My '96 vehicle has no cloud and will continue to.outlive many modern ones.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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I have yet to own a vehicle made in the 21st century.
I'm terrified of having to get a vehicle that requires software updates that eventually will stop receiving support. I'm also terrified of getting a vehicle with just generally shitty software. My gf's car has awful software and there's nothing she can do about it.
Just give me 90s era cars again. They last forever and they're easy to repair on your own.
There's lot to be said for physical safety features like side and curtain airbags, or better crumple zones that don't crush your feet, but those were pretty much standard by 2012 so you can have those without all the computer nightmares.
You can get cars as late as 2016 for this
You just throw it out and buy a new one. Duh.
This is what the GPL was meant to fight against. Having boxes running software that is still under the control of the manufacturer.
Instead people complained that it was hard to use the code at work. YES. THAT'S THE POINT.
Sure but that’s also the reason stuff like this isn’t GPL. For-profit software simply isn’t going to use the give-away-for-free license.
You know it might make sense for automotive. The car is the product after all. The quality of the engine is ultimately what drives sales and most of the entertainment is traditionally third party. Making the on board stuff open helps them make a platform for third parties that are safe from manufacturer trying to push them out or collect fees. That environment also helps the manufacturer in its own sales as their cars are where the cultural impact is.
Sharing code makes sense for everybody. It lets them spend a lot less resources on fixing shit if everyone else is also doing that somewhere upstream. With FOSS you can have your cake and eat it too. At some point Google calculated that committing one developer upstream for the Linux kernel can save a company the equivalent of a couple dozen specialist developers downstream in bug prevention and feature alignment across vendors alone.
Unfortunately many companies continue to think about code as if it were potatoes. It doesn't fucking matter who owns the code, it's a functional spec. But hey, look at all the trouble we have explaining why standards are good – nevermind opening code.
Ohh for sure. That is also my position. I was just pointing out that people do not pick a car for the entertainment, but it can sway a purchase. An auto maker that keeps an open platform might have a stronger third party market that helps sway people into their cars, so even in their "we are trying to maximize our profits" still have a reasoning for it. Of course good luck telling senior management.
The cloud? I've owned many a vehicle who's company doesn't exist anymore XD No car should be tied to any cloud or connectivity crap for use
Saturn enters the chat.
We must create some legalisation on this else a buch of smart cars are going to turn into dumb bricks.
In contrary to what many are saying I don't think going back to plain cars is the solution. I think an open standard would be the solution here to provide an option to self-host or connect to provider.
Doesn't even need a technical solution. Could just be some law that in order to sell a vehicle:
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A company has to maintain any cloud support for at least 20 years.
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They have to put up a bond that will allow such services to continue even if they go belly up before those 20 years are through.
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All vehicle features where cloud connections are not essential to their function must be operable without any cloud connection. So it's fine if after 20 years you can't pull the contacts from your google account to display on the car's screen, or if GPS map updates no longer work. But the door locks or seat heaters better not be cloud connected.
Enforcing 20 years of support would be difficult since they'd presumably be going bankrupt/closing anyway so they don't really have anything to lose.
Big automotive conglomerates won't go bankrupt.
If they do, your tax money will bail them out.
Bond.
vehicle … cloud
Flying cars sure turned out differently than we imagined in sci-fi.
In a sane world, there would be a law that forces certain types of features to always work.
Cloud connectivity can have benefits but honestly, 95+% of a car’s feature does not need the internet
We need a Stop Killing Cars movement
A lot of people don't realise SKG is a foothold in exactly that fight. If you establish precedent on something as "frivolous" as video games you can use it on much higher value thing too.
I still don't understand why people call the biggest entrataiment industry "frivolous" especially when some stories are better than many films i saw
Just part of a long trend of devaluing all artistic pursuits.
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