Comment on Fuck cars
vivendi@programming.dev 3 weeks agoA battery
A highly complex system with support systems to prevent it from literally blowing up (mmmmm tasty lithium)
A battery management system
A seriously complex piece of model specific code that is usually proprietary and has hardware level bricking fuses (so fuck you if it has a fault)
And also, all the other management shit like regen braking and what have you.
You’re doing a “reduction”. If you reduce literally anything to such high abstraction it seems simple. Yes, quantum physics is also " just " an observation of a continuous system, nothing to it mate
ICE cars can be completely reassembled with a couple of wrenches. The most proprietary thing in the whole system is the ECU, and you can swap that and whatever if you wish to do so.
stoicmaverick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m going to humbly disagree with your premise. Ice engines only seem simpler because we’ve been doing it for so long that it seems normal, but the concept is insane when broken down. This is a machine which translates thousands of tiny explosions into smooth rotation at the wheels. An electric motor only has one moving part, and no metal on metal contact except for the bearings.
Electric vehicles still have to adhere to the parts and documentation availability standards of ice engines, it just feels different because you’re talking about primarily electronics parts rather than something that a machinist could make for you like we’re currently used to. It’s true that you can’t troubleshoot an electric vehicle without a multimeter, and a code reader, but you also can’t fix an ice engine without wrenches, a variety of consumable fluids, proprietary gaskets and fittings, etc.
Additionally, ice vehicles subjectively have a more open source feel to them because of the complexity inherent to the design. You can add power or change the dynamics of the car by modifying the intake, exhaust, valve profile, spark timing, and a million other things, but that’s because all those are factors in the way that it works. An electric motor doesn’t have any of that, and unless you want to modify the power going into the motor in a way that it was not designed to handle, there’s really nothing that can be changed due to the simplicity.