Another quality VERGE article i see…
Thanks to badly written software, you can literally design “planned obsolescence” into your products.
“The computer says you need to replace your 15,000 dollar battery pack.”
“But my car is only six months old!”
“Yeah, but the Computer SAYS-”
I think a big part of the issue is that the Chinese market is fucking huge, and the Chinese market also seems to love gimmicky software crap in their cars, and often emphasizes that over hardware features and other general aspects of, you know, being a car. It’s an unfortunate and obnoxious case of carmakers following the money.
Nissan leafs and toyota Prius have been around in big numbers for more than a decade.
It’s the enshitiffication that all modern cars are doing: cramming way too much tech into something that is for moving people around, not entertaining them
Yup, I drive a Toyota Prius and am looking at Nissan Leafs. My wife and I hate all the smart crap in cars, and it’s pretty much everywhere now…
Turns out making drivable iPhones is a shitty idea compared to the highly simplified electric motorcycles that work well? Huh. Who’da thunk?
We are locked into the big heavy vehicle paradigm. People have become so accustomed to moving around in a 2t vehicle they have forgotten about the alternatives. Lithium batteries are not a good fit for this type of vehicle and most of the time the use case is single occupant, where the bicycle is king of efficiency.
don’t make them into smartphones. problem solved, you are welcome auto industry.
Look into used Bolt EVs, many are in the 12-14k range after tax credit, 230 miles on a charge, no bells and whistles, drives great. Many have new batteries after the recall that happened a few years ago.
How many clues have been spilled here to show s/he is american?
The article specifies a JD Power study, which is an American institution. Seems obvious enough…
This isn’t software that is exclusive to EVs.
Why is the preview pic two politicians kissing aggresively
The good news is programming everywhere is garbage.
Software that is completely unnecessary. There is zero reason a battery powered vehicle needs to be much different software wise than an ICE. They do not need 20" touchscreens packed with a custom infotainment system written by hardware focused developers.
The Megane E-tech has functionality in its satnav that lets you plot a route with charging stations on the way, showing how much capacity you will have left when you get to them. Not essential, but very useful for somebody who is new to EVs.
Software that communicates with power companies to allow the car to charge overnight at advantageous rates, or even feed energy back into the grid. Again, not essential, but good for the customer and helps with the transition to green electricity.
I have that in my ICE car and I never use it (map of gas stations correlated with remaining fuel). That’s not specific to an EV.
Any of those features can be in a smartphone attached to your dashboard. Sure you have some benefits in accessing the car data, but they are small.
Electric cars need software to smooth out motor output to create an enjoyable driving experience. They also need to manage battery health and regenerative braking.
battery controllers and motor controllers are available as cheap, simple, stable, off-the-shelf dedicated hardware and there’s no reason budget evs would need to do any coding for them, maybe just some variable adjustment. those things are not controlled by the user facing software being talked about here.
The first thing is something ICE vehicles also do. A BMS, figuring out regenerative braking, and maybe one or two other things are the only things that need to be different. Car makers have shoved all the software they can into EVs without the experienced developers to do it on the hopes that they can fix shit in the future and charge subscription fees for it.
Wow, Dodge is worse than Telsa and almost down to Polestar.
And since when have you known any computer to be problem-free?
Software that’s not made from overworked engineers working 80 hours a week pressured to work even faster to complete this week’s sprint.
I’m so tired of “computers are buggy and everyone accepts that”. No! Computers don’t have to be buggy, you just have to not shove trash software on it made by morons doing the bare minimum.
I have software that’s been running on servers for literal years, not a single bug. The hardware’s been sized appropriately and I wrote good, sustainable and maintainable code. My computers all can easily do weeks and months of uptime. I pick up my laptop and open the lid and 100% of the time it wakes up from sleep and it’s ready to go.
The overwhelming majority of “production” and “enterprise quality” code I work with is total garbage that should never have been written and its author never hired in the tech space. We repeatedly get reports on how X car manufacturer was pwned for not following best practices that are a decade or two old.
Corporate greed makes EVs suck because it’s developed for as cheap as possible and the target is “good enough customers tolerate it”. Shit barely works properly when going through the happy path and the error path just… usually crashes your car.
I’ve had to reboot my car at red lights way too fucking often and it’s not even an EV. 2020 model and the infotainment reliably crashes if I have a Slack or Zoom call going because it tries to read the phone number off my phone over Bluetooth and doesn’t know how to handle a null phone number = the radio crashes.
It’s not fucking rocket science.
Seriously.
Yes, there’s an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there’s way more arbitrary complexity that doesn’t serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.
Also, maybe just don’t copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.
A friend bought a new BMW, with all the bells and whistles. The app for the car is like a game, where you have to subscribe to get the juicy content.
You can subscribe to different feature-packs. They sure made the effort, that the $$$ system works flawlessly.
Like, the app surely is buggy and things may not work as expected, but you only get to try it out, when your money is on their account anyway.
I just want an EV company to make the equivalent of a shitty Toyota Prius.
Sorry, theyre banned here because china made em
Chevy Bolt EV/EUV
I bought one just before the end. No ragrets. There are definitely some software quirks (the rear cross traffic alert always points the wrong direction) but overall I like it.
Which has been discontinued. They have said they’ll bring back a EUV for the 2026 model year, but we’ll see if that comes to fruition.
General Motors accidentally made a good car so that’s why they had to kill it.
I was pleasantly surprised how good the Bolt was and still liked it after 3 years of leasing it. I was ready to get another one after the lease was over, but the pandemic changed my decision (working from home meant I didn’t really need a nice car and definitely wasn’t driving enough for the price plus-up for EV to make sense, so I got a used beater).
How did you feel about the L3 charging rate? 50kW isn’t super fast.
A Nissan Leaf?
They’re discontinuing it in 2026.
There’s tons on the used market.
They all use Chademo connectors and air cooled batteries. Might be ok for puttering around town or as a commuter car, but that’s about it.
They did say a shitty prius.
That covers like 99% of all private car use.
