Scary to think that the answer will be no.
Depends on the manufacturer. A lot of American and European “smart” cars work fine without an internet connection. You need to use a key fob, and apps cloud maps or streaming apps obviously won’t work, but the basic driving, climate, and media stuff should work.
A lot of American and European cars actually kill your cloud service access if you don’t keep paying a subscription fee.
I have zero use for a cloud connected car lol.
Cloud connected cars are essentially what happens when companies refuse to admit smart phones are superior for 99% of the stuff they want their car to do, and the other 1% is subscription bullshit.
Nah they're using that cloud connection to spy on you and make money on the backend by selling your data.
Also to be able to disable certain functionalities of your car if you don't pay a ~~monthly ransom~~ subscription.
Makes you wonder about ice cars too.
Absolutely, in that the more software in a vehicle, the more likely it is to brick once a company folds. ICE cars are less likely since they don't have most of the software, but there are some that are computers on wheels still (and I'm sure the amount will continue to increase).
ICE vehicles have more software because they have more components. They have a transmission control module and an engine control module both of which have a lot of sensors to read and outputs to control. Much more than a simple EV would have.
I think that that can be generalized to:
"When shuts down, will their still work?"
Cars are a particularly problematic example, because they have a long life and are expensive, but generally-speaking, I think that when someone buys a cloud-connected device, it's a good idea to think "what exactly is going to happen if this company goes under and stops providing online services, or just discontinues service at some point" at the outset.
Might be cars or smartwatches or live service video games. They all run into similar issues.
Yup, that's why I don't buy that crap. I would love an EV, but they all seem to spy on their drivers and I'm concerned that all that spyware isn't properly protected anyway.
An EV really shouldn't be all that complicated, and there's zero reason for it to connect to the outside world. All it needs to do is:
None of that requires power, and that whole process is much simpler than my ICE car, which doesn't have any external communication either. Give me an EV without all the smart crap and I'll probably buy it.
That's not an EV issue that's a modern car issue.
One of the worst privacy risks was Buick who didn't even make EVs.
Yep, and precisely why I refuse to buy anything that requires an internet connection to work. I'm even wary of services that lock me in for longer than maybe 6 months. The only annual subscription I have is for my VPN.
An actual device/machine that I plan to use for years? Hell no. Offline only is a must have.
A car is also difficult to ignore, compared to something smaller.
A small expensive device that stopped working because the company shut it down is annoying, but you can at least put it to the side and ignore it.
You can't really do that to a car that has functionally become a paperweight because the parent company has gone under.
This was really thrown into sharp focus for me a couple of years back, when I read an article about how people with ocular implants are being left to go blind again because the company who made their implant has been bought by another company who doesn't want to continue support.
I just can't think about how callous that is, and if a company doesn't give a shit about that, why would they give a shit about a car?
I'm looking forward to the "how to hack your Tesla to 100% operational functionality using a raspberry pi 9 and this dongle, run your car with your phone!" youtube videos (or whatever streaming service steps over its flaming corpse to replace) it in the next few decades
People have already been jailbreaking Teslas to unlock full self-driving, which is a $10k software patch.
Ever drive in a car with a big screen from like 10+ years ago that has the most outdated, useless UI?
Now imagine that's your whole car.
I miss the days when the radio was its own separate thing in a car. Hate the outdated UI? Just replace the radio head unit with a modern one.
Nowadays it's a lot more difficult. There is a module called iDatalink Maestro that allows you to still maintain most factory features after replacing your head unit, but a lot of cars tend to be incompatible—especially EVs—as more and more features become integrated into the stereo. The days of modular components in cars is nearing an end.
You can get that experience with new cars too. Especially anything made by BMW who presumably don't extend their craftsmanship ideals to their software.
Will a new anything work if the manufacturer kills off the entirely unnecessarily forced network features?
This is not an EV problem, this is an MBA grifting problem.
Finally people are starting to ask the questions that actually matter.
Companies should be required to maintain a stash of plans and source code which is automatically released upon the company stopping operations, unless the IP is bought.
unless the IP is bought
It's always bought on liquidation. The creditors require it to be sold to legally satisfy them. What's worse is that the IP may only be licensed in the first place.
Novell was re-awarded OS code which it sold -- a term I use based on talking to people in the room on both the seller and buyer side of the negotiation table at the time, but merely second-hand knowledge. Novell was awarded ownership as the fact of the sale became a poker chip in a US$5bn lawsuit that could be refuted to give an advantage to one adversary in that lawsuit.
Novell hasn't done a thing with it in 20 years. The code is essentially dead because it would cost too much to restart and update.
This was how the original Unix died, and doesn't violate your plan. Counterexampled?
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.
This is not just something that can impact EVs. NFC door locks, smart infotainment, displays for gauges. None of that is EV specific these days.
These cars were clearly not designed to work without cloud connectivity and or an authenticated account. That seems bonkers. China is huge and has lots of remote areas. How were these cars going to work when they couldn’t phone home?
IMHO, a lot of cars have gone way overboard with “smart” features, but this manufacturer’s problems are the result of cutting corners and not designing for some common use cases.
It's not your car if someone else controls it.
Cars are the tip of the iceberg. What about smart home appliances, like garage door openers, or door locks? They all come with their stupid apps, and once the company is dead, suddenly your home stops working.
We really need mandatory standards: post APIs for client-server connectivity and make the connection URL configurable.
Looking at Aging Wheels YouTube channel with his fleet of non working Wheegos, the answer is no, they won't.
cars? what about all those charging stations that don't have payment by card and require you to setup an account through a mobile app like what kind of cuntery is that.
That's cool and scary but it also (mostly) applies to most new ICE cars as well.
As long as the car isn’t dependent on an Internet connection or the manufacturer’s server and the ports aren’t proprietary, I think you’re good. I expect a car to have these.
I'm pissed that even non-ev vehicles make it impossible/expensive to swap out the head unit for something you like.
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?
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.
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?
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