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Why Your New Car's Technology Is Four Years Old
Lucas123 writes "While you can buy a 1TB hard drive for your computer for less than $100, Ford today offers 10GB. Don't expect much more anytime soon. Apart from the obvious — a car's development process can be four years long — the automotive industry also tends to be behind the tech curve because of a lack of equipment standardization. And, while it's possible for the industry to build modular infotainment systems that could be upgraded over the life of the car, there are no plans to do so. Instead, car companies intend to offer software upgradable vehicles through 4G connectivity and data storage and entertainment streaming through the cloud, which means they have to worry less about onboard hardware reliability and standardization."
They'd probably rather sell you a new car with fancy new technology than let you upgrade your existing technology.
This explanation seems to get posted every year as if its news. First it was with GPS in cars, then MP3 playback, now HD size?
It has to be solid state or the hdd head will turn to trash after a few bumps.
Or, it could be that older technology is more reliable, and that's needed for the service of the vehicle. Much like how SCSI drives have never been up to the same spec for capacity as their IDE counterparts because SCSI was using tried & true technology to maintain reliability. Imagine having a rash of failed 1TB HDs in vehicle infotainment systems. Backlash galore.
Flash will fill the gap eventually, if not already happening.
There is no reason to have all of this junk in a new car. The only thing one needs is a USB charging port and an aux in for the smartphone to play audio through the cars audio system. Anything else the car does will be done poorly and until more standardization ensues, shouldn't be done. Where there is standardization, there is prosperity (USB, 3.5mm audio, Bluetooth, 12V power plugs)
Sig: I stole this sig.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cp_uwr-7lY
I can barely wait to have a car engine powered by THE CLOUD!
What you described is Tesla with one exception. You CAN upgrade the hardware. It has not been announced, yet, but it is possible to do so. In time, they will also open the API to allow others to develop apps for it.
first it was car DVD players with LCD screens
then navigation
now infotainment systems
these are normally $2000 upgrades on top of the most expensive models. these are huge profit upsell for what are essentially fairly cheap and old tech. MP3 players were around 15 years ago. it doesn't take a lot of CPU power to play an MP3 and fast forward the songs
The top o' the line factory MP3 player in our 2013 Sienna trips all over itself if it encounters a non-standard bitrate. My 3 year old, low budget aftermarket player one takes whatever I throw at it.
I would be very displeased if I bought a car that uses a mechanical drive that is going to get bumped around and severely damaged by a cars movement. I would expect that the car uses flash memory. 10GB of flash is still incredibly cheap (~$10) so I would expect more, but comparing desktop HDD capacity to that of a car's is asinine.
People who really care about cockpit entertainment will go through the trouble to have aftermarket equipment installed. This was true 40 years ago and it's the same today.
Our tech in the Department of the Navy is 10 years old right out of the gate... Tape backup drives, 80/86 processors, bowling alley displays for Combat Information Center. And these things are showing up on newly commissioned warships! Perspective folks - suddenly Ford and their ilk aren't so bad... :-/
The manufacturers have a higher margin from replacement parts than from the car itself. If they make standardized interchangeable components, then after market competition would slash those margins.
They simply like things the way they are now.
Honestly, if they can't keep up they shouldn't even pretend. I'm sick of cars that have overworked electronics that are just waiting to fail. I don't want my car to be a computer.
I'd like to see a car maker have the courage to go in the opposite direction - simpler engineering that's easier and more affordable to maintain over the life of a vehicle.
Back in the 50's and 60's it was much easier for a kid to pop the hood and learn to tear down and rebuild an engine. Now it requires specialized tools. You don't see as many self taught gearheads.
car companies intend to offer software upgradable vehicles through 4G connectivity and data storage and entertainment streaming through the cloud
in english: car companies are and will continue to be behind the curve because most technology has to be tested to ensure it does not affect the engine control module, electronic stability computer, or other critical systems necessary to have a car in the 21st century. a 10gb drive may be ok, but a 1tb drive with different geometric characteristics may result in a current induction or RF interference that overrides TPMS and reports tires as too low, or for example triggers impact pre-sensors for the airbags (or worse, enabling a multistage airbag for a passenger under 45 pounds.) Having worked for a major asian automotive manufacturer, i've personally seen RF emitted from a hybrid vehicle transmission that caused unpredictable, unintentional airbag detonation. after 6 months of additional testing it had been resolved before the vehicle entered production, but the fix produced another bug that resulted in TBW signal corruption and a sharp vehicle accelleration, followed by a forced shutdown as the vehicle detected the condition.
TL;DR: your car has more technology than most people readily consider. slow and steady is a good thing.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So, the Lightning docks will come out in the 2016 models, then?
I like computers and electronics. Really.
But the car is one place they just don't belong.
Giant distraction while driving (and most of you can't drive for shit to begin with.)
Forced obsolescence.
Higher ongoing costs. (i know someone who had to pay $200 for a SOFTWARE update to his car... blew my mind. dealer wouldnt touch it without that update.)
More things to fail and render the car useless.
Higher cost for cars that don't last very long at all compared to 20 years ago.
Anything beyond GPS is just extra crap we don't really need at all.
And even GPS has its problems as people spend more time watching that than the road. Or they 'don't trust' the gps. yet also don't know where they are going exactly anyway.
Computers and electronics in cars leads to wasted money and people dying. For very little gain. Bad deal.
Am I the only one that doesn't want a car that needs software updates?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
... see them stick to putting a good sound system (with possibly an equalizer) into a car, along with a small headphone jack. This would let me plug the player of my choice in and maintain separate functions where it's appropriate to do so. If they want to be fancy, and it's sonically reasonable (*) to do so, they can have it bluetooth capable so that I can dispense with the patch cable. I don't want to see extra, basically obsolete hardware/software rammed into the car (and cost thereof). Similarly, I don't want to see automobile features rammed into my handhelds...
(*) doesn't sound like %!*&#, tinny AM radio...
The hardware may be 4 years old but the software and RF security is at least pre-1980's, lol.
I assure you, the technology in my car is FAR more than 4 years out of date.
the stereo in my honda CR-v has a USB port. i plug in my iphone 5 and it plays from the device and from the different radio apps. it can also play from a USB stick.
what's the point of a hard drive?
I remember a mechanical welder friend that tore down his entire dodge ram engine. I came over and he had the entire engine block completely disabled in his living room (lol, yeah he had a mullet). I remember asking him in shock if he had ever done an engine rebuild, he said "nope" as he puffed on a joint as he casually inspected a part. 2 weeks later his truck was back on the rode, its now up to 500k miles. : p
Laptops also have reliability needs and there are quite modern laptop HDDs that have been used in millions of laptops for months. Also, the car industry's lack of standardization is irrelevant as the form factors of HDDs have been standardized for ages. Thirdly, (you did mention flash) SSDs have none of the problems of moving parts and cost little compared to a car.
The only problem I can think of is temperature. Don't know what temperature ranges an USB stick can handle and what's normally used for outdoors storage.
the tech I care about is safety related...I can't wait until all this stuff is standard equip
blindspot detection
lane departure
collision detection
adaptive cruise control
electronic brake distribution / ABS
navigation
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
International standard ISO 7736. Cars have had "modular infotainment systems" for as long as I can remember. My old Z car had an am radio, that later upgraded to FM cassette, then added a 6-disc CD changer, then when the changer finally died, yanked it all, installed a flip out 7" LCD w/bluetooth, NAVi, Pandora, etc. Every car I ever owned eventually got some kind of upgrade to the "infotainment system." What I see happening is bluetooth taking the show, and your phone does everything else, the car would only have an amp, speakers, touchscreen, and bluetooth, that is all, it doesn't NEED a hd, no 4G, no disks, no computer, nothing. Want an upgrade? Get a new phone, or may only need an app for that.
I run a computer repair and custom builds shop and this is the same reason I crush HP, my #1 competitor. By the time they're done ordering, testing, writing documentation, assembling, shipping, and then reselling their PCs, it's like 6+ months later. I use SSD drives that just came out. They're probably just shipping Pyro and Vertex 3 drives in their laptops and PCs, lol. Oh wait, they're HP, so it's probably Adata, SSDNow, and Sandisk. They're very anti-good parts over at HP, as a company policy.
I build a computer order to delivery in about 4 days so customers get the latest, fastest everything. Take that, bulky competitors! Unfortunately, there's really nothing like that in the car world.
And, while it's possible for the industry to build modular infotainment systems that could be upgraded over the life of the car, there are no plans to do so.
O RLY?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/22/nvidia_car_software/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Having standard connectors could cut costs for car manufacturers. If you've ever replaced a car radio for your own instead of cheapo car radio, you run into the problem of needing different adapters to connect into a cars wiring loom.
How difficult is it to have manufacturers use ONE connector for +ve, GND, +VCC (for memory backup), and maybe one aux wire for security. Then there's the speakers connections! The car radio manufacturers have standardised more or less, but the car manufacturers have not.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I don't want to be using my car as an entertainment room or office anyway. If I ever get to the point where I feel like I need complete computer access in my vehicle, I am spending way too much time commuting and I need to change jobs or lifestyles.
Maybe I am old-school in the car department but I really don't want my automobile dependent on a computer for anything, truth be told. I'm happy with my 1998 Corolla... may it keep running at least until the Singularity/Robopocalypse :)
You don't want to find out about an SSD read/write bug when you're 1 billion miles from earth. Let the technology shake out the bugs, then buy a reliable, cheaper product.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
How about a cd player that doesn't start going haywire after a few years of use?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The other big problem the car people have is that they have a fetish for "Designed for Automotive".. They will only buy stuff/parts that they think has been designed especially for them, because they think they are very special. For example, in cars, you won't find any Snapdragon processors, only Tegra and Intel, because they aggressively marketing their products as "designed for automotive", but Qualcomm isn't..
Ford? You mean the company that dropped from the top of Consumer Reports quality rankings in 2009, to 23rd out of 26 in 2012? Where the only changes made to their vehicles were superficial adding of Microsoft SYNC, which was so disastrous that it had to be re-branded "MyFordTouch" and "MyLincolnTouch" and users are still frustrated? (note: I'm not referring to their refresh of engines for model year 2013, that won't be reflected until next year's Consumer Reports).
Now they are offering hour long classes for customers to learn the new system. Why do I have to spend an hour learning how to use my radio?
Yeah, good luck with that. Microsoft is shitting all over Ford even though they had started showing signs of life after the recession.
Car equipment makers design for 10+ year reliability, operation over extreme temp ranges, and "playing nice" with other, more safety-critical systems. Then there is the testing and validation to prove all of that out. The radio should last as long as the car, and should work in winter conditions in AK to desert conditions in AZ.
Consumer-grade products, even aftermarket products targeted at Automotive, do not typically put this effort into designs.
Not all car companies or even design groups within a company are where they want to be in hitting reliability targets, but the targets generally exist for everyone.
This makes sense from a "Mars Rover" perspective, when they do the design they only have access to 3MP camera technology, or 8GB flash drives, etc...
However to say the same about your F150 Truck? Sorry it isn't that special.
Lack of Equipment specialization? BS again! There are tons of technological standards, and most of them are more less stable. Look at PC's the last 10 years. Every now again again you might have to make a slight change to procedure, but it is basically the same.
What is FAR more likely is car/truck makers like to make everything themselves. To design every component. The reason for this is so you can't easily replace anything. You need to buy their parts. Go to their dealer. Hell, even stupid stuff like bolts and screws are custom, so you have to go and buy a 20$ plastic screw rather than a 0.05 cent one. The same with their electronic components. The fact that they have to design every part also means that of course they are behind the curve, A) because it is just more work to do, and B) because they are a stupid car/truck maker not a technology expert.
Anyway I call BS on that whole idea and have zero sympathy for the lot. Sooner or later one of the car/truck makers will realize that it is a better path to just make a great car/truck and leave the technological stuff to companies that do that for a living. Heck top gear has reviewed enough horrible GPS designed by particular car designer for their cars, or terrible control UI, etc...
Pardon the pun. but stop trying to reinvent the wheel everything time you use technology and use common components.
>>> Instead, car companies intend to offer software upgradable vehicles through 4G connectivity
This is fundamentally bad idea. Ability to remotely modify anything on a car is a disaster waiting to happen. Cars still last 15-20 years, what decade-old security or cryptography do you still trust in your everyday computing?
I can already see buffer overflow into root, then pushing custom firmware that interprets any accelerator input as maximum throttle and overrides braking by using traction control to redirect it to a single front wheel resulting in a spin-out.
All of these infotainment systems suck. All you need is a radio, but in my moms new ford with sync, you have to press 5 buttons to even change a radio station. No one needs this BS.
it does all the things a car should do just fine, thanx
I spent 3 years (2003~2006) working with a company to deliver MP3 Car Stereos for GM. I believe they still deliver vehicles with them, but keep in mind, very little change had occurred in car stereos before that. Telematics (Auto PCs) had been worked on, too, I was involved with projects at Visteon and Lear, but that was 1999~2002 time frame, and the technology just wasn't there.
There is also a lot more to development of automotive ANYTHING. Electronics have to be a lot more robust (-40degF~140degF, high humidity, vibration, shock, etc...), materials used have to match the car interiors (and be properly made to not fade 'differently' from the rest). Once a product is usable, it goes through a lot of tweaking, as product line engineers determine calibrations to set (like lighting, for example). Failure Modes need to be sorted out to make it as bullet-proof as possible.
Oh, and LOTS AND LOTS of testing. On the bench, in the cars...
We had looked at jumpstarting more advanced tech, like HDDs in the radios to act as radio 'DVRs' and store user's audio tracks. At the time, drives were cost prohibitive and there were still too many legal issues to make it practical.
Mix in the regulatory issues like Driver Distraction, and an immature market, and there are good reasons why design hasn't settled down yet. It's just not as simple as throwing in a general purpose PC with a touchscreen mounted to the dash.
Five years ago, we (drivers) were all buying dedicated GPS units - now we get those features in our smart phones and tablets and desire integration into the car. Dashcams are all the rage in Russia, and probably should be everywhere else. Cars are getting smarter with vision systems (having worked on some of those systems now in use, you cannot imagine just how complicated those are) that do everything from detecting lane changes, signs and oncoming headlights (to dim brights) to braking for unexpected hazards.
The problem with this, and why I bring it up, is that we have no idea what form factors and features we'll demand in 5 years. Automotive, much like mobile, is undergoing tremendous growth where automation is concerned. Unlike mobile, there are still a lot of things computers can do for us as features of our cars that we really haven't fully figured out yet.
If I remember correctly, Ford was outsourcing their IT to HP, but recently dropped them to build up their own in house IT department which include a lot of people that worked for HP.
try 24 bro
Laptops also have reliability needs and there are quite modern laptop HDDs that have been used in millions of laptops for months.
The vibration and shock requirements for a laptop are quite different from those of a motor vehicle. The difference can be overcome but a car is generally speaking a harsher environment than that experienced by most laptops.
Car companies are the ultimate hardware companies. They exist to build large chucks of complex hardware. They are treating infotainment like a hardware company, build some cool hardware and to the extent it's necessary to make it go add some software, ship it, and forget about it. Hardware doesn't get "upgraded" later, so the concept of software upgrades later is foreign to them.
A software company would look at it differently; they see the hardware as something software can exploit and that people will come up with new and novel uses over time. I can think of only one sort-of example right now, and that's Tesla. The large (17") touch screen is all software driven, no buttons or knobs anywhere. They are also willing to push software improvements with relatively quick development cycles.
I think Tesla shows the future here, but it's going to be a long time coming. The car should have an API to access the onboard hardware features. A large display panel should be driven by a general purpose computer. Software updates will come not only from manufacturers, but also third parties making everything from skins for visual effect, to full replacement software to do everything in a different way. With a proper hardware design these general purpose computers could even be swapped out down the road for more powerful models, needing only a connection to the CAN bus to interact with the car.
Automakers will come around, in part because people want it, but mostly due to cost. With the cost of all electronic controls (for things like HVAC) coming down it becomes practical to do away with mechanical knobs. When that happens, reducing the number of parts and sharing them across more models will reduce costs of development and support. The eventual end game will be one generic CPU driving perhaps 2-3 sizes of generic displays across a large group of models. Being hardware companies though it will take them longer to get there, I predict late 2020's before we see new cars from the major manufacturers like I describe.
If you look at that as a list of things that you're making poor people pay for, it sounds really, really shitty. A car costs $10K. The government mandates shit is expensive. We can argue value, particularly with emissions, but the point remains that the cost of those mandates fall particuarly harshly on the poor.
My main car most likely has technology in it that is 17 years old. My leisure car only has a decent ECU of about 10 years old and the mechanical technology varies from 30 to 50 years. Still I can easily maintain that very few other cars or even motorcycles will be able to overtake me on mountain passes and also provide the sheer pleasure the little leisure car does.
What I mean to say is that new technology per-se isn't a guarantee for your itch to be scratched. I'd be pleased to eventually buy a newer main car with technology that may be 8 years old.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Even the safety crap: The electronics fail eventually and leads to unpredictable results. For example: I can't use the cruise control in my car anymore because a transistor behind the dash that runs the speedometer failed. As a result, my speedometer is off by about 20%, i.e., if I'm going 80, it reads 60. This also causes the odometer to read wrong, I'm guessing that the car has about 170,000 on it, but the odo reads 145,000.
If I attempt to use Cruise control, the engine surges in a scarey fashion, as the tach readings don't match the car speed, and the stupid computer can't do anything about the false data it's getting so the car actually TRIES to get me into an accident and/or blow itself up. Manually, everything is OK, I just drive keeping up with traffic and ignore the speedo...
I only want safety tech if I can turn it off when things go bad after 100,000 miles -- it's amazing how badly a car will operate when one tiny sensor is feeding the car bad data.
If you wanna see something hilarious, unplug the sensor coming out of the airbox (the MAF). Your car will drive 30 feet and then stall. Brilliant. And no way to get around that? No way to limp to a service station or dealership?
Screw that, I'm going back to a Carb.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I used to build nav radios. The HDD hardware is standard and the RTOS can handle it -- we would even plug in bigger HDDs to test.
These are ruggedized, and so lag normal desktop HDD in size by some years, but Ford is just being cheap.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"Devil Car" and "Last of the Wild Ones" by Roger Zelazny.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Tesla regularly loads software updates via 3G to add new features to the car. While the Tesla Model S has ample storage, its 2 USB ports and ability to stream music make this largely unnecessary. Many other "futuristic" things mentioned in TFA like using a smartphone to control the car are already available on the Tesla as well as other makes. On a Tesla you can beep the horn, Lock/Unlock the car, access climate control, see the car's location on a Google map (with speed if its moving) and much more. More oddly, my 2009 Mariner Hybrid has a 40GB hard drive for Music. Why would I need that to be much bigger? It also has so called futuristic things like pairing with my phone, speech recognition and USB slots. Was this article written 4 years ago???
Greed is the root of all evil.
...through 4G connectivity and data storage and entertainment streaming through the cloud...
Thanks, but no thanks. This is the most horrible idea I've ever heard of.
there are some after market huds available: just go to amazon and search "car hud".
one kind uses the obd2 port, the other just plugs into a cigarette lighter or usb and uses a gps for speed calculation.
i haven't tried them yet, but i've been interested for a while.
i think they all run into some ghosting problems (the front and back of the windshield both reflecting the image), but i'm not really sure how bad those are. an '02 vette i checked out had a hud that was pretty nice with no ghosting, but i read somewhere (a long time ago) that the plastic safety film in the vette's windshield was wedge shape to prevent hud ghosting.
there's also something reallt cheap to turn a cigarette lighter into some usb ports: the "griffin usb car charger" sits almost flush and gives you two ports.
How many ads can a person read anyway, especially while driving?
thats why we have used cars. poor people arn't supposed to buy shiny new stuff
Ugh. Well...
1. in many cars, prior to the anticipated accident it tightens the seat belts and applies the brakes
2. post accident it cuts off the fuel lines, unlocks the doors, turns on the hazard lights, and calls 911 and reports your GPS coords.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I'd like to see a car maker have the courage to go in the opposite direction - simpler engineering that's easier and more affordable to maintain over the life of a vehicle.
My current vehicle hasn't had to have any servicing of any kind aside from routine fluid and brake changes and it has 100,000 miles on it. Explain to me how a simpler vehicle is going to make that any easier or more affordable. I have had to fix NOTHING. Kinda hard to be easier than that.
Back in the 50's and 60's it was much easier for a kid to pop the hood and learn to tear down and rebuild an engine.
Just because it was simpler in some ways doesn't mean it was better. Vehicles on the road today are vastly more reliable and perform far better than those from 40+ years ago. The electronics on the vehicle have a lot to do with those improvements. I drove cars from the 60's and 70s when I was a younger lad and compared to what is available now they were pieces of crap. Their "simpler" engines got terrible fuel economy per horsepower and broke down constantly. Engines would be lucky to make it to 100,000 miles - now it's rare that they do not go for 150-200,000 miles. We don't use carburetors in cars anymore because computerized fuel injection systems work better in pretty much every way that matters. We have engine electronics so that the vehicle can sense changes in environment and optimize vehicle performance for the conditions on the fly. Those electronics aren't on the vehicle just to annoy you and cost more. They are there because they make the vehicle perform better and more reliably.
Making a device "software upgradeable" to add features it wasn't originally intended to have makes hardware reliability and robustness more, not less, important.
Apple just proclaimed the original iPhone as officially "obsolete" after being out for 6 years. That device was considered cutting-edge for its time.
How much longer than that will today's new cars be on the road? Those painfully obsolete pieces of one-time "technology" will be stuck in the dashboard for years.
For every "new" that comes out, I think companies have at least five or six behind it ready for release in intervals of several years.
This, because all I really want is an empty place to mount my iPad in the dash where some cars have their nav/climate control/etc. displays. I'd rather throw that expensive and utterly useless crap out and just plug in an iPad. In fact I'd actually buy an iPad if I could do that.
It sounds appealing but I'm not sure you've really thought it through. The interface on an iPad is not designed with driving in mind. Your attention needs to be mostly on the road and the iPad interface is not designed to accommodate that fact. Using an iPad while driving would take a rather significant redesign of the interface. I don't even want to think about all the idiots who would try to email or text on it while driving.
There also are driving conditions (glare, temperature, brightness, vibration, etc) to consider which are different in a car than on your couch. IPads are designed to operate between 0C and 35C (32F and 95F) and cars experience both hotter and colder temperatures than this regularly.
Bonus points if they would work with Apple and add some USB devices such that the iPad could monitor some aspects of the car (speed, fuel level, climate control, etc.)
You can already do this via the OBD-II ports.
TPMS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire_pressure_monitoring_system is now standard in the US.
I have to wonder if it's related to the trend of Tire Gigantism at least in the US market. My 1996 car has 14" tires and the top-shelf tire brands no longer offer anything in this size. It seems like the average tire is now 17" for cars and 19" for SUVs. Can you imagine a soccer mom changing a 19" or larger tire?
I pointed this trend out to someone and they asked me why it happened. I still have no answer.
I'm genuinely curious. I don't own a car, but the ones I know don't have anything that would use much data storage. It seems they store fuel economy data, but that's about it. The entertainment systems don't have any data storage, but it can connect to your phone, MP3 player or whatever via USB.
As a point of comparison, the factory stereo deck in my 2009 Dodge Charger R/T, has a touchscreen with basic auxilary controls on the steering wheel, CD/DVD, 60 GB harddrive (not sure which form factor) for mp3's, Sirius sat radio, built-in Bluetooth hands-free cell phone interface, voice command interface, USB, 1/8" stereo aux in, an iPOD connector, 5.2 surround, and finally: upgradable firmware.
Please explain to me how out of date this setup would have been in mid-2008 (when the specs would have to have been finalized for manufacture for the 2009 model year).
I saw a 1 terabyte hard drive for $79.99. wow. A few years ago, my dad paid $60 for a 320 gigabyte hard drive.
Of course, things manufactured that long ago were also much simpler. The simpler a device, the less likely it is to fail, generally speaking. When you put a device made of a dozen electronic components up against a device made of hundreds or thousands, it's no wonder that the latter doesn't last as long--all it takes is one failed component to stop the whole thing dead.
Be careful with that assertion. Simpler often correlates with reliability but it isn't necessarily a cause of reliability. It is easy to demonstrate cases where simpler does not equal more reliable. Vehicles from 40 years ago were lucky to see 100,000 miles despite having a much simpler design. A modern car is quite a bit more complex in design but they also are hugely more reliable and perform better as well.
A four cylinder engine should be good for everybody.
"While you can buy a 1TB hard drive for your computer for less than $100..."
With what warranty? The disk drive industry has trouble offering a 3-year warranty. Automotive parts have to live much longer.
The Ford EEC IV engine control computer from the 1980s was specified to have a 30-year life. Three decades later, there are still tens of thousands of Ford vehicles on the road with their original computer module. Running the original software from ROM.
Or, you could not buy the premium system at time of purchase, drive it to a car system dealer, have it gutted and installed with this decade's hardware. The advantage is not only a modular system you can upgrade later a piece at a time, but when the time comes, you can have it gutted again.
(I tend to buy slightly higher end than I need and then keep the vehicle for a very long time. Your mileage, of course, may vary.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm in the market for a new car and it is nigh impossible to buy one without a fuckton of useless digital crap.
It is effing stupid because to me the technology is crap, the GUIs are crap, and the functionality is totally unnecessary.
It sucks that every new car appears to be marketed to 15 year olds with ADHD.
So who gives a fuck if the tech is four years old? How about NO years old, just jettison the shit and give me 5 analog dials and a stereo that at least doesn't have a screen saver (and that crashes once a week because the firmware was written by C-minus programmers). /endrant/
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Instead, car companies intend to offer software upgradable vehicles through 4G connectivity and data storage and entertainment streaming through the cloud, which allows them to charge a monthly fee for streaming media services.
Leave all the required functions as hard buttons and the non-essentials to smart phones: hard buttons include stuff like lights and hv/ac. soft stuff are all the non critical 'info tainment' ... the nav systems and audio stuff. Those technologies are all progressing so fast that I'll likely have 3-4 phones in the lifetime of my car. Maybe give me a dumb touch screen in the car so the nav's a little bigger and more 'heads up' than my galaxy sIII . That same galaxy siii which appropriately interrupts the iheart radio playing over my car's bluetooth to give me the recommended route to avoid traffic, which my now 3 year car could never even think about doing, as neither service existed 7 years ago when my car was being designed.
I'd much prefer a car that is reliable and has decent fuel economy, and you can keep all your "entertainment", "cloud", and "4G software upgradability". It's transportation, it's not a lifestyle.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Hell, I'd be happy to have a car where you can replace the freaking radio without crippling essential systems.
Whose idea was it, anyway, to put the freaking CAN hub in the <expletive> radio????
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Yes, 1 TB is less than $100.. 2 TB is definitely there, 3 TB is almost there on a routine basis (and I think has been there a few times on special sales).
Because you didn't buy a Tesla!
Ford is a good example of obsolescence by design, but their stuff is so bad it is obsolete before the car is even manufactured.
Sync can't talk to any device that does not speak UMS. That means no i-Devices, and no Android newer than ICS - since both have disabled UMS in favor of the godawful MTP protocol.
You never took physics in school? Unless you feed it energy, it cannot increase vibrations. What it can do is reduce vibration, but increase amplitude.
I did - and if you did too perhaps you may remember something called "resonance". With the same rate of energy input I can easily increase the amount of vibration by tweaking the system so that it's resonant frequency is close to the drive frequency or by reducing the damping (I'll let you figure out how that works in terms of energy conservation). Also vibration, in common usage, means amplitude. If I say "the vibration has increased" I mean the amplitude of the vibration has increased so you cannot "reduce vibration, but increase amplitude". If you are talking about the frequency, as I suspect you are, the common expression is to say "vibrating faster" to indicate an increased frequency.
Now you could argue (as we might have expected for one so learned in physics that they feel that they can criticize others) that the arm decreases the frequency of vibration and that the acceleration, which is the important factor for laptops, is decreased with decreasing frequency. However this is only true for Simple Harmonic Motion and I very much doubt that such a complex system will follow that type of oscillation. As a result you might well find that the increased amplitude does indeed lead to an increased acceleration by the laptop. To be certain you'd need to know the details of the system or, easier and more accurate, just measure it. However there is no law of physics which guarantees that the acceleration will be less, or more, than sticking the laptop on a seat and so absolutely no reason to call into question the OP's physics background.
a '67 Bug got great mileage and lasted.
They did not get great gas mileage *per horsepower* or much horsepower at all for that matter as you noted. Furthermore there were cars with notably better fuel economy available at the same time as the VW Bug. The reason their engines often lasted was that the engine was air cooled. Air cooled engines are generally a fair bit more reliable than water cooled engines.
The only problem with the VW was that the odometer rolled over at 100,000...
The "only problem"? There was a LOT more wrong with the VW bug than just the odometer. The rear engine and bad suspension design tended to cause trailing throttle oversteer". they are terribly unsafe in a crash, they have 0-60 times measured in geologic time, their fuel economy per horsepower is actually quite poor, the climate controls were horrible, especially the "heater", etc. Sure they were inexpensive to build and easy to service but like most VWs they require an excessive amount of servicing. (I've had a Scirroco, a GTI, a Golf, and a Jetta over the years and I'm VERY familiar with VWs) Some of the engineering in them is quite admirable (I do like the servicability) but there is quite a lot about the old VW Bug that is quite badly designed.
In 20 yrs of driving, I've never had an ABS system fail or require maintenance. I have had it save my life.
In a time when you can buy a brand new car for $14K (or a used car for $5K) that includes 6 airbags and ABS, how can you say it isn't cheap.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
My 2002 Toyota Prius was loaded with computers and I drove it over 130,000 miles before I hit a deer on the highway with it. When the insurance company totalled the car, the computers all still worked. Despite being repeatedly frozen and cooked and vibrated!
strikes some real fear into my heart, in an automotive context. I can see that passengers might need such things (I prefer to talk to the driver myself), but the implied complexity of such things sounds like an invitation to distraction to me for the driver.
Definitely time to construct the controls so that they can't be seen or operated from the driving seat. "Can't be", not "are difficult to ".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"