this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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As long as they're a smartphone on wheels the answer is no.
We want real cars again, even if electric.
My smartphone still works without service. Just as a tablet/computer device. Cars should be the same.
If Google or Apple went out of business (depending on which phone you have) you'd stop getting updates and it'd stop working.
My NES hasn't received an "update" in the 37 years since it was manufactured, and it still runs fine. So does my Tandy 1000 PC. Didn't even have to replace any capacitors. This is what we want. Some time 15-20 years ago we started taking the wrong path with our tech.
I am old enough to remember appliances coming with full schematics printed inside their cases.
Electronics age out over time. The old stuff, made with more materials, take longer to age out. However, the old stuff does not have even a smidgen of the performance or power efficiency the modern stuff does.
Capacitors age because they are filled with liquid electrolyte, which dries out over time. Batteries age for mostly the same reason, and the chemical reaction slowly becomes irreversible. Those are easily replaceable. However, an integrated circuit is just a wafer of silicon. A piece of sand. It's going to take a long, long time for that to degrade. If it weren't for needing constant software updates and cloud connections to be useful, an iPhone could theoretically last a hundred years. "Tin whiskers" may also be a problem, but we are talking decades before you have to worry about that.
I don't think your theory about old things lasting longer because there is more mass to them is correct though. It really sounds like you are making that up because it sounds good in your head.
The larger components have more space between them... it takes longer for the "tin whiskers" to grow and become a problem. That and these old devices ran at higher voltages, so they have more tolerance to minor voltage fluctuations. Also, plastic does degrade eventually, copper traces can corrode, etc. Build quality matters, too.
Why do you need performance or power efficiency in a car's computer? It just needs to go when I press the pedal, and stop when I hit the brakes. That's not complicated, and something like battery wear leveling and temperature regulation can be a completely closed system and not require any updates whatsoever.
I really don't understand why cars need so much complex stuff, I just want it to get me from A to B, ideally in comfort. My current car that's >15 years old does that just fine with no internet connection, why do I need all the complex software?
Why performance...
Do you like your car's head unit to spend 1-5 seconds not doing anything before responding to your touchscreen or button press? No? Then yes, performance matters.
Power efficiency? Anything to extend battery life.
I don’t even want my car to have a touch screen!
Yeah, I don't need a touch screen. All I want is feature parity with my 15+ yo cars.
Would it? In what way? Sure the App Store would be done. But apps I current have and safari would be fine.
Think of all the Apple shit your phone depends on. iCloud, iMessage, any time you have to authenticate with your apple password. Probably a bunch of other iBullshit that I'm not familiar with because I don't have an iPhone. At the very least, your OS would stop getting security updates, and like you said, you wouldn't have an app store to push app updates. Some stuff would break immediately and other stuff would degrade over time.
Now imagine it's your car
If we look at Android instead, I can just use one of the other app stores. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, and my updates come from GrapheneOS, not Google (though they basically package up Google's updates). If Google completely disappeared, I'd probably just donate to GrapheneOS so they can afford to take over SW maintenance. But even if I don't get any more updates, my phone is already quite secure and I'd still get updates for the vast majority of my apps.
I want something like GrapheneOS for my car. Or better yet, I want my car to be simple enough that it doesn't need security updates to keep going. My car should go when I step on the accelerator pedal, and stop when I hit the brakes. It doesn't need internet access or security updates to do that.
Not at all. It would maintain functionality at the current status quo, and browsers would still receive updates and keep current with server based technology. If anything required additional components to use new technologies or display novel applications, that would be a hardware based change that won't be fixed through a system update regardless.
You can still browse the web just fine on a phone from 2010 running Android 2.3 - many applications are now unsupported, but if Google (or Apple, for that matter) were to stop updating the OS, then application developers would stay at the current technology level that make hardware upgrades unnecessary.
Some apps that require google services (I'm sure there's an equivalent for iOS) might no longer work, but most run just fine regardless.
If security is what you're getting at, at least for Android, there are excellent third party solutions that keep attackers out even on an end of life device (shoutout to Hypatia).
As a member of /c/FuckCars I say we don't want cars at all. We want robust public transportation, and bicycle paths. Entire cities designed around going green. People want to get angry at the Starbucks CEO for using a private jet, and reasonably so, but NOBODY wants to take responsibility for the toll each car puts on the environment. Yes, even the electric cars. That electric energy still has to come from somewhere.
Public transportation does not operate in the middle of nowhere where the closest store is more than half an hour away.
It will when we fund it. If 100% of the people require public transportation, then 100% of the people will want that transportation to be funded as well as it can. Kind of like how even out in the sticks you have plumbing, and drinking water. Imagine if only 10% of the state needed plumbing. It wouldn't get funded well enough to cover you guys out there.
Look, I'm with you most of the way in theory, but a lot of rural areas don't have plumbing and drinking water from public utilities, they have their own septic and water wells. I know it's pedantic but a lot of parts of the world are so rural that it probably doesn't make sense to have fully public transport, like it doesn't make sense to have centralized water. The scope needs to be great systems within towns and cities and lots of park and ride hubs around the perimeter
We need to start smaller. Have you been to many remote, rural areas?
Name checks out. I'm all for public transportation, but to think that it will eliminate cars is nonsense.
That doesn't work for people like me who might drive 10 miles to work and then at the drop of a hat have to travel to another location 60 miles away, then have to travel back to the original location before the end of the day.
Exceptions can be made just like we make for all kinds of commercial vehicles.
It’s true what folks say: whenever someone mentions a bike path, everyone suddenly has to transport a refrigerator uphill in the rain.
Or if anyone's job or hobby requires transporting more than can be carried on a bike trailer. Anyone living rurally. Anyone famous. People with mental conditions exacerbated by being enclosed with strangers. All that being said, I'd love to see a shift towards it being more popular.
I would also love to see huge improvements in public transportation, especially around me where the last bus route leaves at 6:30 pm. The only time I would actually consider riding the bus again, it's already shut down.
The reality, though, is that public transportation cannot replace cars for people that need them. And if you live in the United States, it's just too damn big, and at least 20% of the population will probably never see public transportation as a viable option.
Not advocating for the previous comment but commerce would adapt no matter the change. Your job would either change your job duties and or hire someone at the other locations or they would find a way for you to work remotely. Who knows maybe banning cars could be the push our society needs to build avatars that we can control from remote locations.
Uh I'm gonna go watch some avatar now. I'm stoned enough that it might be good.
What if they're an electrician/plumber/repair man that needs a full kit of equipment and drives all over town. A contractor building a house transporting materials. A school/church/daycare transporting kids that doesn't want to have them loose on public transport. Garbage man. Emergency services. Food delivery. Etc
That would work if we invested as much into public transit as into cars. This goes back to designing cities for public transit instead of cars. If we did that with the money we currently are putting into cars we could have high frequency metro lines where inner city interstate / highway routes and high speed rail for inter city interstate/highway routes along with frequent bus service in the cities/towns on the lines. We think public transit is inherently slow and unreliable but that's because we never invest enough money to make it fast and reliable.
I'm guessing you've never lived in rural America? I don't think you're grasping how big the world is for some people. I have to drive three hours to get from my urban home to my favorite mountain bike trail in the mountains.
No I haven't lived in rural America but most Americans haven't either. Most live in the suburbs, cities or towns. It's like saying people need to eat less sugar and we should stop using it for every food and people saying "what about the diabetics who need sugar" yeah they do but that's not the majority of people. We can make exceptions for them while also overhauling our food industry to remove this thing that's causing health problems for most people.
As for the mountain bike scenario ideally you would take a train to a town near the trail and then the town can have a shuttle up to the mountain. If we did fully invest in public transit this wouldn't add too much to your trip and has some other benefits.
This would be good for the park and wildlife in general as less traffic would make it easier for animals to migrate. Less roadkill
This would lower the amount of development needed in the park as parking lots wouldn't be necessary.
It would make mountain biking more accessible for people who don't have a car or can't drive.
It would make it more social, you could meet people on the shuttle on the way up, if there are regulars then a community could form.
It would reduce the amount of air and noise pollution.
Yeah maybe there are are 2000 mountains, but how many have mountain bike trails? If there are trails then there is probably some organization maintaining them like the state or national park service who can also run the shuttles. Shuttles are also pretty cheap and can stop at multiple trail heads based off requests. You can also rotate where the shuttles go each day / week so if there's a more obscure trail/mountain then you can just wait until it comes up in the schedule. The towns would also probably want to run the shuttles as well since it will bring business to the area.
Ok, let's assume we want less people on the mountain, what gives you the right to go to the mountain then? Because you can afford a car? That doesn't seem fair. Also most people have a car so it's not restricting that many people. If we say only 30 people should go to the mountain a day that's way easier to enforce if we say only 2 shuttles of 15 are allowed. It's also fairer as who gets to go is just determined by whoever signs up first, as opposed to whether someone owns something.
I think many people would like to socialize. There's a loneliness epidemic and many people are looking for friends but don't know where to meet them. If I was looking for friends with common interests like mountain biking the shuttle up would be a great place to meet them. Just because I want to get away from civilization doesn't mean I want to get away from socializing, I hike regularly with groups of people and they mostly enhance the experience. If you aren't into that that's fine too, just put on your headphones ignore everyone and set off on the trail solo, nothing stopping you from doing that.
For the last point like I said usage can be controlled, even better then cars, but assuming the same usage a shuttle is less pollution then multiple cars. If like you said there are 5-6 cars at a particular trail head then one shuttle carrying all those people will cause less air and noise pollution and make it safer for animals.
It clear that you and I will never agree, but fortunately it doesn't matter because your pipe dream will never happen!
I'll drive my car and hike/bike these mountains every weekend and keep on loving the freedom and peace of mind that I get to live with. 'Cause Murica.
It will eventually have to happen, cars, including evs, are not sustainable, at least at the current levels of usage. If you look at any climate report looking into it the choice is between Americans driving a lot less or severe climate change. I hope murica will make the right choice but the more we tie cars to ideas of freedom and peace of mind the harder that choice will be. It will be tough to fight considering the tens of thousands of hours of car ads most Americans are exposed to pushing that narrative, so it will require just as much reinforcement on the negatives of cars, traffic fatalities, CO2 emissions, airborne micro plastics from tires, maintenance and repair costs, obesity, sprawled cities, etc.
It may not happen in our lifetime, or at least when your healthy enough to bike/hike , but eventually we'll have to transition away from personal cars. Id prefer to build towards that future now for the reasons listed above but if you want to delay that's fine, you'll just have to explain to your grandkids why you did.
No kids, don't give a shit.
That's a nice thought, but not reality in many places.
We can work on both.
You people proselytize more than Linux evangelists and perhaps even Mormons do, and not even as entertainingly. Even if I agree with you, I don’t want to hear about fuckcars in every damn thread.
Dense cities and the consumerist lifestyles that exist inside them can not be "green" no matter how much green lipstick you put on it. Their very existence is destructive to the environment and disruptive of nature, switching out cars for bicycles or buses isn't even scratching the surface of the issue.
This is exactly backwards. People in cities consume fewer resources per capital than people in rural areas, who can't take advantage of the same economies of scale when it comes to transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, public utilities, physical supply chains, and all sorts of services in modern life, from seeing a doctor to repairing a broken window to borrowing a library book to getting a babysitter.
It's rural areas that destroy more land, consume more water, generate more pollution, and emit more greenhouse gases, on a per capita basis, than dense areas.
I'm with you on everything here except the very last sentence.
EV impact is more about toxic particles from tire and brake wear, and greater road wear when most EVs are heavier than similar ICE vehicles. The cleanliness of an EV's power source has been debunked over and over again, showing it's still a net positive environmental impact to run an EV off dirty energy, compared to an ICE car burning gas or diesel.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electric-cars-are-cleaner-even-when-the-power-comes-from-coal/
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-definitely-better-climate-gas-powered-cars
Yep. This exactly.