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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 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.
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