I drive an electric vehicle, and the reason I haven’t bought a second one is that the manufacturer of my current ride made grandiose promises about battery lifespan (years!) but has a very short warranty period (one year!). It’s no different from the laptop business.
Battery rental programs are a really good way for manufacturers to make clear that they’re standing by the risk of new technology rather than dumping that risk onto the shoulders of their customers. I’d be much more inclined to buy an EV with such an arrangement.
That said, a DRM and remote-disabling system is absurd! We already have repo-men, after all.
More importantly, why aren’t we doing this whole DRM thing with regular gasoline-based cars? How about a car that’s bought at a discount, but which is DRM’d to only accept fuel supplied though licensed forecourts? The on-board computer could brick the car if it detects attempts to refill the gas tank using unlicensed supplies - or simply the DRM could update a total number of licensed miles to travel on the odometer, and the car could refuse to move if you try to exceed the distance permitted by the rights holder? Miles could expire if they’re unused after 30 days… Cars could come on contracts… $100 a month for the first 1000 licensed miles, and a sliding scale of top-up fees above that… perhaps road bandwidth could be throttled above 1000 miles a month … your top speed falls to 20 miles per hour if you go outside your pre-allocated mileage. (This is the way everything works on that special circle of hell being prepared for Mr. Doctorow)
Lol! You can’t have sort of French. That’s like saying the British royal family is sort of German, They are German!
That Citroen is a classic, way ahead of it’s time. Modern French cars though, hmmm. Just find them a bit ugly, too much plastic.
Actually did some digging, Bugatti was Italian but set up shop in Alsace, France. Which I didn’t not know. Which is were the best car museum in the world is
Or, if you must use software (say, because having a MIDI keyboard connect to a computer is a useful thing), USE STANDARDS. Rolandbus(t), or your weirdo MIDI-over-Parallel hack will be dead before the hardware that implements it is. MIDI itself, though, lives on (probably longer than most of us), and MIDI has a USB Device Class and so it is cheap and trivial to get a PC to speak MIDI, and likely will be for years or decades to come. (Incidentally, if your Roland is a ‘MIDI keyboard’ as in ‘has actual MIDI ins/outs’ you might consider just grabbing a USB/MIDI adapter. The cheap ones are crazy cheap, if perhaps a bit… eccentric, even the classy ones are cheaper than a good keyboard, by a substantial margin)
Brilliant! Just mix globally-unique coded microdots (cryptographically signed, so no fakes for you…) in order to, um, ‘allow the ECU to automatically optimize engine performance for the unique characteristics of every batch of authentic AuthentiFuel™’ (yes, that’s definitely it…) and reject, or impose a penalty on the customer’s account, if fewer than X dots/liter are present, indicating the use of counterfeit or diluted fuel!
Drove a Peurgeot 205 GTI, it was a looong time ago, so I think it was this model. The road holding was excellent, was pretty rapid. That being said I have only ever broken down in French cars. Could just be bad luck though.
The one I had was a pool car, only drove it for about a week. Could tell you the story of how I nearly ‘parked’ it in a ditch at high speed… but I won’t bore you. I blame it on youth.
Paranoia Fuel: Use DRM in electric car to kill the demand for electric cars
Paranoia Fuel II: Use DRM in electric car to kill the demand for DRM
And just wait until they add the self-drive feature to cars. Violate the DRM? Forget bricking, self-drive will take your car to the closest authorized dealer.
Wrong analogy. It’s not DRM, it’s a locked cell phone plan. You get a discount when you buy the car, in that you don’t pay for the battery upfront, but you have to pay monthly installments to have the battery in operation: similar to getting a discount on a cell phone but having to sign up for specific monthly service. Might be cheaper to just buy the battery up front, might not. might be cheaper to buy the cell phone up front, might not. Different business plans for different folks.
My expectation is that, just like with phones, after a few years they’ll just let you keep the battery (assuming no major safety issues are discovered)
