So a leasing company bought the source code for $2.5 million and then cut off owners after they refused an additional deal. What was the point, then? Is there anything rational about this market interaction?
I'd buy any Tesla, even the big truck, if it came with open source software! I don't want a car that's spyware like a phone. Let me be in control of it, let me mod it, let me own it.
Fisker may have been especially vulnerable to this (my understanding from some very brief searching is that core vehicle functionality required cloud check ins without fallback), but nothing about this is inherent to EVs (this is response to Weisenthal's tweet early in the article). An ICE vehicle could (and many manufacturers are increasingly pushing in this direction) have the exact same problems.
This is a much bigger problem that requires a bigger solution. I'm pretty intrigued by the mention at the end that several european manufacturers are collaborating on an opensource automotive software platform, although their track record on software isn't that encouraging.
How involved is the software in the car, any while driving features? I'd be a little bit afraid of getting in that car even with the best efforts of the community, maybe it's not really for driving, i'd be even more nervous to get in a car with no updates, but still.
Uh no, we need significantly less software in the auto industry. Software sucks. It excels at taking relatively simple (if inconvenient) problems and in exchange for some notional convenience introduces problem spaces so baroque they border on the occult. An example: between all of the seat controls on the driver's seat of my wife's car I've counted 16 individual switch positions and something like six motors, all wired into the CAN bus so the central console can save user preferences.
Without bothering to check the OEM parts cost to replace that seat I am absolutely dead ass certain that it by itself costs more than my first three cars combined. And all of this pageantry replaces the two traditional dumb mechanical levers to control seat distance from the pedals and back tilt. This and real-time cell network surveillance is all the proof I need that executive depravity in the auto industry is functionally unlimited, and the reason why I wouldn't accept a "modern" car as a gift, much less buy one.
> We had reviewed the Ocean in late 2023 and found the hardware genuinely attractive — but the software was simply not ready for prime time. The irony of that headline — “Coming soon, in a future software update” — now reads like an epitaph. Those future updates never came from Fisker. They came from the owners themselves.
It’s sad to see a good site put out bad AI writing like this.
>Fisker had built what Cory Doctorow, the digital rights author and activist, pointedly called a “software-based car.” Virtually every subsystem in the Ocean — brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, door locks — needed to periodically connect with Fisker’s cloud servers for diagnostics or regular operations.
pretty sure you can say "Fisker built a software-based car" without being "pointed" and without needing to cite Cory Doctorow. It would be a pretty anodyne statement in an article about owners taking over maintenance of the software that is pervasaive in their electric cars from a defuct manufacturer,
suggestion to the maintainers: please find some place in the UI to allow "Fiskers cut and paste"
This is not a joke. The prime thing that keeps me driving my old vehicle is my avoidance of modern corporate totalitarianism in tracked vehicles, spying, and other crap. I'm not buying something just to rent it too.
I would pay above-market.
I'm researching this right now. Maybe I've finally found my new car.
18 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadWho's going to sell me one?
This is a much bigger problem that requires a bigger solution. I'm pretty intrigued by the mention at the end that several european manufacturers are collaborating on an opensource automotive software platform, although their track record on software isn't that encouraging.
LLM slop. Why does the author believe he is entitled to our attention if he cannot even bother to use his own words?
Uh no, we need significantly less software in the auto industry. Software sucks. It excels at taking relatively simple (if inconvenient) problems and in exchange for some notional convenience introduces problem spaces so baroque they border on the occult. An example: between all of the seat controls on the driver's seat of my wife's car I've counted 16 individual switch positions and something like six motors, all wired into the CAN bus so the central console can save user preferences.
Without bothering to check the OEM parts cost to replace that seat I am absolutely dead ass certain that it by itself costs more than my first three cars combined. And all of this pageantry replaces the two traditional dumb mechanical levers to control seat distance from the pedals and back tilt. This and real-time cell network surveillance is all the proof I need that executive depravity in the auto industry is functionally unlimited, and the reason why I wouldn't accept a "modern" car as a gift, much less buy one.
[0] Not perfect, but I think as good evidence as any: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654 [1] https://www.pangram.com/history/44cd07d3-ba94-4331-8c7f-a626...
It’s sad to see a good site put out bad AI writing like this.
pretty sure you can say "Fisker built a software-based car" without being "pointed" and without needing to cite Cory Doctorow. It would be a pretty anodyne statement in an article about owners taking over maintenance of the software that is pervasaive in their electric cars from a defuct manufacturer,
suggestion to the maintainers: please find some place in the UI to allow "Fiskers cut and paste"
https://www.fiskars.com/-/media/fiskars/images/united-states...
This is not a joke. The prime thing that keeps me driving my old vehicle is my avoidance of modern corporate totalitarianism in tracked vehicles, spying, and other crap. I'm not buying something just to rent it too.
I would pay above-market.
I'm researching this right now. Maybe I've finally found my new car.
All software should be placed in escrow, made available at end of support.