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Comment by hertzrat | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, how many of the $800 of these chips and their software in new cars are maintainable or repairable at the corner garage? I remember having a Volkswagen years ago (the company is mentioned in the article as being affected by this), and my favourite mechanic saying I had to take it to vw because of the computer systems. VW fixed it just fine, but I didn’t like not having a choice

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Most modern vehicles are repairable at the corner garage, it just takes being a computer nerd and several thousand dollars in tools. You have to buy a scanner to read the codes and watch the live data (basically as an oscilloscope). If you need to update the firmware, or replace a failed module with a different one, you also need to pay the manufacturer to access their programming software.

A little dated, but a good overview: http://www.drewtech.com/downloads/articles/J2534%20Primer%20...

OBD-II codes are standard and can be read by any generic scanner. Beyond that, each automaker has their own software for diagnostics, reading live data, and updating/resetting computers. There are some third party tools[1] that can handle a lot of this but they tend to lag the latest model years because they need to be updated as new models are released. These tools are probably expensive for the home mechanic but not really for a professional. Stuff like loading new firmware is almost always dealer-only.

[1] http://www.pro.innova.com/Product/FullDetail/5160

lol these chips are all going to have unmaintained ancient kernel versions full of bugs in 5 years. no one has any plans to support these cars for more than half a decade. android is an unmaintable pox: they let vendors do what they will with ancient kernels, & there's not an incentive in the world to upgrade to more recent kernel. obsolete software being handed to car makers to make yet more obsolete systems that no one can or will ever maintain. it's not just the corner garage that can't maintain or work on these systems: the system itself is aging quickly & deprecating & no one can maintain it. not the chip maker, not google/android, not the car makers. it's all unmaintainable in extreme. that's what you get when you branch off mainline. that's what you get when you don't go upstream.

The purpose of the chip is to make "corner garage" peasants of the manufacturer lord, so they (and so you) have to pay the manufacturer or dealer for the privilege of fixing their flawed products.

The irony is that given that they are such low margin customers, it is likely that a few semiconductor businesses will not end up honoring long term supply guarantees (i.e. by selling off the division), so car manufacturers might not be able to fix them either.

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