They all want to get to the point of being Tesla. Hiding features only in software, pushing out updates, and trying to bake in a living (recurring revenue) model.
It's a problem for a lot of reasons. First off it's the complete death of ownership. I can't fix things. At some point they will probably just lock stuff back down if I want to sell, assuming I can even sell without them getting a cut.
Second, repairability takes a nosedive. It's no longer a tough but simple piece of machinery that I can maintain indefinitely with some mostly fairly easy to teach skills. I'm an amateur, but I know enough about how cars work that I'm willing to try and fix most issues, up to the point of needing specialized tooling. Instead it's a world of more expensive parts, DRM, and things that just won't work without a dealer authorized repair.
Then we get to the part where I come off an old fuddy duddy. I don't want a car where someone can push safety critical changes the way we push shitty software updates now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to be sold a car that tries to kill me after a mandatory software update. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea.
The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that used to be free.[4]
I see the sentiment though that lead people to use that term.
The 'river' that manufacturers are putting a chain across is the First Sale Doctrine.
It's just rent-seeking wearing a mask. In a similar sense that the legal difference between a pyramid scheme and an MLM scheme is that the MLM scheme is accompanied by a good or service. Legally legitimate, but still morally objectionable.
Well I'm designing a solar powered farming machine we hope we can make open source. A bunch of the parts can be printed on a $1000 printer. I hate proprietary technology, and I think our entire economy should consist of open/libre technology.
It definitely feels like "big business" is working against us in this regard. Everything new is locked down because the the rent-seeking those software locks enable. It's a drag on our economy and we've got to stop letting them do this to us.
I don’t know how those folks are doing. I’ve seen that farmbot just released new products though. Last I checked farmbot did open source right.
And thanks for the kind words! I have been pretty sick of working jobs that don’t broadly benefit society. I’m blessed to be working at a beautiful farm on open source tech!
Last I checked, about a year ago, they were still developing, albeit producing documentation at a pretty slow rate.
I think they are still iterating a fair bit on the micro tractor. But overall it seems there was a flurry of activity around 2014 but then it has tapered off.
IMHO, I think they set their sights a bit too high, with the whole construction set. Would have been better to focus on just the tractor first, getting the documentation really hammered out. It is such an essential piece of farm equipment. But as it stands, nothing on their wiki is really viable to contribute to, because you can't really work off of it.
Plumbers are already on par with psychiatrists in terms of pay. Sure, the work is hard, but from a supply-demand POV, the markets are saying that they do work that is of equal value (all this varies highly, but stick with me here).
Most repair work takes a LOT of experience until the employee is anywhere near proficient. Farmers will tell you that they learned the repair side in very stressful situations and that there is always something that breaks in new, and more expensive, ways each and every time. Repairing even 'simple' machines like a tractor takes a lot of experience.
So, when you add in a computer that intentionally 'breaks' the machine, and then you have the regular machine that will break, and then you have all the linkages that make the computer control the machine (all of which can break), you are requiring that the repair-person be VERY skilled at troubleshooting and repair.
Then, you eliminate most of the ways that people learn to troubleshoot and repair these machines (via these computers), and you are left with even fewer people that will be able to fix the tractors. Think something more like a bio-tech/MRI company's field-service engineers. Those people get paid bank to get sent out to malfunctioning machines and they are trained out the wazoo.
From the tractor manufacturer's perspective, yes, making machines that work for the manufacturer and not the customer, is going to really work out well for this quarter's stock price. But down the road 7 years? I think this is a poison pill.
Quick look at usnews suggests median plumber (in US) makes ~50k and median psychiatrist makes ~200k. I'm sure there are some plumbers that make more than some psychiatrists, but that doesn't really support the assertion that the market values their skills equally.
It's also a little misleading to compare the numbers that way. It usually takes a lot longer to become a psychiatrist in the first place. Your cumulative earnings in the first ten years after graduating high school might be higher as a plumber; in fact, I suspect most people who become doctors actually lose net worth throughout those ten years due to student loans. They just don't count towards the median income for a psychiatrist because they spend much more time not being a psychiatrist.
Once the plumber and psychiatrist are both in a position where they're running their own business or practice, their income is more of a conscious choice than it is for someone who's working for an employer. Self-employed people can and do sometimes choose to earn less money in exchange for more free time, and it's a lot easier to do that when you don't have six figures of debt at the start of your career.
Having worked in plumbing for a while, I can say that anyone who's got their arms in right places and a bit of flair for entrepreneurship can make pretty good money in this field. There's so much work is unbelievable and most of it isn't that hard to do. Also, the hours are decent. Psychiatrists,on the other hand,while on higher income, have to deal with some very challenging and sometimes dark personalities who tend to drain you.It can be very demanding.
Do you have a source for plumbers being on par with psychiatrists? I have friends in the trades (back in Australia) and my impression is that their pay isn't as high as is commonly believed.
Going to need a source, as well. Whenever these statistics are trotted out, they use figures from a few standard deviations to the right of the mean income, where the trades-person is usually self-employed at their own business that employs many others.
The point was not to talk about plumbers, it was to reference the meme, so as to remind/give the reader a baseline idea that manual labor is not valued as the work itself, but the supply/demand.
We just need to put more effort into hacking the onboard computers. I’m sure we all remember the mod chips that gained popularity over the last couple decades.
If the market demands it, which with the advent of computers on tractors platform this can and will be modified to allow for the maximum utility for the end user. I see nothing wrong with this.
I wonder about the cost and practicality of producing kits that fully replace the electronics for various popular tractor models. There would be no need to hack anything; you could use any desired computer architecture.
> I don't want a car where someone can push safety critical changes the way we push shitty software updates now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to be sold a car that tries to kill me after a mandatory software update. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea.
I don't want a bridge where someone can make repairs the way we make shitty pothole repairs now. I don't trust them to get it right. I don't want to pay taxes for a bridge that tries to kill me after mandatory repairs. It's not needed, and it's a bad idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
Here's a neat idea: maybe regulating software engineering like other engineering disciplines is actually overdue? Yet at the same time, failure rate will never be zero.
Alternatively, we should renounce all engineering regulations and let anybody with a rivet gun build bridges. and airplanes.
You may have some good points, but when you quote someone word for word, substituting your own words for some of theirs, you are twisting their words and putting words in their mouth, in essence ridiculing them. That rarely leads to a civil discussion that other people can learn from.
I realize that this kind of misquoting is a traditional "hacker" style of debate. But speaking only for myself, it really rubs me the wrong way.
If you disagree with someone, don't resort to cheap shots like that. Make your point in your own words and with your own logic. You will have a stronger argument and a better chance of informing and educating the rest of us.
> Here's a neat idea: maybe regulating software engineering like other engineering disciplines is actually overdue? Yet at the same time, failure rate will never be zero.
Please could you describe this more? I’m intrigued.
I don’t know anything about this and what systems or mechanisms are used to regulate engineering, so any links or simple explanations are appreciated!
If you want to e.g. build a bridge it needs to be signed off on by an appropriately licensed and qualified Professional Engineer. Essentially the parent comment is saying there should be streams of software development that meet the requirements to become a Professional Engineer. Then places e.g. medical, defence, power plants could say "we need software that's been signed off by an engineer" and have assurance that the final product is of a known quality and unlikely to have any life and safety endangering defects. They are strongly incentivised to only sign off on properly engineered projects as they can be held personally liable e.g. if a bridge fails and kills someone.
An example of the level of quality that would be delivered is the software that ran on the space shuttle. See this article https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff for an insight into how it was developed and the practises required.
I don't think all software developers should be software Engineers, but being able to lead a team to enforce quality (and not sign off on poorly thought out "MVP" crapware) would guarantee that the software that came out of that team would be reliable and well designed. It would be good for software engineering overall to be recognised as a legitimate branch of engineering. Unfortunately it seems like most of the industry does not have the sort of rigour needed for engineering tasks.
> It would be good for software engineering overall to be recognised as a legitimate branch of engineering.
I think the only way this could happen would be if SWE only used waterfall or some similar kind of practice. Agile and the like might be able to be tweaked to work, but even there...
The problem in software is that you can basically "start in the middle" of something and work your way outward; start coding something, get the design details later and refactor.
You can't do that with a bridge or other regular engineering work. You have to plan, design, multiple sign-offs, etc - then build, and you can't build it randomly or a component here and there then fit it all together (well, you can to an extent, depending on the project and design), and if anything changes - well, in a real project it can't change much, not without a lot of money and time being lost.
Several years back there was a series of commercials on TV, I think for an insurance company, which showed (using CGI effects) "impossible building strategies" - one showed a huge scaffolding structure and cranes building something like the Great Pyramid from the top downward (for instance); I think another had some kind of skyscraper being built from the middle outward or something of that nature.
That's essentially SWE applied to regular engineering - or at least, that's how it feels at times. Now tack on Agile and other practices, and it gets 10x worse. Actual engineering is a strict discipline, starting with almost set-in-stone practices along with a lot of hard-won knowledge about materials and mechanics (books filled with tables and diagrams), that are then all used to inform an engineering design, which is then tested and retested in simulation, perhaps coupled with scale models that are also tested, and the plans changed and signed off by multiple other engineers, etc - long before it ever gets to building the thing.
And then that thing is built in a very specific and strict manner; I won't further belabor the point.
Even with all of this, sometimes things fail terribly.
Today in software, we have a ton of tools and practices we are constantly trying - and despite all of them, at least from my perspective - things really haven't gotten much better than they were 20-30 years ago. I would say that widespread use of software versioning tooling and testing frameworks, etc (plus automated build and deployment) have made some of it better - but even after all that, we still seem to be making the same number of bugs and errors that we had before (and rather than a QA department usually, we've farmed this out to the end user for the most part).
So while I'd love to see SWE become more like regular engineering practices (with the selfish request that I and others like me could be "grandfathered" in, as I don't have any kind of compsci or comparable degree, but I have been doing this for 25+ years) - I just don't see it happening for the above rational and reasons.
I could be wrong, though (and if anyone has a counter argument, please post it - I'd love to read it)...
This is a strawman. Why are you talking about public infrastructure in a submission about privately owned vehicles that are exclusively used on privately owned land that has no paved roads or any significant traffic?
I disagree. It's never been harder to compete by producing a long-term, very reliable machine.
* You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things.
* Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
* If your machine is indeed reliable, your customers won't show up for another in a few decades(!). They also won't need many spare parts. This will make your machine much more expensive up front. On a market where an average machine is priced in hundreds of thousands USD, this may be a deal breaker.
* Since you are a newcomer, there's little implicit trust to you, right when you are selling very expensive hardware much higher than competition.
Most things that break are electrical, not mechanical. The mechanics of reliable machines are taught in school and are widely available + relatively easy to repair.
And I'm speaking from growing up in a village with the highest agricultural % of population in Belgium. Which my family is also pretty involved with ( my dad is a veterinarian for farm animals, my uncle has ~40 tractors)
Also: a cousin with a garage, some friends who work at a big manufacturer and another cousin who with worked there.
My background influenced my opinion, not a unfunded comment like yours. I am curious what your background is, it's far from reality up here.
Mechanical parts are becoming a selling point. Just no manufacturer realizes it yet, because of "subscription access", lol.
I'd actually buy a mechanical environmental-friendly car. Not some electrical car that needs an overpriced official garage to work on. I want the guy I know, to work on my car. Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced.
it hasn't changed much, it's still serviceable with a hammer and a couple of pulleys and wrenches. Not sure if it's available in Belgium(it is in eastern europe) and it sure as hell isn't as comfy as a BMW or a MB, but it's cheap to buy and maintain.
Ladas are basically workhorse tanks. Garage 54 on YouTube has put them through all sorts of torture and they take it and ask for more, I wish they were easier to get here in the United States as I'd love to have one.
I don't understand why this comment unvoted :-)
Basically "never breaks/reliable" and "easy to fix/repairable" is orthogonal things.
Lada Niva (4x4) as basically all Ladaa is really easy to fix, but not reliable. If you are riding Lada you have to have toolbox and be ready to perform small repairs weekly, if not daily. But every repair is easy, spare parts are cheap and available (at least in Russia in time of Lada popularity).
Modern car: basically visit dealer once per year, something rarely breaks, but if they do, car not fixable w/o expensive special tools
> Because it's simple to fix and it didn't need a official licensed laptop to be serviced.
This is exactly my point.
Imagine that you are selling cars. If you sell a reliable, easy to fix car, you don't get any recurring revenue. But you need to make as much money as the competition who sells less reliable cars, and more because you can't cut corners. So your upfront cost is higher.
The competition, which sells less reliable cars, can ask much less upfront, and offset this by some recurring revenue from fixing it periodically at licensed mechanic shops that pass a cut to the manufacturer.
This is very much like inkjet printers are sold at a loss, and the money is made on selling the ink which is regularly needed. But with cars (tractors, etc) the manufacturer sells maintenance / spare parts.
In this way, the manufacturers of service-intensive machines credit the buyer initially, but then more than make it up in the "interest" payments.
This is sad dynamics, but I don't see an easy way out of it.
I hope there exists a large enough segment of consumers who distinctly prefer the more expensive, more reliable; from your words, you seem to belong to it. But I'm not sure such consumers are a majority.
The manufacturer of the more reliable car can win by offering a warranty and/or "discounted" repairs. That way, even a naïve customer who doesn't expect the manufacturer to make a reliable car will be incented to buy it anyway. Of course, this will only work if building a more reliable car really is more efficient than doing constant repairs on a less-reliable one. IOW, it actually leads to properly-aligned incentives all around.
A warranty is utterly worthless if there's no company to back it up. Would you trust a brand-new company to be around for 10 years if they offered a warranty that long?
For cars, at least, "discounted" repairs are pretty much impossible in the USA: manufacturers aren't allowed to own the service shops here, by law. The service has to be done by independent dealers. Of course, the manufacturer could heavily subsidize this service (by paying most of the cost directly to the dealer), but that's going to take away all their profits.
After years of dealing with manufactures that find any possible way to weasel out of honoring their warranties, I don't place any credence in them whatsoever. I don't even consider warranty when making a purchase, just reputation for quality, which takes time to build; time most startups don't have to start showing a profit.
There's fairly complex compute that happens in the battery cooling, motor cooling power train etc in a Tesla that gives it the acceleration and range to compete with ICE cars. The early 1900s electric cars that were more akin to what you describe never had the range, power or acceleration to compete.
If we're lucky we'll see plug and play standardization for things like batteries, charging components and engines where the chassis and ux parts of the car can be all different but everyone can essentially have a corolla or civic to fit their price point.
I should also add that i mostly just want a car, i don't need it to drive for me, I think the telsa's could be very very simple if they dropped all the self driving stuff. I know they won't but it would be cool to buy a crate telsa engine and battery pack for a rolling chassis without the infotainment system.
Realistically it does have to have a computer, but not necessarily a visible one. Power motor control is tricky - it requires monitoring the phase angle between the drive currents and the motor position, as well as things like overcurrent protection and the ability to switch to regenerative braking. Oh and you'll want traction control in there because the torque is highest at zero RPM, unlike petrol motors.
It's a hell of a lot cheaper to throw in a micro-controller than use mechanical timers etc. At bulk, an MCU based control board should cost you single digit dollars.
> You have to make your machine good the first time. The customer buys it completely, no chance to update and fix things.
> Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
The good news on this front is that every single patent covering a 40 year-old machine is expired. That means a lot less upfront cost of designing a reliable one. You'll want to redesign the body panels to avoid copyright; you'll want to consult with the community to patch some known defects; but there's no need to reinvent the whole danged thing. And that can go a long way towards establishing trust in your brand.
> I disagree. It's never been harder to compete by producing a long-term, very reliable machine.
All of your points are related to making it reliable, but all it needs is to be repairable. Then look what happens:
> Your machine is marketed as reliable. This means it has to be reliable, so you put a lot of effort / material / money into your machine, when your competition puts in much less.
Or you do the opposite, get it to market quick so you can undercut them on price. Then people buy it for the lower price and don't mind as much when it breaks because the repairs are cheaper. Paying $500 twice is far better than paying $10,000 once.
> If your machine is indeed reliable, your customers won't show up for another in a few decades(!). They also won't need many spare parts.
If it's of average reliability but more repairable then you'll do above average business selling spare parts because your equipment will remain in service longer. Meanwhile your customers will also notice that they're paying much less for repairs than your competitors' customers, and good reviews and word of mouth will drive new sales from other people.
> Since you are a newcomer, there's little implicit trust to you, right when you are selling very expensive hardware much higher than competition.
Which is where the repairability comes in again. If you can only get replacement parts from the manufacturer then the customer has to worry whether the manufacturer will still be in business in ten years, but if you can get parts from any third party parts supplier even after the manufacturer is long gone then the customer doesn't have to worry about that.
It looks like the standard business model of sell product, receive payment might not be the best idea for something like this, but there are other models.
What if the primary form of business is selling the parts instead? Then repair shops become the primary customer, with home repairs and selling the actual vehicle just being the PR model for adoption?
You say they won't need many spare parts. But thanks to emissions regulations, they'll still have to have plenty of electrical components, and those do still break. Easily.
Even on the old-style tractors, I've still replaced plenty of parts. Things do break. Simple things that are easy to replace, but you still need the parts. Clutches, bearings, etc. Tractors are exposed to harsh environments for most of their lives. Plenty never ever come indoors.
The engines don't often need replacing. But plenty of other things still do.
> Simple things that are easy to replace, but you still need the parts.
AFAICT, say, John Deere do nearly the same thing. But they insist on your using their own spare parts (not cheaper third-party parts, or something you fixed yourself), and go to great lengths way to ensure that (with chips, online activation, etc).
Look at how popular 40-year old tractors are :)
It's never been a better time to create a good old repairable machine.