Cars overloaded with electronics

[JSH]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

My new (used) 2021 Pacifica hybrid recently bricked due to "high voltage negative contactor stuck closed". I scoured the interwebz to figure out how I might fix that problem to no avail. Finally I signed up with AAA, had a tow truck haul the van to the nearest dealership, and they charged me $200 to "reset the contactor", whatever that process is.

The "right to repair" doesn't include having a vague idea of what resetting the contactor entails, apparently, and also apparently isn't covered by the 100,000 mile hybrid component warranty, even though the contactors are attached to the battery and not a serviceable part.

So a wrecker company made some money, a Chrysler dealer made some money, and the Chrysler corporation made nothing on your repair.

Right to repair has been a thing for more than a decade in the auto market. It means that Chrysler provides independent shops with the same technical materials and tools available to a certified Chrysler dealer. You could buy those tools too if you wanted to pony up the funds.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw

[Conspiracy theory - start] Governments are on the OEMs' side by introducing laws which favour frequent replacement with brand new models. Other than incentives for big companies, which help bring down the initial up front cost, there are laws about penalties for emissions. Some of these laws do not even check whether your car is presently tuned properly or not, they only limit your access to certain city centers based on the emissions class (eg EURO4, EURO5, EURO6) of your car when it was produced - and this class more or less implies how young your car is. It does not matter how dirty it runs now, or even if you've blocked your EGR and removed the DPF.
So this leads to absurd situations where a properly tuned and perfectly hypermiled EURO3 car would be classified as "polluting" and would be restricted from entering many areas, while a 2024 fuel-guzzling 400hp V8 would be labelled as EURO5 or EURO6 and would have no problems with polluting those areas restricted to others.

It's far from being a conspiracy theory. New (and more expensive) cars are usually an easy source of tax revenue for governments with all those licensing fees, VAT, whatever...

[Piotrsko]

There's probably some you tube channel or equivalent to reset/replace that relay. From my surveys of stuff you can probably replace the whole relay too after an annoying search process for it.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

I guess some people fear the even higher cost of having some electric gremlin repaired properly after they make it worse trying to fix at home...

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Piotrsko

Its either an obscure pushbutton or a whack on the side of the case. The real bucks are knowing where this happens. However, I suspect it was actually replaced since the reason they are sticking is arcing them shut (a much bigger problem)

The contactor is not a serviceable part on the Pacifica, as it's integral to the battery. My guess is the "reset" was changing a bit in software from a 1 to a 0, and that was $200 of "labor".

The process is to reset the contactor, and if that doesn't fix the problem, replace the traction battery.

That procedure isn't mentioned anywhere in the entire interwebz.

Originally Posted by JSH

Right to repair has been a thing for more than a decade in the auto market. It means that Chrysler provides independent shops with the same technical materials and tools available to a certified Chrysler dealer. You could buy those tools too if you wanted to pony up the funds.

Chrysler sells the TSM to dealerships along with $1,000 scan tools that require a $1,500 yearly subscription.

Diagnostic information could easily be shown on the display that all vehicles have these days, but no, we've got to buy proprietary tools and expensive subscriptions to gain access to that information.

The customer should be able to do something as common as add a key without having to take the vehicle to a dealership and pay $350. I duplicated the key on my wife's Pontiac for $4.

[freebeard]

Tesla "We, Robot": Engineering Insights and Industry Impact at 3:44

4:05 they are intentionally over engineering it a bit for the future what's interesting Elon mentioned
4:11 that when the car is not used the hardware can be used to build a distributed computing system
4:18 now let's reason a bit about these numbers they estimate 100 million robotaxis on the road each
4:24 of the car features a 1kW of power chip which of course then has to be recalculated down to
4:31 the computing power this results in 100GW of distributed inference power and this is quite
4:38 a number the biggest question is it usable um you know probably yes for their case but you
4:45 would need a really high communication speed and you know when we're talking about data centers
4:51 this is hundreds of gigabytes per second and you can't expect this with a home Wi-Fi right so this
4:59 all is a bit of a stretch in general Tesla is scaling up their computing to TW range

The cars are turning telepathic!

[Piwoslaw]

Does this imply that we will be paying from our home power budget for Musk to have a distrubuted crypto-mining operation?

[freebeard]

Does it imply awesome dashcam videos?

[Piotrsko]

Musk is starting to exhibit an appropriate paranoia that rich people have. I doubt he'll share or play friendly

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

I guess this beauty may satisfy anyone willing to have only the strictly essential electronics to make a car work. Well, nowadays in some markets it's already fitted with ABS brakes... Spotted in my hometown.