517
When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?
(restofworld.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
517 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
58144 readers
4938 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Why wouldn't they? You plug it in and keep driving. It's not any different from petrol cars.
Unless they have a massive infotainment system that requires cloud services to work properly or the main way to access your car is the app on your phone (and other shit like this).
Also who's gonna guarantee spare parts in case something breaks down in 5 years time? Will I be able to fix their car or will it be a paper weight?
My point was, the same applies to petrol car. They all have infotainment and need spare parts.
I mean, sure, but how many petrol car startups are there?
Regardless, I agree that this in reality is a much wider issue regarding service and parts availability for products you buy. We need laws to regulate the availability of services integral to the products sold
Take a look at the YouTube channel "Aging Wheels", they have acquired and daily driven a Coda, an EV that the parent company shut down, you can see their journey in the channel.
Yeah, he's up to owning four of them, two of which are purely parts cars and one of which is currently apparently irrevocably broken with its parking pawl latched into place and thus immobile in his garage without hooking it with a wrecker and literally dragging it on the tires.
And that guy pretty much knows what he's doing with various offbeat EV's, and has a huge amount of shop space and apparently funds at his disposal to just fuck with these things as a hobby. The average owner, meanwhile, has no chance.
A rare Aging Wheels enjoyer in the wild! That dude has single-handedly gotten me more interested in automobile history and just how cars do things in general.
They might keep driving, but some infotainment features (or even other features that are tied to subscriptions) might stop working.
Depending on the implementation of these features that could mean the car constantly shows error messages, or the infotainment freezes, or in the worst case the car won't even start or charge.
Some of these concerns are true for newer cars of traditional manufacturers: what happens when their online services become unavailable?
Depends actually. If Tesla shut down, that would disrupt a lot of fast charging. The charger handshakes with the car which allows it to auto bill to your card stored on Tesla's servers. For non-Teslas, they have to use the app to start charging.
Plenty of ways to charge an EV without Tesla's superchargers. Sure, superchargers were their biggest selling point before dipshit fired the whole supercharger team, but it's not like any Tesla is bricked purely from lack of Tesla's charging network.
Just pointing out that "filling it up" is not so simple always. On a road trip, you generally rely on DC Fast Chargers since an L2 charger would take hours.
If Tesla went belly up and took the charging network with it, EVs would be much less useful for road trips.
My non-Tesla EV would only be affected by way of more Teslas at non-Tesla chargers. Which, to your point, would be a pretty significant impact to road trips.
But neither I nor most people take road trips more than a few times a year, so even in this extreme case, the impact wouldn't be relevant ~95% of the time.
And to the original topic, this wouldn't brick any EVs or anything like that.