Bruce Perens is organizing a conference on Open Cars. It will take place Tuesday, November 6th, 2018 in Orlando, Florida, USA. The concept behind Open Cars, is the idea that the hardware as well as the software conform to open standards and that, as an automotive product, it must be sufficiently accessible and modular to enable technology upgrades, aftermarket products, and testing by security researchers. The interfaces must be openly documented and be backed by openly disclosed APIs and hardware interfaces. It would not have to run on open data, but could nonetheless protect data privacy and security as well as or better than proprietary automotive products do today. As the emphasis is on the standards and interfaces, both hardware and software, it would not necessarily require that manufacturers base their vehicles on open source software.
The automobile industry thinks they have a solution: lease rather than sell autonomous cars, lock the hood shut, and maintain them exclusively through their dealers.
That works great for the 1%. But what about the rest of us? The folks who drive a dented, 10-year-old car? We should have the option to drive autonomous cars, and to participate in the same world as the more wealthy folks.
Open Cars will be the solution. These are automobiles sold with standard fittings, plugs and standards, so that an autonomous driving computer can be purchased in the aftermarket, installed and tested by a certified mechanic, and put on the road. Similarly, the on-board computer, communication, navigation, and entertainment system on an Open Car will be pluggable, purchased on the aftermarket, and will fit into well-defined niches in the vehicle.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:32PM (3 children)
Thanks, Bruce, for getting the ball rolling. I look forward to the standards Open Car comes out with.
It will be particularly interesting to see how people come to customize vehicles using the open standard. I don't know how it will get past regulators, but I hope it does.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)
Do you mean lobbyists instead of regulators?
It won't get past regulators because of the regulators have an undocumented protocol violating the spirit of open cars. Would removing the regulator cause the vehicle to operate in a way not conforming to the law?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:52PM (1 child)
Your first question as a stand-alone seems like a good correction to what I said. Regulators have rather morphed into lobbyists.
Your second paragraph makes me wonder if that's what you meant, though.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:15PM
The first question is the one to pay attention to. :-)
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:33PM (1 child)
But if he thinks this will happen he is smacktardedd
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:38PM
Google for "tractor hacking".
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:42PM
I wish I could believe this was going to happen as it's truly needed. In fact it should be mandated. I can see a day when your car runs perfectly but has a zero-day exploit where someone can remotely jam on your gas for which there's no "update" available.
Unfortunately the motivation of the manufacturers is of course in the opposite direction. They'd like nobody else but them to even be able to do repairs if they could get away with it...and to some degree they do.
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:53PM (1 child)
If this gets any interest behind it watch the negative PR blitz about how this project is preventing women from becoming mechanics and how men designed cars to be too complicated for women to maintain as part of a giant conspiracy and how if we had feminist cars, gas would cost 70¢ a gallon again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:02PM
Someone above made up a great word that I think applies here.
Smacktarded!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @05:54PM (6 children)
I thought ride sharing was going to be the future of automobiles.
Everybody keeps changing their minds, I can't keep up anymore.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:19PM (2 children)
What is ride sharing? Carpooling? Uber? Once autonomous vehicles become widespread the Uber drivers will be kicked to the curb to die. People could potentially rent out their personal cars to be used as driverless taxis.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:31PM (1 child)
Ask what problem the automakers are solving. Planned obsolescence was their first attempt to convert intermittent customers into recurring revenue streams by designing cars to last about as long as the payments... usually to the finance subsidiary of the automaker. Foreign cars defeated it. So now they want to eliminate the end users entirely and switch on huge recurring revenue streams from self driving cars that the automakers retain ownership of, much like Apple products. At that point their incentives change, make smaller but predictable and long range planned runs of cars to upgrade the installed base and keep it refreshed but generate the lion's share of revenue from usage fees. A few middlemen will, on paper and for tax purposes, own all of the cars in the world and run them in fleets of mass transit / taxi services along with a few in limo service to the 1%. Nobody else will be allowed to own a car, for "safety reasons."
The powers that be will be happy to help them achieve that dream because it will give them what they desire control. Once the roads are redesigned to simplify life for automated cars manual control will be a crime. That means if they do not want people going somewhere they simply tell the cars not to go there and that is that. If somebody becomes a problem they just tell the cars not to carry them anywhere, or only to a few controlled destinations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:21PM
You left out the worst part. The ads. Ads everywhere! They won't be able to help themselves. Hold the door handle for 10 seconds so it can 'confirm your identity' to unlock the car while the window displays a video ad to you. Look right at the middle of the ad so the face recognition camera can get a good picture if you're carrying too much to touch the handle. Then pay an additional $10 to not automatically drive through a valued partener's drive-thu and to not automatically roll-down the window so the attendant can ask if you want a nice cold drink since the AC suddenly to stopped working 10 minutes ago.
Businesses go crazy when they think they've got a captive audience and control the laws in that industry.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:55PM (2 children)
According to Treehugger.com, the future of automobiles is electric bikes. Which means the pizza delivery guys around NYC are already living in the age of Buck Rogers.
I would prefer to ditch ground transportation entirely and live in a zeppelin.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @12:16PM (1 child)
Ideally you would work as locally as possible to save on resources and re-engineer society in a local modular resilient way instead of the intentional spaghetti code equivalent of the globalized serfdom system.
So transportation would mean take that lotus seven replica for a ride on the weekend.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:44PM
I like where you are going with that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday July 17 2018, @06:38PM (4 children)
At the very least, if it looks like it will go somewhere then the big automakers will crush it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:17PM (2 children)
These are cars, so they need a PC analogy: do you remember the "open notebook PC" standard from ~15-20 years ago? Standard swapable modules, boxy overly thick design. It was an idea with many merits, but none that could overcome the ugly, expensive problems.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @12:23PM (1 child)
Just as project ara was an intentional failure, I guess the notebook was intentionally going to fail (too much modularity possibly).
SBC and go pro clones have standardized a bit around some form factors or accessories. Tell me that a portable pc cannot look like the lenovo 500 and be modular.
If you dig up a little you will find scams but also potentially good ideas buried by hardware suppliers failing to deliver in time and quality probs.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:20PM
The modular notebook project had a little grasp on reality. They thought they were going to address the "serious" industrial markets (i.e. knew they could never compete in consumer space). The kinds of places you see Toughbooks, etc. Still, the speed of progress on the consumer side of things made the Toughbook approach of repackaging consumer tech in durable cases with long term availability of specific models much more successful than attempting to run a bespoke custom modular development ecosystem in parallel with consumer notebook development.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:18PM
Who cares how ugly the car is? Only your mechanic ever sees it. All you see is the shell that's put over the top. We already live in a world where most cars are standardized per-manufacturer. Pretty much every mainstream Toyota is actually the same vehicle - sedan, wagon, SUV, or light-duty pickup truck - it doesn't matter, it's all the same frame, drive train, etc. Ditto for Ford, Volvo, etc,etc,etc. Each manufacturer has a very small selection of "platforms", and almost all their products are an interchangeable body installed on one of those platforms.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday July 17 2018, @07:04PM (5 children)
Eh, I don't know if encouraging two ton, 70 MPH death machine modding is a good idea or not. For personal computers and software, openness is awesome because I'm not likely to murder the kid down the street no matter what unthinkable things I do (enable directory hard linking?). Note that FOSS licenses all come with a NO LIABILITY clause.
Open standards are fine, but "sufficiently accessible to .. aftermarket products" is worrying.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:04PM
People modify their vehicles all the time and can register kit cars and other such fully custom vehicles. This is not much different, and besides car companies have shown that they are not fully trustworthy anyway. Bad designs, cheap elements, terrible software.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:08PM (1 child)
For as long as there have been vehicles, people have been modifying them.
Some of these nodifications weren't safe
But the vehicles weren't safe to begin with.
Governments, to varying degrees, introduced "safety" legislation.
Modifications continue, but more and more restrictions have been added over the decades.
At the same time, manufacturers have *also* built restrictions, by design, you can't swap engines, gearboxes, glass..anything. Sometimes, you can make adapters.
Add software, with all the complexity and DRM bullshit, and you get cars being a full network, and idiots connecting all the controls to the one network, and the security for the network having all the protections of an eight-year-old's self-hosted website.
Now we get to re-enact the last 25 years of internet security "improvements", but "in cars" Websites don't kill people. Cars can.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 18 2018, @08:04AM
But it sounds like this is pushing for "accessibility", as in little Bobby down the street can slot in a "nitro" module to his car before going on a joyride through the next house.
The lack of standardization may have created a knowledge barrier for modification, such that people doing mods had some high probability of being smart enough to not do something blatantly stupid. Thus, I'm wondering if fighting for standardization and accessibility of modding to the average teenager will have unintended consequences.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:20PM
The most common modding done to the death machines today is done to make them go faster.... there's a huge global industry built up around it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 18 2018, @12:25PM
> Eh, I don't know if encouraging two ton, 70 MPH death machine
If i had glands I'd salivate.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:47PM (6 children)
In this case it's a good thing, because the 1% are the ones dying behind the wheel while being utterly stupid. We've already gotten rid of a few executives this way because they decide to watch movies instead of the road.
I'm not even remotely interested in the technology because there will be no way to divorce it from the surveillance machines. I'll enjoy a 40 year old rust bucket, that has a street rod engine in it, no OnStar, and no ability to stop it via electronic means because it has a carburetor and not electronic fuel injection. That's if I want gasoline. The prices on custom hybrid or electric engines will only go down, while gas continues to be economically nonviable.
As for the leasing, that is the only way I would use one of those vehicles in the future. With fake identification and cash, or whatever means I need to be untrackable. Really, that's assuming we will have an economy at all that creates enough wealth in the middle and bottom for people to enjoy it.
All that advanced crap actually is for the 1% with their unearned incomes at the expense of living wages for the Middle Class.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:01PM (5 children)
I want an EV modded to scream like a tie fighter on the attack. No, wait. Scratch that. Can't get the foul taste of The Last Jedi out of my mouth... A shadow ship from Babylon 5 on the attack.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:36PM
Ford and Dodge have you covered, I think they both play artificial engine noise through speakers to satisfy their customers' expectations of what a performance car "should" sound like - shouldn't be too hard to tap into that firmware and replace the simulated V8 with a strafing run soundtrack anytime you floor it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:42PM
Well, I actually want a fully modded vehicle to look and scream like a tie fighter with this [youtube.com] blasting, while doing 80mph down the freeway. I'll enjoy it immensely. Once. Maybe twice, but that presumes I can escape a stock Crown Vic with a radio :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Tuesday July 17 2018, @10:02PM
LOL, I always wanted an EV that sounded like an old steam train coming down the tracks.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:25PM (1 child)
Just make sure to wear your tin hat or the government will simply take control of your shadow vessel.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:51PM
Not gonna happen. I'm around a P50. Even PsyCops are only P12.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Tuesday July 17 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
It's a good idea, but why would you have this conference in Florida of all places? There are so many nice places that will have good weather in November, I just don't get why you would choose Florida.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 19 2018, @12:31PM
I was in Florida once in November. It was so hot I couldn't leave the air-conditioned hospital (where my father was staying) for more than a few minutes at a time. Maybe it's an attempt to keep people from wandering away from the meeting?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:32PM (5 children)
We have 4 registered cars in our 2 driver household... the newest is a 2002. Two of them are relatively dent-free (the dents in the other two are minor...)
I find that cost analysis of: repair vs replace almost always comes down overwhelmingly on the side of: cheaper to repair. The last car we replaced was lemon-yellow and starting to act its color, the one it replaced was just impractically shaped for its daily use cases (Chrysler Sebring Convertible - long hood and difficult to judge fenders in small cramped parking lots, not a good choice for the wife's daily driver.) You can make all kinds of arguments about improved fuel economy, etc. but: the difference between 22 and 30mpg will pay you back $42 per 1000 miles driven (at $3.50 per gallon), so... spending even $8400 for a trade-up to better efficiency would take 200,000 miles of driving to achieve ROI...
But, but, we're saving the environment. Bullshit. That new "efficient" car you just purchased has far more negative impact on the environment from its manufacture and disposal process than any reasonable differential fuel savings from the car you could repair for much less money. Overall, money is a somewhat reasonable approximation of environmental impact, the less you spend the less impact you make (unless you're spending your money on jet travel, that's deep discounted CO2 emissions there.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:51PM (4 children)
I'm amazed that you find it cheaper to repair. I've found that as long as I keep the car for the warranty period, and then trade in, that I got a much better deal. Of course, I also made out like a bandit with the first Priuses. Only car that paid me to drive, and that was including car washes in my expenses.
Older cars are much easier to maintain though. All the new crap is infected with proprietary electronics requiring expensive tools to diagnose. You get an older car without EFI though, and it's easily possible to maintain. Of course, even easier if you have the skills or mechanics in the family.
Otherwise, not so much. I'll definitely give you the environmental impact argument. The technology sounds wonderful until you review it from the mines to the street. Than it's no so impressive. Like that corn subsidy bullshit for hybrid fuel not including the damage it does to the Gulf from fertilizer and pesticide runoff in the Mississippi river. Certain algaes and swtichgrasses are much better, but don't have the political clout of the corn lobbyists fuel'd by Big Ag.
I don't think you've fully accounted for $5/gallon gasoline. That changes it very significantly. I didn't mind 42 gallon tanks in massive Chevy suburbans till gas rose over $2/gallon. Then all of the sudden I saw myself going into debt on credit cards to afford fuel. Hence, the switch to the Prius, or my "clown car".
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:35AM (1 child)
There are a handful of cars out there, that if fleet maintained could easily beat new cars on a cost per mile basis. The issue with old cars isn't the maintenance is it is the duplication of work, and the fraud. In VA I have to bring my car to the mechanic for its annual sabotage (safety inspection), and then I have to go through it and figure out what they fucked up afterwards.
Once you have the tools for your car, you can save quite a bit. Shops charge 100% markup on parts, and then typically 2x the labor of a skilled mechanic. And that is before they start making shit up and breaking things. Expect twice that from the the dealer.
So your ROI on maintenance is looking pretty good right out of the gate. However most cars since the 90's have been designed to not be maintenance friendly. This is intentional. The way you know that is that a light lense is now $150, when they used to be $10. So the cars that really make sense from an owner maintenance perspective are getting rarer. Good examples, rarer still.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:59AM
Just like new houses, new cars aren't problem free either (though they do tend to be better than the custom constructed houses...)
I've had as much damage done during warranty repairs as I have had things fixed, it feels like. Once the warranty is gone and I start making more rational decisions about "does this really need to be fixed?" the number of problems seems to drop off pretty quickly.
Often, it doesn't take much in the way of tools to do your own work (for some jobs...) I had a "bad" cooling fan that, when I got into it, was just a loose connector. The connector itself had some breaking plastic and a stretched out metal socket - once I saw that I reshaped the socket with a pair of pliers and it's fixed: total parts cost $0. Time to repair: less than any repair that would have attempted to replace the connector. How long will it last? Time will tell, if it gets flaky again, I already know to check the connector first before even thinking about a new fan motor.
For bigger jobs (like a total accessory tear-down to get to a timing belt), if you can find a good, honest mechanic they can do the work for less than 1/2 of shop rate. I sourced my own parts and paid a mechanic for his labor in my garage with his tools, total cost $1000 to replace: radiator, hoses, belts, alternator, water pump, timing belt and oil seals on a 1999 Miata - the alternator had died, the seals were leaking, and the rest was well past half-life. Hopefully we're now 50K+ miles away from the next necessary repair of any of that stuff. Shop rate for any one of those major component replacements would be over $500, well over at most shops.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:47AM
Well, total up your car purchase expenses and tell me how you do on a 20 year time scale. With the repair it until you can't stand it anymore approach, we tend to run about $1000 per year per vehicle (our typical vehicle buy-in is in the $10-20K range).
Some vehicles at some points in time do appreciate, and I think Prius was one of those, so you may have hit an "investment anomaly" there - I did it with a new 1991 Miata, paid $14K to the dealer and a year later I took a bank loan on it and the bank valued it at $16K with 20,000 miles on it. On the bottom end of the scale, I bought my first car for $900 when I was 17, drove it 5000 miles over the summer, washed it real well, and sold it for $1500 at the end... not exactly funding my retirement, but it can be done.
I did mention that our newest is a 2002? The electronics in the cars from the 1990s aren't too terrible for maintenance, and I gave my 1991 a "brain transplant" in 1997, which I could do again if the aftermarket ECU ever gets too whacked out. I've been toying with the idea of buying a good condition late 60s early 70s small-block V8 something or other and one of the first things I'd do with that after making sure the A/C is capable of keeping meat fresh on a summer day is to swap out the carb for a drop-in EFI replacement. Maybe historical sacrilege, but in my opinion carburetors are art worthy of museum pieces, and seriously inferior technology for the real world.
We bought a 360ci pickup truck new in 1999, $19K new off the dealer lot. It was almost exactly what we wanted, color, rubber floors, no power windows, etc. but we wanted the smaller V8 - instead we got the 5.9 because it was what they had in stock - didn't seem like a big deal in 1999 with $1.50/gal gas, some of the $4/gal years have left the truck sidelined for road trips because it only gets 15mpg, the $85 tank fills were kind of hard to watch, but it's still a great truck around town, and while paying double for fuel does add up over the years, it would take a whole lot of miles to add up to the price of a new truck - even at $5/gal, that's 6000 gallons to equal a $30K (today's near bottom end full size) pickup truck, or 180,000 miles in the new truck before it "pays for itself in gas savings alone." Our 1999 truck is currently sitting around 150,000 miles, and while there has been talk of $10/gal gas, I've never seen it much over 4 - by the time it reaches 5 you're going to have to do quite a bit of inflation factoring on the calculation, including inflated incomes. Even with an $85 tank fill, that typically goes 330 miles and when you compare $85 per tank to a loan payment on a new vehicle (or savings to buy one if you do it that way), it's still not bad.
Our newest is a 2002 S430 Mercedes, bought it 2 years ago with 44,000 miles, today it has a book value of about $2500. It is more expensive to maintain than the average car, we've been spending about $1200 per year on maintenance, but then it's a whole lot nicer to drive around in than the average car, too. We were looking at "average" sedans in the 1-2 year old range when we found the 430 on a local car lot and those 1-2 year old sedans at $20K were just not appealing at all. Dealer told us that the guy who traded in the Mercedes traded it for 2 new Priuses, the Benz gives us a pretty solid 22mpg - can't see $50K worth of Prius being any kind of long term savings, but two vehicles can be more useful than one.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:44PM
I respectfully disagree on this point. You would have to pay me to switch back to a carb and mechanical ignition system. EFI works a thousand times better. Yes, that means you have to own an $80 scan tool, and you have to look up what a trouble code correlates to for your particular vehicle. If you have a problem you can't figure out you take it to a mechanic and pay the $40 diagnostic fee so they can tell you what's wrong, then bring it home and change the parts yourself.
Bias disclosure: I work on my own cars and just rolled 250k miles on my '02 Grand Caravan. I've put 160k of those miles on it and have less than $2,000 in repairs in it excluding gas, oil changes, and tires. She's a good one. I also have a piece of shit Chevy Equinox that needs new piston rings of piss-poor engineering. That job books at 16 hours and I don't want to do it. It has 99k miles.
I'm old enough to remember the stench from pre-efi cars. We don't want to go back to that.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Tuesday July 17 2018, @09:56PM
Unless they can force the industry and government regulators to ensure that the computer guidance and automations is in no way tied to the built in safety features like airbags and abs systems this isn't going to fly. The current regulations prevent ANY manipulation of the computers systems that support those subsystems, and the vendors are the only ones with the authority/ability to make those changes as it stands now.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:09AM
The 72 Super Beetle, the Citroen Du Chavo, the Jeep CJ7, and the 1965 Ford Mustang can all be built today from scratch using after market parts. And that is just to name a few.
The difference between what those parts suppliers are doing, and what you're doing, is that the parts they make are for cars that have already passed regulatory approval. And that is a way bigger problem than building a car. Just ask Audi, Isuzu, Arro, Mahindra, Citroen, Alfa Romeo, Yugo. etc. etc. etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:01AM (1 child)
I'm still waiting for cheap-as-chips diesel-powered quadracyclic vehicles with 4130-chromoly tube frames and body panels made from recycled single-use plastic water bottles. With no amenities, except a basic guage cluster.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:48PM
You might have liked the Elio. It was a tricycle design enclosed motorcycle with lots of amenities for half the price of a new car.
Unfortunately it looks like the project is going to fail for lack of funding. They blew all their cash getting the legal bits in place, and ran out before they could actually make the car. Damn.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday July 18 2018, @02:57PM
I'd love if manufacturers provided a standard video in and keyboard-style interface for their built-in LCDs. Most car's infotainment systems are crap, and enabling aftermarket competition in this space would be a game changer that drives massive improvement.
The CAN bus gives you the knobs you need to electronically control the vehicle. I just want the ability to leverage the built-in interfaces so I don't have to bolt an aftermarket touchscreen on top of them.