21–30 of 47 posts
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To be fair cars as currently designed are a pretty stupid idea to begin with. Let’s just waste energy carrying around 5000lbs of car at ridiculous speeds to move around a 200lb person.
This is a terrible argument against cars. You could say the same for a train, let's waste energy carrying around 1,500,000 pounds of train to move around 120,000 pounds of passengers.
Software in cars and OTA is the stupidest thing in recent years. Like the damn laptop riddled with mediocre software wasn't already frustrating enough, let's fuck up cars too.
Same things with phones. A phone should just make calls, it doesn't need software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need lot more lbs of cars to move 120k lbs of passengers, that's the argument in favor of trains.
Yeah about twice as much. But it's still a bad argument because pounds don't really matter.
Software is such a powerful tool that I understand motor vehicles having as much code in them as they do. What I don't want is for that software to be shoddy or for it to spy on me. I also want complete control over whether or when it changes, and I want to understand the nature of and reason for the updates, just as I do for my Linux laptop on which I use apt-listchanges before accepting upgrades. For example: apt-l…
Imo the current continuous update while letting customers beta test new updates starts to fall apart as the cost of the hardware increases. Bricking am expensive smart phone is infuriating, but bricking an expensive household appliance or even more expensive automobile is a non starter. The signed image on USB seemed to be the norm from maybe 2010-2020 but it seems cellular connectivity has gotten too cheap and telem…
I got my R1T in June 2023 and since here are a few things they've improved, just off the top of my head, not bothering to look it up:
1. Significant improvement to ride quality via different / better suspension tuning.
2. Ability to schedule warming the cabin and pre-condition the battery
3. Completely redesigned the UX for setting drive modes and suspension height (for the better IMO)
4. Added a ton of car info, like battery temp, motor temp, and other info like altitude, various angles the vehicle is at (for off-roading), degrees the front wheels are turned
5. Added additional settings for ride softness / firmness (I got this update yesterday and haven't tried it yet)
When an update is ready I get a notification in the car and from the Rivian app on my phone. I can just hit apply and it installs it.
IMO a USB install would be a substantially worse experience and it would be much less likely that customers would actually install it.
But, for the type of person who just wants the car to stay the same as it was the day they bought it, and never change, it's not the vehicle for them. Personally I really like that it's continually improving and I don't have to go in for service or even go out to the truck to do an update.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a terrible argument against cars. You could say the same for a train, let's waste energy carrying around 1,500,000 pounds of train to move around 120,000 pounds of passengers.
Except your example makes it clear that a train is a way better deal
To be fair, Volvo did the same thing recently, so it's not just weird American startups that do this - Volvo never released the numbers on how many cars were affected, but I'm a member of several facebook groups for Volvo owners and it was just like an onslaught, people were posting daily warning others about not applying the latest software patch or it had a good chance of bricking your car. Absolutely no idea how t…
When I first got the Volvo the GPS and LTE connection would periodically stop working for a day or two. They pushed a fix for it. Later they added CarPlay, which wasn't there when I got the car. Good updates. But not as frequent at Rivian.
Was Volvo able to fix it with another OTA or did people have to go in for service?
To be fair, Volvo did the same thing recently, so it's not just weird American startups that do this - Volvo never released the numbers on how many cars were affected, but I'm a member of several facebook groups for Volvo owners and it was just like an onslaught, people were posting daily warning others about not applying the latest software patch or it had a good chance of bricking your car. Absolutely no idea how t…
I hadn't heard about the Volvo one! I had a 2022 Volvo C40 before I got my Rivian R1T. When I first got the Volvo the GPS and LTE connection would periodically stop working for a day or two. They pushed a fix for it. Later they added CarPlay, which wasn't there when I got the car. Good updates. But not as frequent at Rivian. Was Volvo able to fix it with another OTA or did people have to go in for service?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imo the current continuous update while letting customers beta test new updates starts to fall apart as the cost of the hardware increases. Bricking am expensive smart phone is infuriating, but bricking an expensive household appliance or even more expensive automobile is a non starter. The signed image on USB seemed to be the norm from maybe 2010-2020 but it seems cellular connectivity has gotten too cheap and telem…
In the case of Rivian they have been pushing very meaningful improvements on a roughly monthly basis via OTA. I got my R1T in June 2023 and since here are a few things they've improved, just off the top of my head, not bothering to look it up: 1. Significant improvement to ride quality via different / better suspension tuning. 2. Ability to schedule warming the cabin and pre-condition the battery 3. Completely redesi…
I never said I didn't want updates. What I said is that I want to understand what the updates are and then choose to upgrade or downgrade when and how I see fit. Or better yet make the updates OSS and then let me do my own builds with the features and functionality I prefer as they are developed.
One thing that is right is that a Rivian is not for me, for a lot of additional reasons.