This is a perfect example of why the market doesn't always produce the kind of product that consumers would prefer. Despite this sort of server integration being a terrible design for customers, investors absolutely love a platform like this for lock-in and rent extraction.
A company needs funding before it can even start making a hardware project on the scale of a car, and it is vastly easier to obtain funding for a project like this than for one that would not screw over customers. Free markets are usually great, but they can have terribly misaligned incentives at times.
the company went bankrupt- i think the market worked in this instance.
By a narrow definition of 'worked'. There are a lot of bricked cars out there, unless someone cracks them or the new buyer can revive the systems needed.
I don't think there's much "free market" here at all considering how much government money, tax breaks and other incentives are provided by the government for "green energy".
Markets aren't truly free without a government to ensure fair competition. Otherwise the biggest players just become a defacto government in their market. And society only has one environment in which to exist. It would be crazy to let companies destroy it just because they can afford to. Even Adam Smith doesn't advocate that markets be entirely free of all regulation.
Gas companies are burning the world to the ground just to get a few more quarters of profit. They'll buy regulators and presidents of they have to. In fact one is openly selling himself to them at a bargain rate.
That's completely and utterly false. Governments corrupt anything and everything they touche and are the primary reason that monopolies exist. Why are there 3/4 major network providers in the US? Because they received billions of dollars in grant money from the goverment and did not have to compete in the market with prices. Do you know who is one of the biggest individual consumers of oil? Take a look at the military industrial complex. Want to know why Microsoft is so far ahead of Linux? Take a look at how much money the US government has paid to Microsoft/tax cuts/grants. Want to know why Amazon has no other competitors that are anywhere close to their scale? Take a look at the tax breaks it has received from different government institutions. The list goes on and on.
> This is a perfect example of why the market doesn't always produce the kind of product that consumers would prefer.
This is a misrepresentation of market forces. Markets produce many different products and services based on the assumption that consumers want them. Those consumers like stick and further diversify, the others die. This is what markets do, they don't have a crystal ball, instead they create products and services by trial and errors, and additionally execution can make or break a company.
Maybe before you launch a product over a certain price point you have to prove that you will be able to support it for a certain period of time. Kind of like how in certain jurisdictions you have to have money and plans set aside for environmental cleanup after natural resource extraction. These cars are now effectively e-waste far before they should be because there was no plan in place for long-term support.
When working as a vendor with mature automotive manufacturers they’ll often evaluate your company to ensure you’ll still be around over the timeframe that they intend to sell or service cars with your parts in them.
This is why I'll always buy cheap used cars - they already have a history of running. All they need is intensive oil changes and occasional part replacement for a couple years before I move onto my next used car.
I avoid all the whizbang rent seeking bullshit just by driving horrible old cars.
I really hope someone makes a conversion kit for the computer in these cars. It would suck to be out on a new car, and just have a brick sitting in your driveway.
Related:
Bankrupt Fisker says it can't migrate its EVs to a new owner's server
Genius use of stable diffusion for the article’s cover art.
> its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed
Ouch
> A "software-based car" gets to mobilize the state to enforce its "IP," which allows it to force its customers to use authorized mechanics...
Doctorow has a good point here.
That's pretty cruel of Cory Doctorow.
He's just pealing back the layers of absurdity. They intentionally released a totally broken by design product so now people don't have to guess if they're stupid.
I think the person you are responding to was poking fun at the way the title is structure, which could be interpreted to indicate that Cory himself bricked the vehicles.
Parts pairing is rampant in the automotive industry. Why isn't that banned in Oregon?
What does being EV have anything to do with bricking it?
Why was it bricked in first place? Cars don't brick themselves by entering tunnel or driving in wilderness.
I get it, he has to keep stirring up controversy to stay relevant, but Cory sometimes looses his marbles over irrelevant crap.
EV is relevant because all of the bricked Fisker cars are EVs. Nothing stopping something similar from happening to modern ICE vehicles.
TFA doesn't say that all Fisker cars are bricked - It says that they become unusable do to minor maintenance issues that can't resolved without Fisker servers being online.
I wish I could buy an electric car with no radio transmitters and no ways to install software other than JTAG ports. I think that'll be possible in the relatively near future through EV conversions of legacy vehicles, though that route may have crash safety concerns.
I want a rugged EV so bad. No smart features, no phoning home, total control to the user, and designed to be beat up. I think an EV could be an absolute workhorse if built correctly.
If I ever get the funds I'm building this vehicle for sure, because it is pretty much guaranteed no one else will.
I’m not even convinced that the cars won’t work without working servers. All of the links in TFA are behind a paywall I’m not going to bother working around, but is there any evidence that Fiskers need a home to phone in order to keep working? Or is it that one can’t remotely start the vehicle (as one example) without working servers?
‘Cuz $DEITY knows that “bricked” has a very wide range of colloquial definitions.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-maj...
Not all the links are behind paywalls. Fisker themselves are among the groups saying they don't know how to get the cars running again.
> Fisker themselves are among the groups saying they don't know how to get the cars running again.
Eh ? Like any gambling game: Insert Coin
Wonder if we should have a dedicated agency that for keeping control server up.
Allowing manufacturers to open/close your vehicles at whim sounds putting too many eggs at same basket. DMV is the one who knows who actually owns the car after all...
I expect government(s) to step in at some point and ban the practice entirely because it's such a foolish cybersecurity risk to have unnecessary single points of failure. It's basically a big red button that reads "cripple our economy, please" that our adversaries can hit at any time.