An even bigger conflict of interest with auto dealers is that they make most of their profit from service
I am old enough to remember what owning a car was like when things were changing away from mechanical devices one could understand and tinker with and becoming nondescript hunks of plastic you had to buy from a manufacturer. (I'm talking about the ignition system, as one specific example.) There was always a bit of a sinking feeling for me along with a sense that the world was being dumbed down and manipulated for profit. As programmers and technical people, we should be able to see many parallels!
That said, dumbing down the world in some ways is not necessarily a bad thing and can be exceedingly positive. One might miss the twisty, dusty country road in leisure time, but curse it when it's raining and the road has turned into an impassable morass. Reliable, boring, convenient transportation is great sometimes, like when you're driving someone going into labor to the hospital.
Maintenance free electric cars that drive themselves will be one of those positive simplifying things.
Yeah, I remember those times, too; perhaps less nostalgically than you do. Take your ignition system example. Sure, one could dig in there and replace and adjust the points. But you did it because you had to, you had to do it regularly, and it would be adjusted correctly exactly once: after you did the job. From there, the points immediately started wearing and it would not be exactly right until you did it again. Solid-state ignition, please.
Synchronizing three Weber carbs? Oh, yeah, good times. Good times that involved poisonous mercury to boot. Port fuel injection, please.
Don't get me wrong, there was a time I liked working on cars, too. So much so, I was a professional ASE-certified mechanic for a while. I also like my Scion xB that in 70K miles we've done nothing to except insert gas, change the oil, and put a set of tires on it. I don't miss having to slap new points and plugs in it before a weekend trip.
And for the Tesla tie-in, our Leaf is about as much of an appliance as you're going to get in a car. There's something to be said about a car whose maintenance schedule doesn't fill a page.
> Reliable, boring, convenient transportation is great sometimes, like when you're driving someone going into labor to the hospital.
Or great even for something as simple as getting to work in the morning. I've owned my share of Triumphs and Fiats. I enjoy my dumbed down existence that doesn't involve a late-night session under the hood because I have to be at work the next day.
I mean, I see your point. But if most folks are like the cranky, older version of me now, if they wanted finicky transportation that needs constant maintenance they'd buy a horse.
Hah, I'm glad you mentioned points and carbs. Those are the two examples of systems I just don't want to have to screw with ever again.
Carbs are great until something in the environment changes and they're not perfect anymore. I want MAF's, o2 sensors, etc, thanks.
I think my favorite car was my late 80's toyota truck with a 22RE. For my taste (which would vary wildly for another person) it had the perfect blend of technology while keeping things reliable and easy to work on. But it was still just something I enjoyed working on because I enjoy working on things.
For a day to day car, I'd rather have something I never had to touch. I'm hoping the move to electric vehicles picks up speed.
Toyota trucks of that era were great mechanically, and the 22RE was a great little engine, but they would rust out in no time. OK for the south but not a good choice for anyplace that salt is used.
Hmmm, I drove mine in St. Louis. It was there for at least a decade. I never had any major rust issues with that particular truck, but I was better to my vehicles at the time. There was some bubbling around the quarter panels, but nothing major. It was an 1987, and was pretty beat up, so I wasn't worried about it being perfect.
The thing with the toyota truck I noticed mostly, is that despite cosmetic flaws, it still ran great and was pretty sound functionally at 230k. I had a dodge dakota that fell apart around me and spun a bearing at 160k. The drivers side door hinges actually rusted completely out.
I had a 1987 MR2 in St. Louis for four or five years as well, and my friend had it for three or four before that. It had issues with the rear quarter panel as well, but otherwise was good.
All anecdotal, and the St. Louis winter isn't a Michigan winter or anything like that, but there's my experience fwiw
I heartily believe there's a market for both. Compare a Macbook Pro with a custom built Linux desktop. The MBP is very user friendly, plug n play, and has very little customization capacity. The custom Linux desktop is an absolute tinkerer's paradise, with everything from hardware to software being open for customization.
The car equivalent of these used to exist for daily drivers, but are now relegated mainly to closed course competition vehicles (much to my delight). The Radical SR is probably my favorite one, consisting of a modular vehicle that can be built from a kit shipped in boxes of parts [1].
There is extreme pleasure to be had from driving both a Tesla, and a Radical SR. But both have very different uses, and very different performance and maintenance criteria.
> Compare a Macbook Pro with a custom built Linux desktop. The MBP is very user friendly, plug n play, and has very little customization capacity. The custom Linux desktop is an absolute tinkerer's paradise, with everything from hardware to software being open for customization.
It's not fair to say Macs are less customizable or less of a tinkerer's paradise just because they are more user friendly.
I think it's fair to say that. In my opinion, Linux wins on kernel configuration options alone. Would you like a tickless kernel? Soft real-time? Hard real-time? A different scheduler, may be?
But even for Linux, Ubuntu is trying really hard for you to not have to go into the command line. They would love for it to be a tinkerer's paradise but also usable. They want it to be a muscle car and a Tesla. Computers have the advantage of being both of those.
An apt analogy. I moved from Linux-based machines to Macbook Pros. I love the ability to tinker in Linux. I hate the requirement to tinker in Linux, just to get normal desktop stuff working.
Somewhere inside you is something that misses the Webbers. Every night under the bonnet, day in the rain covered in oil and every bizarre breakdown (the rotor disintegrated again?!) was worth it for the induction notice, smell of warm oil and exhaust note... I think... Tuning Strombergs is another dark art.
I agree with the idea in principle, that electric cars are a net positive for reliability and minimizing service costs.
However, when you talk nostalgically about the good old days of cars being "mechanical devices one could understand and tinker with", and then turn around and talk about the new generation of electric cars being somehow equivalent, it seems a little logically inconsistent to me.
Make no mistake, a Tesla is just as much of a "hunk of plastic" when it comes to fixing or modifying it yourself. Expecting any complex piece of modern electronics to be similarly hackable to a car from the last century is a little unrealistic.
EDIT: sounds like we're basically in agreement on this. I misunderstood the previous comment.
I hope that emerging manufacturing technologies will allow what has happened to software over the last 25 years to happen to hardware over the next 25 years.
It is possible to run a completely open software stack, and very easy to run an almost-completely open software stack.
My hope is that open-source hardware (both electronic and mechanical) will be abundant enough in the future that I could feasibly fabricate a new ECU from scratch, or 3D print a new evaporator for my AC.
I too hope so, but not for automotive. I want to 3D print the hull for a high speed catamaran. Every year I wait is another year laser sintering gets cheaper, 3D printing gets better, and the cost of technology drops.
As long as the carmaker is open about things, the increasing complexity doesn't have to be bad news for tinkerers. It's not officially released yet, but https://github.com/timdorr/model-s-api shows the promise of Tesla's commitment to openness. It won't allow the "how does my car work?" type of tinkering, but it allows the "how can I use my car in interesting ways?" tinkering.
It's much the same as computers. The original Apples were understandable devices. The lack of miniaturization meant that hackers could figure out how everything was working and play with it. That activity would be ridiculous with modern-day CPUs/components as the complexity has increased by orders of magnitude and the miniaturization has reached levels where specialized equipment is needed to look at what's going on that costs well beyond what can fit in a hobbyist's budget. Yet modern-day computers are still programmable and people are still learning and hacking. The only difference is that this learning is happening a few abstraction levels removed from the actual hardware. The same will be true with cars, provided manufacturers are as cooperative as Tesla seems to be.
> An even bigger conflict of interest with auto dealers is that they make most of their profit from service
Musk is too smart to know hes comparing oranges to apples.
He is only partially right. I say to Mr. Musk - I will agree with your complain when you sell me your car for $18,000 - an average price for an average car in the US. Why it doesnt cost $120,000, like your models, you ask? Well, exactly because of what you mentioned: they use cheaper parts with less engineering that are bound to break faster and then they will make up some profit on the parts. That's why Mr. Musk, they profit from service on car that is TEN times less expensive than your car.
If you asking me I prefer to pay cheaper upfront and be able to treat it like a pair of shoes that I will be able to exchange for a newer model in 2-3 years, when this gets me bored or wears out.
Other than that -- always love to hear brilliant people sticking it out to the lobbyists and corrupted over-bureaucratized politicians! At this stage of things within US, Musk is sticking it to so many groups (building rackets "10-times cheaper than otherwise tax payers would've paid") and pissing off so many powerful people, that I wouldn't be surprised to see him dead sooner or later (although of course I wish him all the best!)
It kind of feels like the opposite is happening today with the "maker" movement. With those "blobs of plastic" falling left and right to arduinos and 3d printers, it seems like the makers are on a tear to bring the "good old days" back again.
Funny enough, quite a few programmers who have become burned out with the mainstream tech industry move into automotive related industries as cars are becoming more and more computer driven.
I am old enough to remember what owning a car was like when things were changing away from mechanical devices one could understand and tinker with and becoming nondescript hunks of plastic you had to buy from a manufacturer. (I'm talking about the ignition system, as one specific example.) There was always a bit of a sinking feeling for me along with a sense that the world was being dumbed down and manipulated for profit. As programmers and technical people, we should be able to see many parallels!
That said, dumbing down the world in some ways is not necessarily a bad thing and can be exceedingly positive. One might miss the twisty, dusty country road in leisure time, but curse it when it's raining and the road has turned into an impassable morass. Reliable, boring, convenient transportation is great sometimes, like when you're driving someone going into labor to the hospital.
Maintenance free electric cars that drive themselves will be one of those positive simplifying things.