This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sure, if you consider every tiny microcontroller to be a computer, it's probably more than 100.
Right? This article is kinda a ridiculous take. A musical greeting card has a computer in it.
Cars are going to have tons of computers in them, from engine to battery management systems to driver displays to the audio system.
The computers that should be of concern are the “black box” and telemetry, one can brick your car with an OTA update and the other is uploaded to data aggregators, bought by your insurance company, and used to raise your rates if they see driving their metrics say make you a risk.
but I'm a safe driver so that won't effect me
-average consumer ...
Your computer has dozens of computers in it!
I mean, strictly speaking yes, but that's like saying your quartz watch is a computer.
Cars have been like this for three decades. The problem is that some of those computers do data collection & upload.
Can my mobile data center extract income for me somehow? How about a class action lawsuit from all vehicle owners to get a cut of that lucrative "selling your information to other predatory companies" gig?
My motorcycle, Harley Davidson Pan America, is a computer on two wheels. If I fire it up before the computer completes the start phase (~10 seconds), it will eventually throw error codes.
If you want an automobile that will survive an EMP blast, find an old manual transmission Mercedes-Benz W123 240D.
Wow, 10 whole ass seconds? Peak HD design.
My CB300R just starts as soon as the fuel pump is done priming.
When you think about it, 10 seconds isn't all that slow. Unless you're John Connor and the liquid silver man is after you.
And here I was thinking they are still gravity fed..
Yeah the human tends to be gravity fed to the bike, hard to stay on an upside down bike.
So then, beyond safety standards, what's stopping someone from developing an open source hardware vehicle at this point?
Time, money. The usual.
This article says that'll never work:
Not mine. My car was built in 1999. Going to drive it until they stopped offering fuel at gas stations and then just transplant a electric drivetrain.
My car has a cassette tape and no Bluetooth.
Well there's still like 2 or 3 computers on it most likely if you go by the definition of computer automotive journalists like to use.
PCM for sure, but could also have TCM if auto, ABS if equipped might have a computer, potentially some kind of BCM...
When they say a modern car has 100 computers, most of those are actually fairly simple controllers and the reason there are so many is that you can just route canbus and power to them and then run the necessary wires to the sensors and actuators from the modules instead of running a bunch of wires from one single controller to everything. Keeps the harness simpler and lighter.
My own 20 year old car has 26 "computers". 4 of them are door controllers that just actuate windows, locks and mirrors.
All I need is a baseline open hardware EV. Fat chance, of course. So I guess I have to buy something used, today older than 8 years and counting.
this civic ev swap kit looks promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VFNb139Nlc
aftermarket ecu should give pretty good control of all the data.
Not quite open hardware, but it's minimal compute - https://www.slate.auto/
SUV and US only, hard pass.
