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“Please do not turn off the engine during installation”
Tell that to my empty gas tank.
Well, if it’s a new car, it might not use any battery from idling anyway. Still a stupid requirement though.
That’s the most ridiculous part to me. Why isn’t this able to continue off the car battery? It should be do not disconnect car battery if anything. I hope there’s some sort of fail safe to prevent it from bricking that doesn’t involve a factory reset or dealer visit.
I’m extremely curious what would happen if I just shut it down and left it as usual while it is updating but I’m not ready to test it out yet. Lol
So that sort of happened to me on the previous gen of this infotainment unit.
I used the app to turn on the car and it keeps the car on for a short time, I started the update but it took way longer than I expected and the car shut off halfway through.
It seems to me that the unit is kept in some low power standby mode, when I turned the car back on, it just continued from where it stopped.
Good to know.
If the programmers have any competence, the update will just fail and you’ll have to restart the process.
They would need something like an A/B partition once it starts writing otherwise it’s gonna be soft bricked. Car manufacturer programming are usually terrible so I doubt they have any solutions implemented lol
It’s because they don’t want the car battery running flat during installation. Kind of like how your phone requires a minimum battery charge to update
Yeah but shouldn’t the power usage for the infotainment system be similar to a cell phone at this point with similar hardware where it really shouldn’t be possible to run a car battery dead during an update?
My car pulls about 130W on the 12V line while in “stand-by”. That would flatten a 12V, 40Ah battery in less than four hours, and that’s only if it’s in perfect health.
Ideally. Depends on the update time too. I know flashing ECU tunes requires a battery topper. I’ve also killed a car battery modding my infotainments firmware so it’s totally possible. But most likely Subaru is doing it out of an abundance of caution… Don’t want an angry customer coming saying the update killed their battery
Haha now reinstall FordOS
This is interesting. My Hyundai when it gets software updates (usually just updating the built in GPS) tells me the update can continue even when the car is off. Didn’t realize not all new cars could do that.
Engine? Lol. There is literally no reason to buy a car with an engine at this point. Fucking moron
I love my EV. There are still reasons to have an ICE car (not knowing what OP has, but generally speaking) and frankly, comments like yours are not going to convert anyone
They had to simplify it for the end user
And this entire post is why i will never own a car in my life, miserable pieces of junk that you pay thousands and thousands for so they can spy on you and make your life worse.
Mopeds are just better in every way that matters, if i need to travel further than that i’ll take the train.
Found the European
Buy an old car idiot.
Even better, buy an old car then convert it to an EV.
* (☞ ͡$ ͜ʖ ͡$)☞
Still thousands of dollars…
Edit: yeah you downvote me. Whatever makes you feel better pal lol
Mopeds rock!
That works great abroad not in US of A. You’d get run over and killed on principle. That only if you manage to find a place where to buy a moped.
And trains? Those were made for commodities! We don’t sell tickets to people anymore!
God if I want to catch a train I have to be in Cincinnati in the middle of the night of either Tuesday or Thursday depending on which way I’m going. Also not exactly moped range for me to get to Cincinnati.
I love my Subaru. But the infotainment system is awful. It’s slow and unresponsive, it frequently takes a few minutes to warm up to even be usable, which means usually when you can use it you’re already moving. It’s absolutely impossible to do anything outside of the touch screen.
The car is great, but that computer is a piece of crap
I cam confirm that the Subarus my inlaws have had over the last 5 years have the worst infotainment systems I have ever interacted with. Their current one keeps killing the battery. Not just draining, but actually damaging it. They have had a loaner from the dealer for the last 3 months.
Love how it drives, but the electronics are annoying to use, slow, and way too distracting.
Yeah these infotainment systems are trash. I think the Subaru one is made by Denso. Like, Denso makes spark plugs and shit, stay in your line Denso! Thank fuck for Carplay/Android Auto.
Yeah spark plug divisions and companies should be making spark plugs and M3 submachine gun aka the Grease gun.
My mom has a ‘16 Subaru and the infotainment has been such a hassle. I had to constantly keep repairing her Bluetooth. It was so bad that my daughter, who has wanted a Subaru for years decided against one simply because of the infotainment.
It has sadly only gotten worse. Still not as bad as the Nissan I had, but it’s pushing it
She ended up getting a 2016 Nissan Rogue, but it did not have an infotainment system. It is a fairly simple system with Bluetooth connectivity for audio. I wish more companies would give us the ability to modify the systems, especially after they abandon them (my 2015 Toyota Tacoma’s last map update is from about 6 months before my truck was built.)
My ‘15 Mitzu (love her so much) also has a full shit infotainment system. It’s super slow, Bluetooth has a 1.5 second delay (try watching anything on your phone while waiting for someone with that delay!) and also constantly drops connection and re-pairs.
I’ve got a BT-to-3.5mm jack BT adapter that connects INSTANTLY, sounds fantastic, and has NO DELAY.
…the got dang car doesn’t have A 3.5MM JACK WHY THE FUCK
My Subaru made me drop Android and buy an iPhone. I hate the phone, but the infotainment system works drastically better. Android Auto was hot garbage.
Hooking your car up to a phone regardless, is for the weak.
Just out of curiosity, what android phone did you have before switching? I haven’t hadany issues with Android Auto the few times I’ve used it in a rental car. My car is too old for it but it’s going to be a variable in my next vehicle purchase which admittedly is very far away.
I’ve also never had an issue with Android Auto, my issues with the console are all exclusively within the computer itself
Android auto in isolation is generally fine. I’ve owned an aftermarket head unit that offered android auto and it worked flawlessly with my pixel phone.
When I bought a Subaru crosstrek, android auto using the same phone was terrible. It constantly disconnects and has strange audio issues all the time. Apple carplay works fine with my partners phone.
There is something about Subaru and their implementation that is total shit for android auto specifically. I wouldn’t recommend them for a good android infotainment experience.
Wireless android auto has a huge difficulty connecting to my Subaru, it was co developed by Toyota and uses Toyota software though. 95% of the time I restart the head unit and toggle Bluetooth on my pixel they will connect though.
Exactly. This is on a Legacy. I liked my Android phone way better but I was constantly messing with it while I was driving because of it.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience. My legacy (2021) has a much better experience on my phone with Android auto than on my wife’s iphone.
Holy cow.
And nobody can jailbreak and disable these “features”?
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That was a very scary and dystopian read, but thank you!
Honestly, I figured that they collected data. But I didn’t think the extent of it would be stuff like my sex life and genetic data. How the hell do those work?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
They track you and then different kind of tools are trying to profile you based on your data. Similarly how ads work on the internet. Saying your car collect data of your sex life more like means they collect absolutely everything about you and then they run it through different software to profile you then sell all this data for extra profit. If you daily drive to a school they will assume you have a family and kids. If you go to a random apartment complex once a week after your kids went sleep they will assume you have a mistress. Its all based on location data and the stuff you enetered during registration.
I’m betting the sex tracking is more about the pressure sensors in the seats for the seatbelt warning system.
They can also track who your devices are near. If your phone sits next to someone else’s in an office building for nearly 8 hours a day and they know that persons job they can infer yours, especially since departments tend to sit together. Ad companies often assume recurring groups of people share overlapping interests (hence why their together multiple times) and will push out ads based on what other people around you are interested in to see if you are too.
Interesting. Makes a lot of sense, though it sucks that it’s all based on assumptions because it sounds like it can easily be mistaken for a lot of things.
That’s how most of them work. I got baby toys for a friend’s baby and the Internet started trying to sell me all kinds of baby things. You listen to a lot of podcasts about craft beer? They assume you’re a 40 year old white dude who needs beard oil.
I’m guessing if you talk about that stuff in your car, it send that data home.
Oh that makes more sense.
My mind went to a completely different approach, collecting your data when you fuck someone in the car. Length of sex, moaning volume and pumps per minutes is what I was thinking of.
Now we all know who is a bubbler and who blasts ropes
Hahaha I like that idea better.
I’m kind of surprised that car technology is so awful. How the fuck am I paying $35k for a car and they’re still like “lets run the UI off a potato via the least responsive touch screen possible”? At some point I’d rather they just gave up on providing a UX themselves and just ran everything through Android Auto.
This is the way
I don’t mind having a UI for things like navigation or android auto. What gets me is why do things like climate control need to be buried in a UI? If my windscreen starts to steam up mid-jourmey, the last thing I need is to take my attention off the road to change the climate settings in the UI where dials and buttons will do the job much faster without needing to take my attention off the road.
Yes! I hate having everything in the UI. I’d much prefer a physical control set for A/C and even basic volume control at least.
You can’t sense a flat touch screen, but we are really good at sensing knobs and switches. It’s much safer for the driver to feel for a control rather than look at it.
My 09 VW CC has knobs for bass, treble, and mid, in addition to volume. Seat heaters, AC, everything is tactile and I can operate anything without looking.
I know it’s manufacturers wanting to save money, but it’s so annoying that we’re going backwards. Touchscreen is a form of input. Just because it’s higher tech doesn’t mean it should replace tactile inputs in all applications ffs.
If my windscreen starts to steam up mid-jourmey, the last thing I need is to take my attention off the road to change the climate settings in the UI where dials and buttons will do the job much faster without needing to take my attention off the road.
This is why ill never get rid of my 2009 Tacoma. Three knob AC controls are the pinnacle of UI engineering. One knob for fan speed, one for temp and the third for vent/airflow selection. The backlight on one of my knobs has burned out at this point, but i dont need it…Can adjust the AC without taking my eyes off the road.
When it was ubiquitous, this meant i could do this in any car. Borrowed my inlaws FORD F-150 once, had to pull over to figure out how to turn off the goddam heat. It had BOTH a touchscreen and series of dash buttons but there were so many it was hard to figure out what did each thing while driving. I also had to update their dang infotainment, it wouldnt work on some random USB device, i had to go get a USB-A 3.0 device to get it to work at all and even then it was idling in my driveway for an hour and a half. Even tried just doing it via WiFi…nope
Yeah, my 2017 KIA has a touch screen for controlling navigation, radio, android auto etc. but climate control is controlled with buttons and dials like you described. It’s modern enough to the point it feels safer than an older vehicle might, but I don’t think I want a vehicle more modern than this.
Just FYI, it might be pretty easy to replace the back lights. You can even get LED ones. Word of warning though, if the bulbs are built such that the polarity can be reversed, they’ll only work in one orientation. This is due to the nature of how LEDs work. I had to redo mine because I didn’t win all 3 coin flips when I installed them
Yeah it’s not too bad. Just the dash kit is fairly old and held together by those plastic clip. I always break those things. It’s a juice isn’t worth the squeeze honestly. I actually upgraded my radio a while back to a wireless CarPlay/android auto and mean to ask them to swap em. But forgot.
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They gotta get better collection systems of that sweet sweet sex you’re having in your car
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/OYcmF9IAJbU?si=gS1v5LQQskrbpIdj
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Fuck yeah good bot
These videos never seem to play for me on mobile. It launches in Firefox and then just spins endlessly.
I love piped as a concept but it rarely ever works for me too
Why the fuck would the engine be on?
To ensure that the update process finishes without interruption due to weak battery - if that happens it can brick your car. Tbf you can also just connect the battery to a power source and keep the engine off. Depending on update and car updates that take a few hours are not unheard of
a few hours!?
This is such extremely poor engineering that it throws me into a rage. There is nothing to prevent them from installing the update in the background progressively while driving and then just switching to the new version in one swift atomic operation (like changing the name of a directory) when it’s ready
We both know that this will never happen. For the same reason why you can get a 300k$ car, and have an infotainment system that runs at 3fps. They don’t have any incentive to make it run better
Backup cameras are mandatory by federal law. If your device is updating when you put the car in reverse then that wouldn’t be allowed.
It won’t be, if it’s done right.
It’s a mix of piece coat optimization and a lot of creep in what used to be a pretty lightweight process throwing it into the ditch.
The things that run software in cars largely fall into one of two camps: MCUs and SOCs. Think Arduinos and Raspberry PIs. Background programming, with an active and inactive partition, is absolutely possible on a SOC. They’re even file based, so you can do all kinds of clever things. Cars tend to not have many SOCs, so it’s not a monumental task to pitch having them each coat a little bit more for extra storage/processing. The biggest hurdles here are automotive grade and the very long development cycles. These both mean that the hardware is 3+ years old when it launches.
MCUs tend to have monolithic software builds (think literally everything gets compiled into a single .exe). There are a million billion of these things in a typical vehicle from most automotive OEMs. It’s… very hard to make them all have more capacity because you would take that cost and multiply it by 40 or so to get all the MCUs on a vehicle ‘upgraded’ for extra capacity.
If this all sounds a little crazy, it is. From two angles. First: do we really need as much software control in cars as we do? Marketing departments seem to think so. Second: the reason why there are so many small compute units in a car is the slow migration from mechanically controlled components to electrically controlled on. Back in the 80s the majory of automatic transmissions shifted based on a very complex mechanical system (look up a transmission valve body if you’re curious). Moving that to electronic control meant adding a computer to control that functional. Now take this and multiply it and you’ll kind of see the wreck in motion. Most OEMs are moving toward more centralized compute (fewer, larger, and smarter control units), but new electrical architectures take a lot of time/effort so it’s slow going.
I’m pretty sure that what’s being updated here is just the software for the infotainment display, which is likely a pretty powerful SOC that has nothing to do with any components that are necessary for driving the car.
Most OEMs usually show an update screen on their radio, even if something unrelated is being updated.
If the update is taking a long time it could be a really big file on a SOC. It could also be a smaller file being written to… very slow internal memory because when the part was sourced 8 years ago no one considered including memory read/write speed in the sourcing documentation. I’m betting the second, unless this OEM didn’t include background programming on SOCs, which is kind of foolish given how much easier it is on a SOC than MCU.
I can’t speak for this particular OEM, but 12 volt lead acid batteries don’t have very deep power reserves. The OEM choosing to leave the battery on during programming is likely a method of ensuring there’s enough juice to install the update and start the car on the next attempt.
There’s two major things limiting them actually. Bad software developers and using the barest possible minimum on processors and RAM to run the systems.
I wonder if cut backs on the processing power had any relation to the chip supply chain issues over the past year or two?
Probably has more to do with the extreme penny pinching most auto manufacturers do
That’s additional work. Easier to tell people to run the engines.
Because oil companies pay them to keep it running sarcasm
People keep saying new cars are shit but nobody wants to trade me their new car for my 2004 Toyota 😄
Wanna trade with my 1989 Toyota? 😄
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People keep trying to buy my 2002 Tacoma, I get notes on my windshield constantly. Often offers for like 80% of what I originally paid for it. It’s insane for a 20 year old car with 300k miles on it.
That depends on what Toyota you’re talking about lol.
This might be “unpopular opinion” territory - but I kinda like that my car is better now than it was when I bought it. 🙃
(Due to over the air updates.)
Depends on your definition of “better”.
Lots of OTA updates remove features only to replace tem with something less user friendly.
I’m sure the manufacturers love all the new data they can collect on you every update
You might want to be a bit quiet about that they might find out they accidentally made a good car with consumer friendly updates
I do agree it’s nice that a car can get better over time and fixes for issues over updates but just like other tech this will bring problems with long term support and features being removed/ pay walled by greedy manufacturers.
If it can get better it can also get worse
Same as with computer games - stop releasing half-finished crap. You cede ownership and/or use of your car when they control functionality.
Newcars aregreata cancer on societyThere, FTFY
While the need for cars is cancerous I wouldnt blame it on the tech, cars are fun. The problem is lots of companies realized they could make lots of money and fucked us over starting about a hundred years ago, atleast here in the US.
That’s Soo stupid. That’s why I buy old cars
10 years from now you might not be able to avoid it.
I really REALLY hope someone at some point starts a gasoline to electric car conversion company at some point.
I love my car because it has just the right amount of technology: Bluetooth connectivity for calls and music. That’s it. That’s all I need.
There was some discussion on a post about gas to electric cars https://lemmy.world/post/5901284
There are likely a lot of complexities here.
Battery tech will need to improve greatly and be minimalized. EV batteries are currently massive, heavy, and generally engineered as long, wide, flat modules to be installed beneath the floor so they keep the center of gravity low and the vehicle balanced. That’s not really possible in an ICE vehicle with all the frame molding around existing exhaust and drivetrain components, and you most likely can’t just have some sort of modular battery and motor unit that you just drop into the engine bay, as that would put a ton (literally) of additional weight on one end and mess with the balance.
The draintrain components may need to be replaced or the motor outputs modulated to prevent the torque from ripping it apart.
Power steering and brakes will need to converted to electric assist. AC and heat would need to converted to electric.
Older cars (early 00’s and older) with cable throttles will need to be retrofitted with drive-by-wire, or use some sort of adapter module that connects the cable and converts it to digital inputs. Same with brakes.
All of the electronics (lights, wipers, windows, locks, radio, etc.) will need to be rewired since there’s no longer an alternator.
Probably will need upgraded suspension and brakes to handle the extra weight.
There’s probably a lot more I’m not thinking about or not even aware of. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to happen outside of rich enthusiast circles, which is terribly sad, because I completely agree with you. Basically everything made after around 2010 is total dogshit.
Spaßbremse!
/s
Reality is often disappointing
It is, depending on the expectation
Aaawwww Man. I hate to admit it but you’re absolutely right. It’s so much work it might not even be worth it.
At some point, I’m sure they will, at some point.
Nah. It’s less profitable.
Depends on what kind of car you have. I know for a fact there is a company doing this with classic mini coopers.
Yup. Unfortunately, since most people seem to prefer the dystopian futuretech, all auto manufacturers are going to employ it. Just like with cell phones. The last phone I know of with 16:9 aspect ratio and no blighted hole punch or notch was in 2018. There’s a market full of us luddites who prefer the old ways, but we’re invisible to manufacturers because it’s more profitable to make something that more people want to buy, and we’re forced to buy that garbage as well anyway.
You forgot about the programmed obsolescence.
Yeah, it goes further than just designing the hardware to only last a few years, all of these electronics ensure that the car is fucked as soon as the necessary online services go down. Meanwhile a well-maintained '93 Geo Metro, driven in the south where they don’t salt the roads every year, can last decades.
I’ve had my 2010 Mazda 3 for 13 years now and I’m taking every precaution to keep it as long as I can.
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It’s already started rich rebuild v8 swap a module s and is currently diseal swapping a module 3
I hope so
forced to buy
the real mildlyinfuriating is always in the comments
There are some positives and negatives to the desire for old form factors. Secondhand phones from 2018 cost much less than new ones but lack some of the new features like… I can’t think of any.
5g and nfc was rarer then.
I believe you on 5g, but hasn’t nfc become rarer rather than more common over time? Has there been a resurgence of nfc in recent years??
All contactless payments use it. All your cards have it. All phones that you. Can pay from (which I don’t know any new brand that doesn’t offer this feature) uses it.
I guess that covid was the resurgence, with all the banks and businesses setting up nfc cards and payment machines for zero touch payments.
New features, like the absolute gutting of Tasker’s capabilities
the only tech i need in my car is an aux port. i will forever buy used cars from before 2010 but after around 2004ish?
I dont know the details, but Ive heard of companies that do this, or kits that can be used for it, existing, though I can only imagine that changing a car that one’s business has not manufactured and was never designed for such a conversion must take a lot of manual work, which would be expensive before even considering things like the cost of batteries.
Power train conversion is reasonably simple. Just throw combustion engine and transmission box away, make brackets for electric motors and attach them directly to the wheels (with axles if necessary). Conversion of controls is (I assume) is also somewhat simple since existing brake system and power steering is quite straightforward to run with electric motors since you just need something which can run a belt drive and gas pedal is most likely already electric. For all the electronics you have plenty of space in where the engine used to be.
But. And there’s a pretty big but. Batteries are pretty big and pretty heavy. On any given combustion engine car there’s just no room for them (at least if you’re after a conversion with similar range/power than a readily built electric car). And even if you cut the floor panel off and modify it to accomodate battery pack (or whatever the route you choose might be) it’ll heavily affect weight distribution, frame stability and many other things, suspension included. Model S battery is apparently 540kg, so if you’ll do a conversion to your corolla you might save around 150kg of weight by removing old engine+transmission but you’d still have additional 300kg of mass to deal with.
For a van which is designed to haul heavy loads from the start it might be pretty simple to just raise floor of the cargo space a bit but for a common sedan that’s a whole another thing.
I looked into this for my car. The conversion has a 50 mile range, essentially replaces the engine with an electric motor, locks the car in 3rd gear, and replaces the fuel tank with batteries.
It cost about £3500, which was a bit much for me considering the car only cost £3k, and I could just sell my car to buy a 100mile+ leaf for the same outlay.
In our local craigslist for cars website someone has been selling a -84(or so) Nissan Sunny for ages with electric conversion. The seller did just that, took combustion engine out, attached a electric motor into transmission and the result is that you have 80’s car, with manual transmission and batteries so small that once you’re out of the driveway you’ve depleted 10% of the batteries (give or take, but that’s pretty much what you’ll get). And it had something like 15kW minus losses of the drive train.
But the parts are so expensive (at least for now) that listed price is almost 10k€. I can understand that seller wants their money back and it isn’t the most serious conversion out there, but the reality is that you’ll get a shitty 80’s car with a even shittier EV conversion (since the frame has it’s limits and high quality components are expensive) while you can sell a similar car with a combustion engine for 350€ on a good day and a tank full.
BEVs built from the ground up are much better at being BEVs.
Swapping an engine is relatively easy if you know what you’re doing… If these kits can connect the electric motor to the existing drive train it wouldn’t be too bad. Messing around with batteries big enough for an electric vehicle can be really dangerous though.
I don’t even use BT in mine and don’t use the music system either. I stick to my phone. I just hope by the time I need to switch cars, I’ll be able to jailbreak it without bricking.
Those shiny reflective screens are terrible.
There are like $5 matt screen protectors that help with this. Annoying that it’s not applied in factory.
