? Yes. Making heaps and heaps of money? Probably not.

Expensive parts are usually expensive for a good reason. Typical reasons are:
time consuming to build; tiny market, so costs are spread over a small number
of orders; materials are expensive and cost of mistakes is high; overhead is
high because of the loans on expensive machinery and supplies & power to keep
them running; combinations of the above!

Having talked to people in the automotive supply industry, it's a low-margin,
cutthroat way to make money. Not a whole lot of people getting rich making
auto parts. At least not in the lower tiers.

~~~
RealityVoid
Maybe it was an exaggeration from my part with the heaps of money. I don't do
budgets, I write software, but I've seen the price the parts we're building
come with and I have an ideea what it's worth. I just feel that the way they
approach the problem is very inefficient, they could do things better cheaper,
more reliable if they had a better approach, but thye don't and I feel,
compared to other markets, the presults are very expensive relative to what
they deliver.

------
lazyjones
YMMV, but I don't want the average car owners to replace their hardware with
whatever they found on Aliexpress, especially if those cars are supposed to
drive autonomously at some point.

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tyingq
400 volts at 60 amps floating around in there though.

------
notadoc
Become cheap, widely adopted, and commodified?

Or become big heavy unwieldy pieces of plastic loaded with stickers and coming
with a large tech spec sheet?

