Earlier quoted context omitted.
you are 100% right in theory. in practice the car is the computer. when my 2014 tesla s rebooted while I was going like 85mph on the highway it is a moment I’ll never forget. the car is running but everything is dead, quiet, have no idea what the speed is, all systems are shut down, a/c is out (I was in the middle of a desert in Utah)… EVERYTHING feels wrong and every instinct you have tells you to pull over immediat…
Ok but how is this failure mode unique to an EV? Modern ICE cars are highly reliant on computers as well. Maybe even more than EVs since they have transmissions and timing and fuel injection and exhaust monitoring.
I’ve owned and driven EVs from several brands. Prior to this, I could pretty much always expect the following from my car:
1. The drivetrain always operates normally and safely (aside from some actual mechanical failure) with no computer glitches.
2. I can always see my speed and gear selector state on a dashboard somewhere, even when (not if) the infotainment screen crashes and reboots. I’ve had (2010-2020ish era) Lexus, Audi, and others have infotainment glitches, crashes, and reboots, but the speedometer, drive train, and AC all had physical controls running on isolated systems and so they always continued to work through a reboot or glitch of the infotainment.
3. The AC is always operating (aside from some actual mechanical failure) with no computer glitches or lag to my ability to control it. I consider this a critical safety system given that many drive in climates with weather that can be dangerously hot or cold.
In pretty much every EV I’ve owned, none of these have been true except maybe #1, and that is pretty sad to say that the only thing that hasn’t happened is my entire cars wheels locking up on the highway (and yet still this is reported happening for many EV brands, Tesla, Audi, and Porsche at least come to mind where I’ve read stories).
It’s insane to me that it’s even possible for the cars computers rebooting to entail AC shutting down, not being able to see your speed, etc. If this EVER happens, the entire vehicle line should legally require a recall until it’s guaranteed this won’t happen. We have ways of guaranteeing computer systems don’t fail like this to extremely high probability — car companies only don’t do it because it’s expensive and more complex than just throwing all the same crappy software into one single system rather than designing multiple isolated fault tolerant systems.
Less horrible but still shockingly bad regression is how almost all modern cars AC is controlled through an often laggy computer system (not to mention the almost universally despised move of AC controls to touch screens, instead of physical controls). Maybe not so laggy on Tesla, but in my experience both BMW and Audi have AC control touch screens which sometimes respond but occasionally can have 1-10 second random lags before anything responds. Presumably due to garbage collector lag or something. But this is also a mild safety issue since the lack of predictable behavior from common controls makes it very distracting when trying to so something so common and simple as adjusting the temperature that should just be as simple as a simple physical button or knob.