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Honda is killing its EVs

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Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#671

Post by close04 »

neya wrote: post #453
rkagerer wrote: post #308

Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time. No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled,…

Most people including the author think more software = premium/better. But as software engineers, we know better. That's not the case at all. More software = more control by everyone else except you. Manufacturers. Governments. For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals. The other issue is support. So man…

> But as software engineers, we know better.

As users we should also know better. All too often software is used to remove functionality from your things, or add unwanted ones. Even just adding ads. It's used as bait and switch and can make the thing you bought unfit for the job.

Car software comes with so many locks and it's intentionally made to not be serviceable by the user in any way. You can't tweak it, replace it, take one from another car. It's your car, the hardware part that does the same job is yours, but the software that replaces it isn't.

And at the end of the day almost no buyer buys a car for future promised software features. They buy it for existing features and new good ones are just welcome. If anything, the software is just used as an excuse to deliver a half baked product and have it bake over the years in the owner's hands, so at the end of the ownership maybe it's what was promised in the first place.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#672

Post by dzhiurgis »

billfor wrote: post #129

"Here, Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time." I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are t…

> the newer versions are terrible

300k subscribers that pay $100 per month must be..? Imaginary? Wrong?

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#673

Post by aetherspawn »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #670
aetherspawn wrote: post #636

Guys, cars are specifically designed to work for their entire life in areas where there is no coverage. Thus, there are plenty of EVs, probably all of them, where you can just open the telematics box and pull the SIM card. Then the software will never update, and the car will just stay in whatever state it’s currently in. The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app, but your car will be mor…

> The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app Probably untrue with Tesla. I have mine integrated via BLE to home assistant for solar charging. App works via BLE using same protocol. Your biggest struggle would be avoiding to update the native app, but I guess nothing is stopping you from developing your own implementation.

Yes the Tesla BLE seems to be one of the better ones and works in the middle of nowhere even without cell reception, so it probably would still work with the SIM pulled on the car side.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#674

Post by simondotau »

kstenerud wrote: post #602
simondotau wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not. My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, s…

I literally worked on building the next generation of handheld OBD devices (m68000 based) that techs used to reflash Toyota ECUs in 1997. Automakers can and do update software after the car has been sold. Before that, techs would need to swap EEPROMS.

It’s getting better, but even now many traditional automakers strictly limit software updates to bug fixes only. And they'll probably only fix the bug if there's a legal or sales incentive to do so.

My own car is a 2013 BMW 125i. Its software stack received a handful of very simple quality-of-life improvements in 2014. The clearest example is the on-screen volume overlay. As delivered, my car’s volume knob provided absolutely no visual feedback.

If you ask nicely, BMW dealership can update it. But that's not enough. The way BMW "codes" your vehicle after a software update means that any features introduced after its date of manufacture are disabled. So even after I had the dealer install newer software (to fix a crashing bug with navigation) the volume overlay didn’t appear. What I ended up having to do was "recode" the ECU with a new delivery date. Literally all I did was change the delivery date in a pirated copy of BMW E-Sys, push the change to the car, and the overlay appeared like magic.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#675

Post by generic92034 »

carefree-bob wrote: post #655
dzhiurgis wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars with 20yo computers do work tho.

The older modules were more durable, but even those start to fail after that much use. In the past, you could go to a junkyard and pull a new module, but now everything is vin-locked to the car, so you need to buy a new module from the manufacturer, but oops, they are no longer selling them. Now what do you do? It's a real problem. Some shops try to reverse engineer the modules and create clones, and that works a lit…

At least in places with strong consumer rights I imagine there could be regulation to force vendors keeping their old cars repairable.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#676

Post by Markoff »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #646
Markoff wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint - I returned to China (Beijing) last summer after 9 years and was honestly surprised how LITTLE it has changed over those 9 years, I was expecting big changes reading this tales about Shenzhen, but the reality is maybe only 1/4-1/3 of the cars on the road were EVs, there were pretty much none escooters, people still smoke in restaurants and yes, the air was for the most part perfectly fine, though this w…

1/4-1/3 EVs is an underestimate for somewhere like Shenzhen (probably for Beijing too). It's going to be well over 50% there. And virtually all scooters will be electric. You're right about the smoking, though. It's a massive problem.

it's definitely not underestimate for Beijing where I stayed for 3 weeks this summer, maybe you count PHEV as EVs, many of those cars which look like EVs are actually hybrids, only in late 2025 China reached 50% newly registered BEV+PHEV cars plus there are lots of previously registered cars and if we count only BEVs the percentage will be much smaller, actually I think 1/3 of BEV on the road is quite an overestimate from my side

are NEV common? sure. do BEV make majority of cars on the road? for sure not

there are basically none scooters, they use either (e)bikes or electric motorbikes/mopeds (these are not new, they used them en masse already 10 years ago)

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#677

Post by top_sigrid »

ActorNightly wrote: post #635
koshergweilo wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korea makes pretty good EVs as well

Not a single manufacturer out there makes a "good" ev. All have proprietary bullshit parts, proprietary fancy software with features that nobody gives a fuck about, and are all expensive. Im not paying fucking 30k for a Nissan leaf. EVs are supposed to be simple. Where is my 12k OTD Corolla with a battery and a motor instead of an engine? Meanwhile BYD has an app that auto parallel parks. And China has cars like Gree…

And BYD doesn't have propietary software? Also this leaves out Kia and Hyundai, the latter which I would argue has some of the best EVs and in Europe with the Inster also one of the most affordable ones without it being stripped down completely.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#678

Post by angry_octet »

simondotau wrote: post #596
rkagerer wrote: post #308

Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time. No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled,…

I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not. My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, s…

I'm afraid it's exactly the opposite -- Tesla has awful software, and no self discipline about adding more bloat. There is a lot of rigorously designed software in cars where you can't see it. Jeep is no one's idea of quality in any respect though.

Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.

Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#679

Post by mrweasel »

sys_64738 wrote: post #189

Anything you need to plug into a power source is doomed to fail. EVs are simply not designed properly which is why hybrids are the best of both world. A Camry hybrid has some genius technology as the EV part is used at low speed and ICE at higher speed. That is the perfect balance and you see why it's a success for them. Toyota make the best hybrid vehicles. Honda makes hybrids too so they're not throwing all their E…

Hybrids makes no sense, but to the smallest of customer segments.

They need to carry two engines, batteries and a gas tank, that makes them pretty bad at being both an EV and a ICE vehicle. They are to heavy, have to little battery capacity to be a good EV. The batteries and electric engines make them to heavy to get good fuel mileage as a gas powered car.

I've meet exactly one person for who they made sense. He could get to an from work on battery alone, but not much more and he needed the combustion engine to haul a trailer every now and then. If he could have waited a few years, he could just have gotten an EV that did the same.

There might be locations where hybrids makes more sense, but now that the range of EVs have gotten much better I think that list is slowly shrinking.

The thing that's weird to me is the focus on getting rid of diesel, because EVs and diesel cars are not at all competing. EVs can replace gas powered cars, in most cases (depending on your location), but they can't replace diesel. Need to drive 500km a day? Diesel is probably your best bet and EVs are completely out.

Re: Honda is killing its EVs

#680

Post by monegator »

rkagerer wrote: post #308

Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time. No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled,…

Also because SDVs actually come with half baked firmwares that make the ECU crash, throw down the CAN network, make lights and screens act up...

Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.

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