From a liability point of view where does this put you? The batteries that come in these things are potentially very dangerous if folk started dabbling with them. Sure, no more dangerous than if someone starts welding their gas tank, but that’s a known quantity - no-one is going to blame the manufacturer. If someone gets hurt fucking around with one of these batteries, will a jury look as favourably on the manufacturer?
So long as it’s all really obvious up front then people can vote with their wallets. I don’t see that Renault are really doing anything wrong here. Standard hire purchase agreements aren’t exactly consumer friendly either - have you SEEN Lizard Lick Towing?
No love for Panasonic? The hacked GH2 is getting long on the tooth in this new post-Blackmagic Design world but still an excellent video camera for a ridiculously low price.
I’m not sure if laws protecting DRM protect your battery, which is not copyrightable under even the most imaginative reading of the law. So I’m with the rest of you - just jailbreak it and be done with it.
Normally, the argument made (sometimes successfully, sometimes not, as in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc.) is that the DRM is not there to protect the object (which is trivially non-copyrighted, and so would not invoke DMCA fun time); but to protect some sort of copyrighted firmware that just so happens to be necessary for the object to actually do anything of use.
As in the Lexmark case, this can fail, if you lean so close to ‘firmware is neccessary because something has to respond to the printer’s challenge/response auth mechanism’ that even a judge rules ‘reverse-engineering for interoperability’; but it might work if the firmware in question were more substantial.
DRM is bad, blah blah blah, spying on customers is bad, blah blah blah BUT renting rather than owning is a good thing. An economy based on recycling and re-purposing is much more sustainable than what we have now, one based on consumption and obsolescence, with products going from natural resource to dump, which is a total waste of resources. If products were made with the idea that they would/could be updated and/or passed along to another person when it doesn’t meet the needs of the current owner, they would be in use longer and presumably built to last rather than the producing the crap we have now. Ownership is overstated. A better world is possible, looking beyond your privilege.
I don’t see how Renault having the right to remotely shut down your car is in any way conducive to a ‘better world’, your odd trickle-down economics recycling argument notwithstanding.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like a clear division between things I own and things I don’t. I would have no objections if they marketed it as a rental-only car without any suggestion of ownership.
Besides just cracking the OEM software to allow you to use the OEM battery as you see fit, you’d also have to reprogram the charging system to accept the new battery specs and or different chemistry completely. At which point I’d see Renault going after who ever was behind the software hack, but you say it’s a crack and from an elite haxor ninja…who also doesn’t provide any sort of warranty or guarantee, which as an importer of “cheap” Chinese batteries would make me a question the validity of that market.
It’s interesting how cars reporting back home and harvesting data is terrible, but no one seems to blink an eye about Amazon and all it’s data harvesting, or Google, or Netflix. BoingBoing even uses Amazon links as a form of revenue generation, which seems to indicate they’re not too conflicted about how much data they collect. If the few cents savings, or superior Amazon/Netflix recommendations are worth the huge privacy implications of their data collection procedures, then surely any improvements in battery technology/charging/commuting is worth the privacy implications of relaying driving speeds and routes.
[quote=“GilbertWham, post:33, topic:14202, full:true”]
I don’t see how Renault having the right to remotely shut down your car is in any way conducive to a ‘better world’, your odd trickle-down economics recycling argument notwithstanding.
[/quote] Many, if not most, cars being sold today can be shut down remotely. While usually promoted as anti-theft devices, I’m not sure if they’re ever used when the finance company tries to repossess (and yes, finance companies can and do repossess, which is essentially what remote shutdowns in the event of non-payment achieve).
And the guy you’re quoting was not talking about trickle-down economics in any way, shape, or form.
No, I know, I just saw some parallels. You might not. I find all those ‘reporting home’ things disagreeable so what’s your point? It’s false equivalence to conflate netflix to a car that can leave you stranded by the side of the bloody road, quite possibly due to an accounting error. Renault (or, indeed, any other manufacturer) doesn’t rent people petrol tanks, because that would be insane.
I understand the problem, the battery is expensive and does not last all that long. There are good reasons not to own your own battery, for example I heard about a leasing system a long time ago. Then battery leasing was necessary for cars that can swap batteries at a charging point, effectively making the charging time for a car like this shorter than for a gasoline car.
And off course manufacturers don’t want to sell a cheaper car just to have you buy batteries from the competitor, just like in the cellphone business the phone is sold (at least in most of Europe) for much cheaper when you get a contract with a phone company. I think this is a good system you subsidize the high phone cost with a higher then usual monthly cost. I was never good at saving money but this way I could still get nice phones.
I do fully agree that the locks used (on phones or cars) are wrong. The lock should be contractual only, when you buy a phone/car with a pricey monthly contract and then decide to switch providers you will have to pay two contracts. I don’t see how that would be a problem for a phone or car manufacturer.
And when the contract is over, you should be free to switch.
So, isn’t it a notably bad thing that DRM schemes (at least ones contemporary enough to have a connected or at least timestamped component), tend to be used quite enthusiastically to curtail secondary markets?
Non-DRM cars have never exactly suffered from a lack of rental, secondary market, scavenging for parts, etc. despite the fact that it is possible to own them (though you can rent/lease/timeshare if you feel like it).
Having physical goods that are ‘licensed, not sold’ and thus can only be resold at the power and mere pleasure of the manufacturer isn’t going to improve the reuse rate…
