When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?

I built some custom EVs & drove many miles with them. I used hacked/reverse engineered OEM parts for them.

While the servers going dark might be annoying, you still have access to your cars hardware, giving various attack vectors in making your car "go" again.

- CAN protocol between components is relatively straightforward to reverse engineer, and on a fundamental level all modern EVs work "the same"

- you/someone can put a new circuit board into the remote-disabling component and tell the rest of the car "everything is fine, please drive"

- depending on how much the OEM has invested in preventing this, it might get harder, but it will always be possible (last resort, swap to new brainboard)

So, all that said, this is of course a worry for the consumer (liability as well when modifying the car of course), but if you control the hardware and enough other people have the same car as you I believe they will be reverse-engineerable.

You can check my submissions, I am making a video series about how modern EVs work, also check out openinverter.org community.

One more anecdote: Fisker Ocean was in a similar place recently and I started looking at their owner groups to see if there would be a business case for me to get more involved, but I haven't pursued it further.

So in the same way that "life will always find a way" in Jurassic Park, I think if you bought something that enough other people have bought, someone will hack it/share a solution (albeit voiding the warranty in the process).

My dad has a "smart" radiator. For 5 months he couldn't control it remotely because some server in Norway was down.

There should be some escrow system for software and service for something as expensive as a car. When Saab Automobile went bankrupt in 2016 a number companies where quick to announce that they'd be able to source or manufacture replacement parts. You can build a brand new 2CV from replacement parts, with an electric motor, and I'm almost certain you can do the same with a VW Bettle.

All the "smart" stuff leaves us a risk of having to discard brand new functional vehicles at a huge environmental impact. Unless you drive a lot, it's better for the environment to maintain an old Saab, compared to buying a new Chinese EV.

Of course, this trend such as "software defined vehicles" is happening with all cars, not just EVs.

The main problem points for incompatibility are places where the car interfaces with software outside of itself. As that software gets updated or APIs change, the car can go out of date. I think chargers and automatic payments might be the most important one there.

This reminds me of a story of a hiker (or 2) who rented a car through one of those apps that immediately unlock the car for you, and then you just park somewhere.

Well, the place they parked had no cell phone reception, so they couldn't unlock the car there and leave (how they locked the car is another question).

From the article

> He also couldn’t see his car’s mileage and charging status on the dashboard.

I'm assuming this is in the app...

“Beijing has rolled out new EV subsidies to help keep struggling companies afloat.”

This seems like an odd approach. If you’re gonna site maintenance as the concern, then what you’re saying is you’re concerned about the consumer; meaning if the company is gonna go bust, you should take the money that you’d spend keeping these companies afloat and give them directly to the consumer to replace the car.

That depends on what you mean by work. Most will surely still work as cars always did but will no longer get updates to software or to maps.

As far as I can tell my Tesla S will continue to work even if Tesla and all the charging stations disappear. But the navigation system will be much less usable and many features of the entertainment system will stop working (Spotify, TuneIn).

And if you buy from a company that produces a very large volume of cars then at least in some cases third parties will step in to support the vehicles for a fee.

This issue has been a plague in the area of Toys and Games. Good luck finding a good toy that does not *require* an app to run.

Every year I have little gremlins asking me to "fix" a toy someone brought them the previous year; the app doesn't work/update anymore - and the toy is a brick.

In the modern world, not everything needs to be connected to the internet or smartphones.

EVs, solar inverters and wrist watches are definitely one of them.

I'm not surprised, not sure how anyone is thinking that devices that tie you to one company completely are a good idea

I understand (though I’m not super happy about) auxiliary functions like apps or services not working when a car company shuts down. But shouldn’t most of this software be “baked into” the car and not require a server somewhere to operate?

I’m in the market for a new vehicle and would like to purchase an EV. However, I also have a fear of the software becoming obsolete or no longer supported. I tend to keep my vehicles for a long time, my current vehicle is 12 years old.

So, is someone missing a great startup idea here maybe? "Jailbreaking" supposedly "defunct" EVs, and / or custom firmwares, etc? Could be profits to be had?

What happens to Noland Arbaugh when Neuralink goes out of business?

It is a bit odd but I submitted the exact same article 10 days ago.