You won't have any options for non garbage vehicles pretty soon. It's more profitable to sell you garbage and than sell you the maintenance on the above mentioned garbage while getting a steady trickle of revenue for ad impressions.
Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want.
Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme.
Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code.
Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch
Technically you are correct, practically you will get into question of "who pays for the internet in the car?" and if customer refuses to pay (like in VAG case) then you will have just a car without an internet.
great sales yeah (7bn+) but those dsp6 recalls on the fiesta cost ford about 2 billion.
id buy another one. (in manual.)
i dont know how many other gen5 fiesta owners would walk down the aisle with that car again tho
i think the dsp’s kind of cool. still have a 2011 in a barn somewhere. its on engine #2 and transmission #2 at 124,000 and thats not even counting all the bad grounds, bad caps, electrical squirrels ive been able to track down and fix. it wasnt that bad to deal with, but i totally empathize with anyone who doesnt remember theirs fondly or want to go out and get another one just like it
100% manuals are the way to go if you want to feel like a driver, not a passenger. I love my manual Jetta
Thing is, people are lazy. US market is automatics only. Can't make people understand what the clutch is or why slushbox is bad for fuel efficiency. No one cares. Gas guzzlers are the national idea
My kid learned to drive a manual in 15 minutes. Too much effort for US drivers!
Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades. And the computer can shift a DCT faster than you can. These days a manual tranny is right up there with hand-crank starting your car: if you enjoy it, great, but don’t get smug because people don’t want to manually adjust the spark advance.
>Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades.
No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.
While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).
An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).
So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.
Only because they cheap out and don't put in manual with optimal gear ratios. Otherwise the manual is better because you can use high throttle with low rpms - try that in an auto and you get high rpms which is bad for efficiency - but great for acceleration.
When you have a small fuel efficient engine, you can tell and feel the difference. With a V6 under your hood, you probably don't care. US is mostly big engines
You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
> You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.
You're not really, especially on a long run. If you're doing motorway speeds there is no difference in economy and performance. An auto will be a bit worse in slow driving, when it's using the torque converter which is quite lossy.
> Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).
They will let you rev the engine as high as you like and will engine-brake just fine if you select a lower gear. They might not shift into a lower gear if you've got a gearbox that's smart enough to stop you money-shifting the engine.
Not really, although I guess the least powerful automatic I've ever driven was a 1.7 litre naturally-aspirated diesel Citroën Xantia. It was very economical on long runs but acceleration was really something for very patient people.
Most Xantias had a 1.9 petrol making roughly 50% more power, although with appreciably less torque.
You don’t know much about cars. All the work they had done on their vehicle was typical for that model generation. Air suspensions are generally problematic because of constant wear mixed with parts issues, and A/C problems are common in that model generation. This is all normal stuff to fix over twelve years.
I do most of the maintenance of cars in our garage, and I would never accept double AC repair, suspension and radiator replacement to be "normal" around 120k.
The thing is, modern jeeps are a joke even compared to this "reliable" example.
There was a post recently about over-the-air update bricking Jeeps WHILE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING HIGHWAY. And no one cares. People keep buying this trash and defend double AC repairs. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability
The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability.
Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day.
But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
Perspective from my side of small automation business ownership
We started cleaning out company dependents dev stack from not necessary components starting mid last year. This activity just picked up full steam and we're planning block stuff like .microsoft.com and .GitHub.com in our main mikrotik router next month.
My engineering team did amazing work divesting our development stack from windows. It is very hard to achieve in automation business. Most software development packaged for windows only. They did so much work replaced hardware vendors who did not work with Linux. Some work good with wine and we keeping them.
We have internal company's gitea. We mirror EVERYTHING from GitHub we need internally. Even debian repositories!
I expect that we can soon operate without internet connection for core business (install software on company PCs, develop automation code, etc),
Company trucks all have 4TB hard drives with everything necessary for work outside the office.
We have email and calendar on proton. Highly recommend amazing service and support.
US companies cannot keep my company hostage anymore. It is hard to achieve this. But you can do it. Even we did in the field where windows OS is king.
We are a small automation startup in Europe. Our usual workflows include manufacturing a custom brackets, cases, etc. for out custom control equipment. We previously outsource everything to local shops, and recently switched to owning our own printing cluster. Started with 5 prusas and had to fix and repair things always. PLA dont stick to the bed at all. Switched to bambu recently and printing with ABS now with zero concerns. Printed >500 enclosures on 3x bambu X1s, much faster and better quality than 5x prusas. My personal recommendation for anyone who wants to print a lot with minimal maintenance. Bambu is slightly more expensive but ROI is very short compared to prusa in the short term
Thank you! I had no idea those SDs are hackable. We'll look into it as well. Would be nice to get ahold of a hundred SD on ebay. I'll search tomorrow. I like their form-factor and that it fits in SD slot tightly, very clean and no need to fit another box in the control cabinet.
Your point regarding liability: as-is systems are unreliable already so much that the manufacturer selling support contracts to firms like mine, so we to improve reliability through humans driving around and fixing&replacing them. The HW manufacturer has insane lucrative contract themselves and so now they need to fix things up so they re-contracting support of their shitty HW down the chain. Can't say more due to NDA. So "broken" state of controllers is already has, so we are not making any new hardware failure points. I did talk to my lawyer, he said my plans are ok. Thank you for your comment!
Just to clarify, my point about liability was more about if someone gets hurt by the controlled and it goes to (potentially criminal) court for negligence. In this case there is going to be a witch hunt and everyone will try to deflect blame, thus your non-standard modification will be under much scrutiny regardless if it actually played a role. In fact judging by the original reliability (or lack thereof) of the system, you might get blamed for failures that don’t actually have anything to do with your modification.
If there’s no risk of injury/death then the stakes are much lower and indeed since the vendor software itself is already shitty you can’t really make it any worse.
To add to my original comment, if you want to pursue the Wi-Fi SD card route, I suggest using any of the known vulnerabilities to get root on the card and then reverse engineer the card (as in how the SD side is driven) from the inside.
This would effectively let you skip the whole “build a device that emulates an SD card” part.
From there I’d suggest building a Linux image from scratch using Buildroot or Yocto, so you start with a fresh and modern base and don’t have to fight with the SD vendor’s firmware or deal with their vulnerabilities (which might be a liability in your case).
Feel free to get in touch (email in my profile) if you want more guidance.
Ford pulled focus/fiesta lineup from US ignoring great sales (despite widely known DCT issues) just so they can focus on selling the garbage SUVs and pickups, highest margin cars. But hey, no CAFE regulations to follow, can pollute as much as you want.
Jeep quality is a joke - they would've been sued out of existence with trucks like that in Europe. When I first saw the Jeep Gladiator photo I through it was a joke/meme.
Corporations do truly control everything in US. They'll sell you garbage overpriced trucks, convince you to feel happy about them and laught all the way to the bank while raking cash for all "dealer maintenance" required to keep such garbage on the roads. And then they lock down all the maintenance behind encryption so you can't replace a battery without going to the dealer for the unlock code.
Please speedrun your late stage capitalism asap, it's getting harder and harder to watch