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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Such a pity there is no way to get an electronics minimal car control unit. Funny how conspicuously unimplemented functionality works.

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When you go to an electrical drive train you quickly realize you need computers for things like battery conditioning, efficiency, forward/reverse, charging, route planning, stop/start, and on and on and on. It's not as simple as engine on, engine off. Tesla (rightly, IMO) chose to lean into this. It will be interesting to see what a company like Slate chooses to do.

Note I said minimal. If manufacturers were content to just restrain integrated circuits to those purposes without widespread telemetry or phoning home, or creating software lockouts we'd meet my definition of minimal. Just what it takes to make a functioning device. Instead, we see software used as load bearing supports for predatory or exploitative/surveillance oriented architectures. That is not minimal to me.

IMO the rules should be simple: manufacturers of electronics need to be required to provide private keys for the electronics, plus a source-available MVP firmware for getting the thing to work.

I don't care if GM or whoever wants to ship a buggy, ad-ridden, data-siphoning, subscription filled nightmare with new cars. That's their decision. But they should be banned from trying to exercise any kind of control over a piece of hardware that I own outright.

If you do an aftermarket EV conversion the car will mostly be built using hardware that you can nearly fully reason about and won't include snitch boxes.

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