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Comment by fuzzfactor | Hacker News Reader

Can't read the article but it does make you wonder.

How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?

Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.

The people up north may have fair warning decades later when the collectors having something like a mint 2025 Mercedes in places like Texas or Florida start having theirs die for this reason.

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>How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?

Life time estimation for parts has existed for over 100 years. It is not a novel science.

Also a fun little exercise, what do car companies sell, besides new cars? That is right, they all sell used cars. For most car companies used cars are a huge part of their businesses model, their ideal customer buys new cars often AND sells their old car to the manufacturer, so they can sell it again.

>Or maybe one day the only vintage cars will be same ones there are now, only the ones made without chips at all might be capable of operating beyond 30 to 50 years ever again.

All cars are made to die, there is no alternative. If the owner wants to avoid that, they will have to do constant maintenance. Vintage cars do not exist because rust didn't exist in the 1990s, but because they were extremely well cared for and had significant replacements.

Car makers need cars to last for a while. That someone can trade in their 3 year old car means and there is value means that someone can afford to spend more on the new car they are buying. However they also need old cars that the poorest drive to die eventually so that there is someone all the way down looking for a different car once in a while.

Many of the parts of the car are bought from a third party who gives a discount to the OEM because they can sell replacement parts later. (put my alternator in your car, and when it wears out in 5-10 years they will buy a new one from me)

It's not like classic cars are flawless immortals. It takes a lot to keep a classic car going and this will be no different.

While true, classic cars are "simple" in that all of their parts can be replaced and remade in people's home garages with commercially available tools like lathes. If a chip breaks down, I doubt even in 100 years someone can make a replacement at home. In theory there will be a manufacturer or market with replacements, but it won't be easy.

It is substantially easier to replace the entire computer system of most gasoline engines if something critical like the ECU is no longer commanding the engine to deliver fuel or spark. In the US this constitutes a "defeat device" and is prohibited by federal law

It is possible to retrofit many old engines that didn't have an ECU with a modern fuel injection system.

My son drives a 1996 Buck Park Avenue which dates from the beginning of the ODB II era. We got it for about $4k but it has been through a few difficult repairs that took my son or auto techs a while to figure out. For instance the immobilizer system failed with the result that we couldn't start the car, it took a tech a lot of investigation to realize this, but once he did it wasn't hard to disable.

What would a defeat device look like for an electric car?

I suppose that hasn't been explored in the legal system currently. Most electric cars would be considered a zero emission vehicle. If you bolted a generator to an electric car that'd change its emissions. One could argue this defeats the original emissions target, but that sounds like a stretch.

Overall if the car has some sort of devices that limits, mitigates, or eliminates emissions then any modification to it can be considered a defeat device

> It is substantially easier to replace the entire computer system of most gasoline engines

Verses a carburetor? Have you worked on engines before?

I read it as agreeing with you by adding an interesting anecdote. Ie “yes, the old systems are easier to keep on the road. It would be possible to keep newer systems on the road with custom built parts (aftermarket ECU) but unfortunately that is illegal “

Carburetors are one of the most complex parts of a classic car and thus a bad example. If there are major carburetors problems it is probably simpler to replace it with fuel injection. (but only if a community of people work together - all the different maps and such in the ECU need to be created before you can make a useful fuel injection - this is long tedious work)

I think that was "versus replacing a chip."

The ECU has fairly standardized interfaces, mostly CAN or just simple switching circuits on or off. You can just get a replacement ECU. These replacement ECUs generally don't do things like using the O2 sensor to adjust the fueling, so they can burn dirtier than the original ECU.

> mostly CAN

CAN is just the physical and framing layer. The data that goes over it is a whole different matter, and it's proprietary to every vendor, incompatible and generally undocumented.

For a lot of cars you can't even swap the exact same ECU between vehicles (due to bullshit like the VIN being written into it for no reason, and often no official way to change that other than "buy a new module" - so you have to hack around with reverse engineering & EEPROM programmers), let alone mix and match completely different parts.

> the VIN being written into it for no reason

There is good reason for this: theft protection. A long known crime model is the "chop shop" where they tow away a car, then cut it up for parts. Because the VIN is in the ECU a chop shop has less incentive to exist since there is less money in it.

It does of course make legitimate repairs harder, and probably there should be a process to write a new VIN in - but it should only be available to someone who can verify the ECU wasn't stolen (which isn't free).

EEPROM programmers and various other ways of rewriting this VIN (turnkey tools using undocumented diagnostic commands giving you unauthenticated read/write access to memory) means it's just one insignificant expense for the chop shop (as it's amortized over all their cars) vs a multi-thousand-dollar investment in money for a legitimate vehicle owner or part-time mechanic.

Only if it is done via EEPROM and not via something more complex. Though your point stands.

That's true, but it's usually pretty simple to reverse engineer, and that's been done for a lot of cars. CAN message are generally sent out at fixed time intervals, and correspond to some physical or control value, with a simple linear mapping between some physical unit and the value in the message. You collect some CAN data, change something like pressing the accelerator, see what changes, record results.

Just search for "aftermarket ECU", you'll find lots of them; generally for high-performance cars that gearheads want to soup up further, but the same basic principle applies to most ECUs.

Neither case is easy. Making something "simple" like a new control arm or connecting rod is way beyond a typical garage shop. The electronics are not a home shop item either but replacing parts with work-alike modules is already something people do with aftermarket ECUs etc. As long as there is enough demand people will find a way to make the parts (to supply aftermarket), for example I expect the first gen NSX to be repairable for decades.

I very much doubt cars with a lot of electronics and reliant of software and increasingly network connected are going to last that long anyway. The manufacturer stops updating software after 10 years if you are lucky and then its EOL and increasingly unsafe and insecure.

Guy with no experience maintaining classic cars. Good luck making carburetor diaphragms on your lathe.

While true, classic cars are "simple" in that all of their parts can be replaced and remade in people's home garages with commercially available tools like lathes.

I've an '81 VW van in my driveway that begs to differ. It's got a bad idle stabilizer. The vehicle won't start unless that electronic idle stabilizer is bypassed. It runs fine in the bypass state, and good thing, because NOS parts ran out a few years ago. There might be efforts to create a clone (haven't checked thesamba.com in a while). I'm sure a clone is doable by someone that paid more attention in electronics class than I did, but no one is going to pop one out on their garage lathe.

And that's just the electronics. It has mechanical fuel injection (fuck you, Bosch), but good luck making injectors in your home workshop. I'll not start on suspension parts whose manufacturing require a far larger hydraulic press than anyone is likely to have in their garage.

It will require different skills though. One of them may well be reverse engineering, it's not as if the owners manual for a modern car includes schematics and source code.

Because the physics is fairly well know, as I understand it. See for example these[1][2] articles from Microsemi and TI respectively, or this review paper[3] for power electronics.

[1]: https://www.microsemi.com/document-portal/doc_view/124041-ca...

[2]: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/sprabx4b/sprabx4b.pdf

[3]: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/18/4589

>Can't read the article but it does make you wonder. How would they know this unless they were already making them barely good enough to last beyond the warranty period in northern climates?

Sorry to be a stick in the ass, but RTFA. The Arrhenius equation is mentioned and is quite interesting.

Didn't intend to hurt anybody's feelings but it did stimulate discussions when there were absolutely none.

The work of Arrhenius I do remember from 1970 myself, and it has been a consideration over these decades, not only with the electronics but the chemicals professionally since then.

But I haven't stepped into a fab lab since the early 1970's, I know they've come a long way though.

I was wondering if much theory was involved or actual lifetimes have begun to be exceeded.

I do remember cars from before, during, and after the arrival of silicon semiconductors, and then chips myself. It did not appear to be a very ideal progression, nor as logical as it could have been. That just makes it more difficult to arrive at very accurate predictions.

Did I mention that the web page is not open to the general public?

Not that I actually expected anybody to read the article to me ;)

Having lots of comments are more informative regardless, and naturally sometimes more helpful than others.

So everybody wins.

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