Technology

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.

Makes you wonder about ice cars too.

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:

• charge the battery
• regulate the battery's temperature
• discharge the battery to make it go

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.

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?

People have already been jailbreaking Teslas to unlock full self-driving, which is a $10k software patch.

And somehow the RPi9 will still need some $90 5V20A USB power supply

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 Hate the outdated UI?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.

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?

My smartphone still works without service. Just as a tablet/computer device. Cars should be the same.

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?