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Aardvark DailyThe world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk |
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Cars have come a long way since those early Model T Fords began rolling off the production line around the turn of last century.
Wheels with wooden spokes have been replaced with alloy rims and low-profile, steel-belted radial ply tyres. Box-like bodywork built of thick and heavy steel and wood on a heavy chasis has been replaced with unibody construction formed from sophisticated alloys that have allowed much thinner and lighter sections to be used.
Most importantly of all, the tired old flat-head internal combustion engines of those early days have evolved into highly complex mechanical arrays of injectors, balance shafts, multiple camshafts, high-compression computer-controlled efficiency.
Whereas the old Model T had an advance/retard lever for setting the ignition timing, today's modern IC engines have knock sensors and a computer that constantly adjusts the timing to suit engine load, RPMs, fuel octane and even air pressure.
So much tech -- but so much more reliable, powerful and efficient.
There are also hybrid vehicles which have merged the convenience, efficiency and extra power of electric motors and batteries with the age-old tech of internal combustion.
Whether a regular hybrid or the plug-in variety, these vehicles are capable of fuel efficiency figures that were just unimagninable a few short decades ago.
And finally we have the EV, perhaps the pinnacle of modern automotive evolution so far.
Dramatically reduced component count in the power train makes for reduced mechanical complexity, a much lower maintenance burden and potentially much longer life and reliability.
It certainly sounds like we've come a very long way since Henry Ford started making cars affordable.
However, with all this super-sophisticated technology comes a risk.
If you buy a new car today then it will be festooned with dozens (or more) tiny computers, each performing a very specific task.
By using the CAN bus, much of the car's electrical system can be treated like the node of a network and this hugely simplifies the wiring involved. Smart components don't need to have individual control wires running alongside their power feeds -- all the control and telemetry is done over a common data bus. This, of course, requires that each of those components has a small computer onboard to decode and encode the CAN bus traffic specific to it.
As well as the distributed array of tiny processors along the CAN bus the modern car also has a number of much bigger processors that deal with the heavy lifting. The engine has its own computer to make sure it's functioning at peak efficiency and performance, the entertainment system has a processor to handle its display interface and audio processing and the satnav will also have its own computer that deals with all that sort of thing.
Of course computers themselves are useless without software and, as we all know, software can have bugs. For this reason, most new cars have OTA (over the air updates) which allows manufacturers to push out important fixes or even feature upgrades to some or all of the vehicles they've sold.
In the case of a EVs you can simply subscribe for more horsepower and your subscription is activated when the manufacturer pushes out an update to your car's computer(s). No new hardware required, no "spannering" -- just a few bits cast across the ether and your 0-100KPH time has a second or two shaved off it like magic.
Many important safety updates are also regularly pushed out to vehicles while they're parked in people's garages. Changes to the software that controls braking, charging and all manner of other functions in a modern vehicle can be "tweaked" by the manufacturer and then silently installed in the small hours of the night -- or even while you're driving to work.
What a fantastic world we live in eh? All this sophisticated stuff going on while we just go about our daily routine.
Well that's true most of the time... but sometimes... well, sometimes things go wrong.
The catalyst for today's column is this story from ArsTechnica and it highlights the downsides of all this super-smart software based functionality and the ease with which it can be updated.
It is because modern vehicles are so reliant on complex software that the risk of finding your expensive new car "bricked" in the driveway or failing mid-journey has increased quite significantly.
Forget about the fact that manufacturers are now able to log everything you do and everywhere you go (if they choose to), forget about the fact that they can purposely disable your vehicle if you do something that breaches the terms of service associated with ownership. No, the bigger risk is that in their haste to fix what may be a critical safety defect, they might roll out a bad update that renders your car inert.
In the worst case, these update failures have broken vehicles so badly that they've required actual physical access to the vehicle by dealer technicians before they can be restored to functional status.
Imagine if all the cars of a popular make and model were bricked by accident right now -- how long would it take before you could get your "brick" booked in to the local service agent and repaired?
Fortunately this sort of situation is very uncommon but it's still a risk that no Model T owner ever had to contend with.
In light of this, keeping my 1994 Toyota ute is looking like a better option each and every day.
Carpe Diem folks!
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Here is a PERMANENT link to this column
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