The third point is extremely close to how trucks have always been built. Body-on-frame construction has been prevalent in the automotive industry for a very long time.
Ever see a crazy classic car body dropped on top of a truck frame, i.e. a 4x4 60s mustang on a bronco frame?
It’s also what large car companies already do. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform (has nice series of photos that show how different cars on a single platform can look.
> On top of that, the upper body will take the shape and size depending on the need: a sports or family car equivalent, a commercial vehicle, etc.
body-on-frame is not a great design for a family vehicle, as it tends to decrease the interior space and increase the weight for a vehicle of a certain overall size. it's particularly unsuited for a sports car due to the weight penalty and the higher center of gravity. AFAIK, it only really makes sense for large vehicles and/or vehicles designed to have a large towing capacity.
I have to wonder if they meant something more like the volkswagen mqb platform [0] but expressed it poorly.
I didn't realize that Apple would be getting into the car rental business, I hadn't been paying attention. The Tesla model seems more palatable, where in theory you are allowed to "hack" your car because you own it.
"Hacking" of cars has been always extremely popular, and you share the roads with people who modify their cars every time you drive. Why should that change now?
The difference is that it's quite hard to accidently make a mechanical device dangerous for the most part. You can ruin your brakes for example, but you get mechanical feedback of that happening and you know when to be careful.
If you write your own DIY electric power steering firmware, and it crashes or gets stuck it can just suddenly fail on the road and you're dead.
> That will require a major overhaul of technologies like the above-mentioned CAN-bus that is four decades old and employed in every car (including, believe it or not, in a Tesla).
I don't understand why the author keeps banging on about CAN bus being an old standard. So what?
CAN bus is used in the automotive industry because of it reliability and low wire count. Why should it be changed?
I agree, but I try to stick to downgrading the comment/argument instead of the people themselves, because I’ve found it to be a pretty ubiquitous line of thought since I started noticing it.
I was listening to an episode of Joe Rogan, and the guest considered himself a conservative.
Discussing the differences between a conservative and a liberal he used an analogy of a fence, where a liberal would want to take it down and a conservative would want to leave it up.
Also makes it easier for a mechanic to trace and fix issues.
Imagine something more complicated where you need specialized knowledge to troubleshoot things.
It’s like they want to complicate things so the average person can’t fix things themselves. They look at John Deere not in askance but in admiration for making things irreparable by ordinary folks.
CAN is great for real time control, and a huge number of embedded components support it. I don’t see it going away any time soon. That said, it does not have a lot of bandwidth. There will need to be something higher bandwidth to support modern info-tainment systems. A second, high-bandwidth network with less strict real-time requirements.
I mean, if you just cant stream video over CAN, but for infotainment MOST is fine. But you need something faster and better for your surround cameras (even if its just to stream to the driver for parking assistance)
Cars are getting more sensors (radar, video, lidar, ultrasonic) and increasingly fuse the information. I guess the future here is a hybrid though. "Big" data via Ethernet and status via CAN.
Why would you want to mix control and entertainment? I'd argue that you want control separated, for safety and security if no other reason. You don't want an app taking over your car.
HTTP1.0 is old. But we're nearing HTTP3.0 now. Not that HTTP1.0 has gone away, nor would it need to; but for the devices that need the features it offers, the newer versions are better.
I think the author is pointing at that concept, with the idea that CAN hasn't evolved over time in the same way as HTTP. Ideally there'd be a CAN2.0 for the cars that want it, that's backwards-compatible with CAN1.0 readers/etc.
Not that these seem to work differently at the OSI Layer 1/2 layer, so while older messages can be sent over the newer transport, it is not wire compatible.
Right, you'd likely have to connect your old CAN-bus reader to the new system through an active PHY-to-PHY adapter dongle, sort of like a VGA-to-HDMI adapter, or (presumably, once it happens) a MIDI1.0 to MIDI2.0 adapter.
As long as the new version of the protocol is still formatted on the higher OSI layers in terms of reusing the core messages from the old version, and then adding new messages that are optional to the understanding of what's going on from a CAN1.0 perspective, then a change in the PHY layer still isn't really throwing the baby out with the bath-water.
The cynic in me believes that Apple is so bought-in to its own hype that they have a need to change it for change's sake alone. Just like their pathological desire for thinner laptops with no practical benefit, they'll rail on about how this unnecessary churn is progress.
I think the Apple Car will be a buggy, unreliable, unrepairable mess that the buyers won't ever truly own.
Because Flex Ray is better for real time systems and has been around over 10 years. Don't get me wrong, CAN and LIN have their place but CAN has a lot of jitter, especially in a car when you can kinda guess how often an ECU is going to spit out messages to the other ones. The only thing you lose with FlexRay is now your controllers have to speak flexray, which is a more complex standard.
I would never voluntarily design Flexray into anything. It's not especially fast, it's conceptually convoluted, the resulting bus is brittle, and there's very few choices for silicon. I spent a flight to Germany reading a book about the bus (I was working on a project that needed to interface with it).
Traditionalists like to point to its latency guarantees, but you can do just as well with a thoughtful Ethernet implementation. And there are single pair PHYs. Others argue in favor of the multidrop topology, but I see it as a common failure point. Plus it erodes the utility of the bandwidth.
> CAN bus is used in the automotive industry because of it reliability and low wire count. Why should it be changed?
I don't know this space, but depending it may be there are more messages going to and fro, and so perhaps more bandwidth is desired? IEEE 1394 ("FireWire") seems to have a bunch of 'industrial' uses:
If all you're doing is getting sensor values at a few Hertz, then CANbus is probably fine, but if you need to distribute the images of a read-view camera, a bunch sonars, a bunch of radars, etc, then the 500 kbit/s in J1939/14 may not be enough.
Since I'm a programmer I'd make the car-o-future modular. A kernel and different replaceable hardware and software modules. It bugs me how hard it is to customize a car now and the high cost of it.
car safety come mostly from the chassis, an engine swap shouldn't really impact safety, unless it goes to fill crumple zones, but then it's not swapping engines per se that impact safety, the issue comes from putting too big of an engine.
the real issue would be making the thing actually reliable. matings and fittings off the production line aren't the same you can get post assembly on a workshop, and that will affect component durability big time
Crash testing isn't the be all and end all. If you put a new engine in and it cuts out on the motorway, for example. The verification process takes a lot of time, even for a racing car let alone a road car that has to pass crash tests as well.
I sometimes entertain a fantasy where I have a car for which I pull out 75% of the batteries and leave them in the garage for my daily commute. Then for a trip to grandma's, I put them in. Along with the range extender. Oh, and the range extender is just plug-and-play; I can swap in a Honda, or a Briggs and Stratton, or whichever. It could be gas or hydrogen or nuke. Most of the time it just sits under a bench in the garage.
This fantasy highlights some of the absurdity of modularity. A car with only 1/4 the batteries and no generator will handle completely differently. It would really be a different car. But "reconfigured" in less than an hour by a complete luddite.
And, "nuke"? Really?
Why not imagine the owner could just snap in and out between 2wd and 4wd drive trains? Choose to insert one electric motor or two (or four?) depending on the day?
What could possibly go wrong?
Still, it's fun to fantasize. And maybe some of it could make sense. Like unplugging the driver controls and just moving them over to the left or right seat and plugging them back in. Wait... what?
Number 3 is unbelievably wrong. I think he got his ideas from 90s GM concept brochures and never bothered to dig deeper.
Yes, conceptually the "skateboard" makes sense, but you're not going to have actual snap-in components like that. By Tesla's own admission, thinking of the Model X as just another body on top of the Model S skateboard set them back a long time. Whether you choose to go the traditional unibody design, or a more unconventional exoskeleton design like the cybertruck, each body is specifically made for each model type. While the Model Y is a "jacked up" model 3, the body is a completely new and different thing.
Why would Apple's hypothetical car need to solve problems endemic to the vertical itself?
Electrical is still "the only way forward" for automakers—politically, due to emissions regulations—whether consumers are willing to accept those drawbacks or not (i.e. whether it's profitable to build EV cars or not.)
Auto-makers just have to bite the bullet and accept lower profits as people refuse to compromise for a while, until those same consumers later realize that governments won't be letting them have things any other way.
Conveniently for Apple, their strategy has always been to leave enough of a profit margin for themselves (and market to those who can afford to pay it), that the business will pay back its capital outlay even from only niche uptake. Apple isn't Tesla, with a plan to eventually sell an EV car into every garage; they don't need general market adoption, just adoption by conspicuous consumers.
it ignores that there are pretty solid researches into biofuels which are reaching high yield, low pollutant emissions[1], would reuse most of the existing infrastructure and all without sacrificing range and versatility.
[1] note that it's misguided to claim you have to reach zero emission to compete with batteries, because batteries chemicals pollutes both during extraction, transformation and disposal.
exactly, this "re-imagined" car just looks a lot like a tesla, but with proprietary connectors instead of the industry standards, I wonder why, surely it isn't to curb stomp the accessories and replacement parts market. (heck, bet they even want even to remove the obd port)
The idea to make steering drive-by-wire is terrifying.
I had a truck with a hard to reproduce software bug where the electric steering assist would just turn off. Imagine going down a canyon road towing 5000 lbs and the steering suddenly gets extremely hard and the wheel rips from your hands. I had it happen. Luckily there is still a mechanical shaft going to the steering rack.
>The idea to make steering drive-by-wire is terrifying.
Indeed. I have zero confidence that the company who thought Catalina was ready to ship can deliver a safe drive by wire system. That's not the kind of system where you can just patch the bugs out later.
There is another reason that the auto industry is on a whole slow to change. Suppliers. With the exception of the ICE most other major systems in vehicles today comes from a handful of suppliers. To make electric vehicles, you have to take on much more of the manufacturing process yourself or subcontract it out. You lose economy of scale when that happens to some degree. Sure the suppliers could start making the parts for evs, and they are starting to but there is a lot of standardization that needs to happen as well.
Ownership of the car won’t be necessary. As a passenger car sits idle 95 percent of the time, there are plenty of alternative options.
Every time I see someone say "all cars will be rentals in the future" I think if all the people I know who have stuff kicking around in the trunk that they use occasionally but rarely. The automotive version of "every-day carry". Some of it's basic car maintenance stuff. Some of it's not.
And then I also think about the people I know whose passenger or back seat is a giant pile of trash because there's no easy-to-empty integrated place for trash and it all just ends up on the floor...
Also to quote this incredibly relevant point from fartaspoobutt [dead]: [1]
The car I really want is a network of fast, affordable, widely available public transit.
it'll work better for some people than others. the only stuff I (deliberately) leave in my car is a tire pressure gauge and a bicycle pump, along with the spare tire and related tools that came with the vehicle. if it's not my car and I'm allowed to just ditch it and get another one whenever there's a problem, I wouldn't need any of that stuff.
Rent the runway is a billion dollar company. A bigger issue is the danger of deplatforming and corporate terms of services when it comes to fundamental transport infrastructure.
The sitting idle 95% of the time isn’t super meaningful. What percentage of cars are used at rush hour? Not 100%, but a lot more than 5%. What matters is meeting peak demand, not average demand.
We can also provide everyone with 8 hours of sleep while eliminating 2/3rds of the beds if we sleep in shifts and trade off occupancy of our homes with strangers while we're out. Oilfield workers and submariners do this, after all, and they turn out fine.
It costs 3 orders of magnitude less and you put it in your mouth. Not a great analogy.
My car sits idle for 99.9% of the time (I make less than 2000 km per year, and vast majority of that in a few long trips each year). It would probably be cheaper for me to rent a car for vacation trip and go by taxi the other 10 times a year I need it for city driving. But we already have a car and it's been in the family since 1997 and it doesn't break so we keep it.
I would love to have a way to pay a reasonable yearly fee and have a good car available when I need it without paying for the parking space, insurance, maintanance, etc. But as it is renting a car is too much hassle.
Wouldn't that increase weight? Steel is much stronger and not much heavier, so it can be made very thin while still being strong (unibody). Also, it would make recycling cars much more difficult.
Fiberglass car bodies used to be a thing. But they mostly came back to steel now. Fiberglass and I guess plastic isn't good enough for structural parts with the current safety standards. And if you have to support your plastic parts with steel, you lose the weight benefits.
Wouldn't the safety standards change if all cars would weight X% of current mass?
According to quick googling cars got heavier: "The average new car weighed 3,221 pounds [1461 kg] in 1987 but 4,009 pounds [1818kg] in 2010." [1]. The weight of a trabant, which was probably a very badly engineered car, was about 600 kg [2] - 1/3 of a modern car.
I imagine we could make cars today even lighter and if weight of all cars would be similar than the safety standards would be much different.
It will only matter on car vs car collisions. Fully loaded trucks and ground obstacles will still be a problem.
Also I am not a mechanical engineer but it looks like steel is really good at absorbing energy from impacts. Plastics tend to shatter when the impact force is too great. I actually experienced a minor accident in a fiberglass car. No one was hurt because the chassis held everything in place but the body was completely broken.
> First, the skateboard and the upper body could be built separately. Maybe not at the same place (a handful of skateboards will fit perfectly in a shipping container for completion thousands of miles away).
I hate to be critical, but this really reminds me of a 1950s "visions of the future" piece more than a practical design choice.
For example, the skateboard is not a new concept [1], and there are reasons you don't see it. Modular design really only shines for low-volume production (or a large combinatorial space). When you are doing 10s of millions of units per year, as the auto industry does, modularity often gets thrown out in deference to volume/cost.
Also, distributed manufacturing is a huge pain, why would you ever want that? See Boeing's experience with the 737 supply chain. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Think of MEB as a set of abstract parts with default implementations. If you want to change the whole vehicle, you only have to change certain parts. Make these pieces bigger, these pieces smaller, etc.
A true skateboard would be a static implementation of the frame and propulsion system, with defined interfaces for the "top hat" (industry term for the body of the vehicle).
A car platform is a set of shared components and design concepts, but not an actual physical thing (a "skateboard"). Same platform cars can have different engines, wheelbases, suspension types and setup, transmission types and so on.
Most modern cars use the monocoque/unibody type of body, where the body and frame ("skateboard") are combined into one, because of weight and safety (it can be made to bend in a more controlled manner, usually with different type of materials bonded/welded together). The frame+body is better because it's easier to repair (many unibody crashes are not economical to repair because a proper repair to the same strength as the initial car would need dismantling half the car).
In addition, the idea that manufacturers can just plop any old body on top of the skateboard is a bit of a pipe dream. Crash safety is hugely important, and it isn't the skateboard that hits other cars/people/objects. So the integration will need to be very tight and engineered as a whole. Just like it is today, even if we call it a chassis.
I may be naive but I would love to see modular design. I just don't expect it from Apple. Also figure if there were an apple car there would be no right to repair for ordinary mechanic shops
The 'skateboard' really isn't a new idea, it's the early motoring era approach where you bought the rolling chassis from a chassis manufacturer and then hired a coachbuilder to design and build suitably elegant bodywork to your personal specification on top.
Then we got vertically integrated mass production which cost less and built cars which handled a lot better as they'd been designed as a unit with bodywork and chassis having complementary characteristics. "I wish my sports car also had the ability to handle like a family car or a commercial vehicle if you slapped the right bodywork on," said no modern driver ever.
Calling it a skateboard (bah! so twentieth century) doesn't change the fact it's the nineteenth century approach to doing things....
I was about to say, I have no idea what the difference between this idea and some ladder chassis platform was supposed to be. The Ford Panther platform was used on like 8 different models across 3 marques, including a police car.
The thing is companies don't really like using modular chassis like ladders anymore is because anything that can't use the roof for structural support is heavy and flexes like mad.
That's on the mark! It's also pretty clear that manufacturers did want to utilize this as it reduces tooling costs a lot. But, in attempts to increase fuel efficiency/reduce weight(cost) they lost rigidity and went to unibody.
Composite & battery technology are enabling these types of designs again.
As for the lead comment, it's true that the exact same 'skateboard' isn't going to perform, but keep the board and swap 'trucks & wheels'. There's your sports car cum minivan.
It's about the chassis not the rolling
Hearing car companies talk about sharing and renting is always suspicious, because it means on the surface they sell far less. This is what ought to happen: cars loose glamor and become a cheaper low-maintaince rental appliance without such huge a industry behind it, but they companies will go do kicking and screaming before that happens.
Let the batteries get cheaper, let there be more public transportation (classic variety and municipal bike sharing including cargo wagons, etc.), and hopefully the industry implodes on itself as described above.
And screw all this wall-e-esque infotainment stuff.
> "No industry is pulled down more by the burden of the past than the automotive industry. Also, no industry is slower at adapting its practices — design, manufacturing, marketing. The main reasons are an ossified culture and the amount of capital required to launch a new model"
I think this is fair, but incomplete. (Disclaimer, I work for General Motors, these are my opinions alone).
It is hard to make things work. It is harder to make things work consistently. It is even harder to make things that will work consistently when you don't have control of the thing and users can use and abuse it in unforeseen ways.
Everyone who has spent more than a little time in a car has something they can complain about, regardless of the brand. Now think about how many parts are implicated in that defect. Now think about how many parts are in a car. A very very small number of defective or under-designed or mis-designed parts can lead to a bad experience.
Think about testing. Many people on HN are programmers or otherwise involved in software development. Think about writing tests for your code. How many end-to-end integration tests do you have? How many unit tests? What happens when you change platforms or update middleware? Tests in the real world are EXPENSIVE! When you test a new car, you're not testing 1 cheap part from a run of 1,000,000 parts; you're testing 1 expensive prototype part from a run of 10 parts.
The article touches on the dealership experience. For legacy automakers, there are laws in place that prevent them from ditching their dealers.
Legacy automakers also have agreements with labor unions. Adopting new work processes takes patience and understanding in the best of times. Re-arranging work can quickly become confrontational and not collaborative.
The other major partner for OEMs are suppliers. Suppliers do much of the design work, based on specifications from OEMs. Suppliers can sell the same or substantially similar parts, made from the same sub-components to many different OEMs; but the further down the sub-component tree you go, the smaller the profits. Also, if you want to do something crazy like ditch CANbus or upgrade your 12 volt architecture to 48 volts, you'll have to do a lot of work with your supplier base.
Cars aren't judged on the things that work well, they're judged by the things that don't. The car design and manufacturing process is all about limiting and eliminating those things. Uncontrolled changes can cause a huge spill of defects.
----
Edit: My main point here is that, Yes, the industry is ossified and slow moving, but you can't just speed up. You have to address the reasons why it is slow moving, and you have to do it WITHOUT RUNNING OUT OF MONEY!
If it was a racing series then you could supply the tyres and insist no parts came from existing cars with everything scratch built. That would make for an interesting race series.
But cars are about how they are made, so final assembly and the supply chain. Having the capital to reinvent that is way too capital intensive for where we are.
Might as well build a web browser in a computer where you have to build your own CPU working back from the HTML specs.
The biggest reinvention going on right now in cars is in software. Traditional automakers are not seup to do this well because suppliers have their own stack and all the controllers are pretty much fixed outside a firmware flash.
Tesla doesn't follow this approach. Their software is pretty unified and they can update everything including their controllers OTA.
> Hybrid was interesting in its time (the Toyota Prius is a great car), but it is… well, hybrid, i.e. torn between the ancient and the new world, therefore a bad solution.
But can be refilled in 5 minutes and driven for 300 miles, which I don't see happening with electric cars any time soon.
Actually plug-in hybrids seem to be the sweet spot, if only I could afford one. I'd probably use it as an EV 95% of the time, charging overnight and driving under 30 miles each day, but still not lose the ability to drive to my family (200+ miles) without long stops for charging.
Eventually I think you will probably prefer an EV with a large battery that can charge fast. An ICE engine is expensive to buy and maintain, and heavy. The reliability is also not perfect when you almost never use it.
If you bike or drive behind a Toyota, you can notice the smoke and the smell. Especially during winter.
This is missing something on the larger dynamics at play to reinvent the car. It’s one of the biggest addictions inherited from the 20th century (with disposable plastics and cigarettes).
This is not only about engineering and sales. Current car culture is rooted in post-WW2 values: masculinity, personal freedom, power and control. Even Tesla plays that book with the SpaceX halo and the insistance on performance.
I wonder how Apple will approach this change of “soul” in car culture. It’s a shift not unlike what they brought to computing in the 80s, though they transformed the design then. Can Apple build a personal, shareable, fully automated electric pod? I can’t imagine them selling a vehicle with a wheel for instance.
All in all, doubtful we ever see the outcome of the Titan project.
Perpetual payments are interesting, but not something I want in a vehicle. There are lots of reasons to own, but I don't want a perpetual payment. If the car is more reliable and needs less maintenance then I can expect it to last longer and be a better value to own.
90 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadEver see a crazy classic car body dropped on top of a truck frame, i.e. a 4x4 60s mustang on a bronco frame?
> On top of that, the upper body will take the shape and size depending on the need: a sports or family car equivalent, a commercial vehicle, etc.
body-on-frame is not a great design for a family vehicle, as it tends to decrease the interior space and increase the weight for a vehicle of a certain overall size. it's particularly unsuited for a sports car due to the weight penalty and the higher center of gravity. AFAIK, it only really makes sense for large vehicles and/or vehicles designed to have a large towing capacity.
I have to wonder if they meant something more like the volkswagen mqb platform [0] but expressed it poorly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group_MQB_platform
If you write your own DIY electric power steering firmware, and it crashes or gets stuck it can just suddenly fail on the road and you're dead.
I don't understand why the author keeps banging on about CAN bus being an old standard. So what?
CAN bus is used in the automotive industry because of it reliability and low wire count. Why should it be changed?
Discussing the differences between a conservative and a liberal he used an analogy of a fence, where a liberal would want to take it down and a conservative would want to leave it up.
It got me thinking if this was true or not.
A little digging and I found this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
"Although the purpose of this fence is not obvious, there may be valid reasons for its presence."
(I'd like to think I'm in the mindful middle somewhere)
Imagine something more complicated where you need specialized knowledge to troubleshoot things.
It’s like they want to complicate things so the average person can’t fix things themselves. They look at John Deere not in askance but in admiration for making things irreparable by ordinary folks.
Navigation and playing music? Both are done by other systems as CAN already.
I mean, HTTP is quite old.
and CAN is a solid piece of tech. Ultra reliable, fast and low wire count. It's controllers are cheap and reliable.
I think the author is pointing at that concept, with the idea that CAN hasn't evolved over time in the same way as HTTP. Ideally there'd be a CAN2.0 for the cars that want it, that's backwards-compatible with CAN1.0 readers/etc.
If he works in this space, I would think he'd know that there are new things being worked on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_FD
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexRay
Not that these seem to work differently at the OSI Layer 1/2 layer, so while older messages can be sent over the newer transport, it is not wire compatible.
As long as the new version of the protocol is still formatted on the higher OSI layers in terms of reusing the core messages from the old version, and then adding new messages that are optional to the understanding of what's going on from a CAN1.0 perspective, then a change in the PHY layer still isn't really throwing the baby out with the bath-water.
The cynic in me believes that Apple is so bought-in to its own hype that they have a need to change it for change's sake alone. Just like their pathological desire for thinner laptops with no practical benefit, they'll rail on about how this unnecessary churn is progress.
I think the Apple Car will be a buggy, unreliable, unrepairable mess that the buyers won't ever truly own.
Traditionalists like to point to its latency guarantees, but you can do just as well with a thoughtful Ethernet implementation. And there are single pair PHYs. Others argue in favor of the multidrop topology, but I see it as a common failure point. Plus it erodes the utility of the bandwidth.
For multiple drops I like CAN a lot better.
I don't know this space, but depending it may be there are more messages going to and fro, and so perhaps more bandwidth is desired? IEEE 1394 ("FireWire") seems to have a bunch of 'industrial' uses:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Common_applications
The marine folks went from a CAN-like NMEA 0183, to a more bus-like NMEA 2000, and are not looking at an Ethernet-based system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_2000
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_OneNet
If all you're doing is getting sensor values at a few Hertz, then CANbus is probably fine, but if you need to distribute the images of a read-view camera, a bunch sonars, a bunch of radars, etc, then the 500 kbit/s in J1939/14 may not be enough.
Even the 'CAN folks' recognize this:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_FD
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANopen
Having a modular car with a high degree of customization would be a huge hassle in keeping cars safe.
the real issue would be making the thing actually reliable. matings and fittings off the production line aren't the same you can get post assembly on a workshop, and that will affect component durability big time
This fantasy highlights some of the absurdity of modularity. A car with only 1/4 the batteries and no generator will handle completely differently. It would really be a different car. But "reconfigured" in less than an hour by a complete luddite.
And, "nuke"? Really?
Why not imagine the owner could just snap in and out between 2wd and 4wd drive trains? Choose to insert one electric motor or two (or four?) depending on the day?
What could possibly go wrong?
Still, it's fun to fantasize. And maybe some of it could make sense. Like unplugging the driver controls and just moving them over to the left or right seat and plugging them back in. Wait... what?
Yes, conceptually the "skateboard" makes sense, but you're not going to have actual snap-in components like that. By Tesla's own admission, thinking of the Model X as just another body on top of the Model S skateboard set them back a long time. Whether you choose to go the traditional unibody design, or a more unconventional exoskeleton design like the cybertruck, each body is specifically made for each model type. While the Model Y is a "jacked up" model 3, the body is a completely new and different thing.
he compared cost, performance, regulations, but I didn't see him tackle the issue of range and recharge times not even in passing.
> It is the only way forward.
with claims like these, skipping the two major drawbacks seems quite intellectually dishonest.
Electrical is still "the only way forward" for automakers—politically, due to emissions regulations—whether consumers are willing to accept those drawbacks or not (i.e. whether it's profitable to build EV cars or not.)
Auto-makers just have to bite the bullet and accept lower profits as people refuse to compromise for a while, until those same consumers later realize that governments won't be letting them have things any other way.
Conveniently for Apple, their strategy has always been to leave enough of a profit margin for themselves (and market to those who can afford to pay it), that the business will pay back its capital outlay even from only niche uptake. Apple isn't Tesla, with a plan to eventually sell an EV car into every garage; they don't need general market adoption, just adoption by conspicuous consumers.
[1] note that it's misguided to claim you have to reach zero emission to compete with batteries, because batteries chemicals pollutes both during extraction, transformation and disposal.
"Let's completely reimagine from scratch. But we all know there's really only one option so let's ignore any other ideas."
I had a truck with a hard to reproduce software bug where the electric steering assist would just turn off. Imagine going down a canyon road towing 5000 lbs and the steering suddenly gets extremely hard and the wheel rips from your hands. I had it happen. Luckily there is still a mechanical shaft going to the steering rack.
Indeed. I have zero confidence that the company who thought Catalina was ready to ship can deliver a safe drive by wire system. That's not the kind of system where you can just patch the bugs out later.
Every time I see someone say "all cars will be rentals in the future" I think if all the people I know who have stuff kicking around in the trunk that they use occasionally but rarely. The automotive version of "every-day carry". Some of it's basic car maintenance stuff. Some of it's not.
And then I also think about the people I know whose passenger or back seat is a giant pile of trash because there's no easy-to-empty integrated place for trash and it all just ends up on the floor...
Also to quote this incredibly relevant point from fartaspoobutt [dead]: [1]
The car I really want is a network of fast, affordable, widely available public transit.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23738780
One could say the same thing about clothes.
My car sits idle for 99.9% of the time (I make less than 2000 km per year, and vast majority of that in a few long trips each year). It would probably be cheaper for me to rent a car for vacation trip and go by taxi the other 10 times a year I need it for city driving. But we already have a car and it's been in the family since 1997 and it doesn't break so we keep it.
I would love to have a way to pay a reasonable yearly fee and have a good car available when I need it without paying for the parking space, insurance, maintanance, etc. But as it is renting a car is too much hassle.
According to quick googling cars got heavier: "The average new car weighed 3,221 pounds [1461 kg] in 1987 but 4,009 pounds [1818kg] in 2010." [1]. The weight of a trabant, which was probably a very badly engineered car, was about 600 kg [2] - 1/3 of a modern car.
I imagine we could make cars today even lighter and if weight of all cars would be similar than the safety standards would be much different.
[1] https://slate.com/business/2011/06/american-cars-are-getting... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
Also I am not a mechanical engineer but it looks like steel is really good at absorbing energy from impacts. Plastics tend to shatter when the impact force is too great. I actually experienced a minor accident in a fiberglass car. No one was hurt because the chassis held everything in place but the body was completely broken.
High end cars (and most/all race cars) use carbon fibre for both bodywork and structural components.
I hate to be critical, but this really reminds me of a 1950s "visions of the future" piece more than a practical design choice.
For example, the skateboard is not a new concept [1], and there are reasons you don't see it. Modular design really only shines for low-volume production (or a large combinatorial space). When you are doing 10s of millions of units per year, as the auto industry does, modularity often gets thrown out in deference to volume/cost.
Also, distributed manufacturing is a huge pain, why would you ever want that? See Boeing's experience with the 737 supply chain. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Hy-wire
It is a difference of just how independent the "skateboard" is from the top?
A true skateboard would be a static implementation of the frame and propulsion system, with defined interfaces for the "top hat" (industry term for the body of the vehicle).
Most modern cars use the monocoque/unibody type of body, where the body and frame ("skateboard") are combined into one, because of weight and safety (it can be made to bend in a more controlled manner, usually with different type of materials bonded/welded together). The frame+body is better because it's easier to repair (many unibody crashes are not economical to repair because a proper repair to the same strength as the initial car would need dismantling half the car).
Then we got vertically integrated mass production which cost less and built cars which handled a lot better as they'd been designed as a unit with bodywork and chassis having complementary characteristics. "I wish my sports car also had the ability to handle like a family car or a commercial vehicle if you slapped the right bodywork on," said no modern driver ever.
Calling it a skateboard (bah! so twentieth century) doesn't change the fact it's the nineteenth century approach to doing things....
The thing is companies don't really like using modular chassis like ladders anymore is because anything that can't use the roof for structural support is heavy and flexes like mad.
Let the batteries get cheaper, let there be more public transportation (classic variety and municipal bike sharing including cargo wagons, etc.), and hopefully the industry implodes on itself as described above.
And screw all this wall-e-esque infotainment stuff.
I think this is fair, but incomplete. (Disclaimer, I work for General Motors, these are my opinions alone).
It is hard to make things work. It is harder to make things work consistently. It is even harder to make things that will work consistently when you don't have control of the thing and users can use and abuse it in unforeseen ways.
Everyone who has spent more than a little time in a car has something they can complain about, regardless of the brand. Now think about how many parts are implicated in that defect. Now think about how many parts are in a car. A very very small number of defective or under-designed or mis-designed parts can lead to a bad experience.
Think about testing. Many people on HN are programmers or otherwise involved in software development. Think about writing tests for your code. How many end-to-end integration tests do you have? How many unit tests? What happens when you change platforms or update middleware? Tests in the real world are EXPENSIVE! When you test a new car, you're not testing 1 cheap part from a run of 1,000,000 parts; you're testing 1 expensive prototype part from a run of 10 parts.
The article touches on the dealership experience. For legacy automakers, there are laws in place that prevent them from ditching their dealers.
Legacy automakers also have agreements with labor unions. Adopting new work processes takes patience and understanding in the best of times. Re-arranging work can quickly become confrontational and not collaborative.
The other major partner for OEMs are suppliers. Suppliers do much of the design work, based on specifications from OEMs. Suppliers can sell the same or substantially similar parts, made from the same sub-components to many different OEMs; but the further down the sub-component tree you go, the smaller the profits. Also, if you want to do something crazy like ditch CANbus or upgrade your 12 volt architecture to 48 volts, you'll have to do a lot of work with your supplier base.
Cars aren't judged on the things that work well, they're judged by the things that don't. The car design and manufacturing process is all about limiting and eliminating those things. Uncontrolled changes can cause a huge spill of defects.
----
Edit: My main point here is that, Yes, the industry is ossified and slow moving, but you can't just speed up. You have to address the reasons why it is slow moving, and you have to do it WITHOUT RUNNING OUT OF MONEY!
If it was a racing series then you could supply the tyres and insist no parts came from existing cars with everything scratch built. That would make for an interesting race series.
But cars are about how they are made, so final assembly and the supply chain. Having the capital to reinvent that is way too capital intensive for where we are.
Might as well build a web browser in a computer where you have to build your own CPU working back from the HTML specs.
Tesla doesn't follow this approach. Their software is pretty unified and they can update everything including their controllers OTA.
But can be refilled in 5 minutes and driven for 300 miles, which I don't see happening with electric cars any time soon.
Also Toyota hybrids are not very responsive and fast. And they smell.
> And they smell.
Erm?
If you bike or drive behind a Toyota, you can notice the smoke and the smell. Especially during winter.
This is not only about engineering and sales. Current car culture is rooted in post-WW2 values: masculinity, personal freedom, power and control. Even Tesla plays that book with the SpaceX halo and the insistance on performance.
I wonder how Apple will approach this change of “soul” in car culture. It’s a shift not unlike what they brought to computing in the 80s, though they transformed the design then. Can Apple build a personal, shareable, fully automated electric pod? I can’t imagine them selling a vehicle with a wheel for instance.
All in all, doubtful we ever see the outcome of the Titan project.