When cloud computing first became a thing, the benefits seemed obvious, in that you could access your data wherever you were as long as you had wifi. But as with all things involving big tech companies, they used that to draw people in before they started using it turning the screws on the customers. Cory Doctorow writes about this phenomenon is his excellent book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (that I have read and will publish a review of later) and which I have written about a few times before.
This article in arstechnica looks at one particular aspect of this phenomenon as it relates to modern cars, when purchasers find that they are no longer in full control of the product.
Imagine turning the key or pressing the start button of your car—and nothing happens. Not because the battery is dead or the engine is broken but because a server no longer answers. For a growing number of cars, that scenario isn’t hypothetical.
As vehicles become platforms for software and subscriptions, their longevity is increasingly tied to the survival of the companies behind their code. When those companies fail, the consequences ripple far beyond a bad app update and into the basic question of whether a car still functions as a car.
Over the years, automotive software has expanded from performing rudimentary engine management and onboard diagnostics to powering today’s interconnected, software-defined vehicles. Smartphone apps can now handle tasks like unlocking doors, flashing headlights, and preconditioning cabins—and some models won’t unlock at all unless a phone running the manufacturer’s app is within range.
However, for all the promised convenience of modern vehicle software, there’s a growing nostalgia for an era when a phone call to a mechanic could resolve most problems. Mechanical failures were often diagnosable and fixable, and cars typically returned to the road quickly. Software-defined vehicles complicate that model: When something goes wrong, a car can be rendered inoperable in a driveway—or stranded at the side of the road—waiting not for parts but a software technician.
A friend of mine recently bought a Tesla. As he was driving along, he was rear-ended. There was no damage at all but the car simply stopped on the road and would not restart, nor could he open the doors. It took a call to the car company to get the car moving again. This is unnerving enough but it is not hard to envisage scenarios where things could be, and have been, much worse, such as where people have been trapped and died in burning Teslas because neither they nor the fire rescue teams could open the doors because the batteries that controlled them were no longer functioning.
The above arstechnica article continues:
These cases highlight a broader shift in the auto industry, where long-term ownership is increasingly dependent not just on mechanical durability but on continued access to proprietary software and manufacturer support.
“When a modern car’s software misbehaves, you don’t fix it yourself—you call the manufacturer,” said Stuart Masson, founder and editor of The Car Expert. “They control the code. At that point, you’re not dealing with a traditional service department so much as an IT help desk.”
…Take a decade-old Tesla Model S, for example: You might snag one at a bargain price, but there’s no guarantee Tesla will continue supporting it indefinitely. When a manufacturer drops software support, the car isn’t just at risk of breaking down—it becomes a potential cybersecurity liability. In a world where vehicles are increasingly defined by their code, running unsupported software is akin to leaving your router exposed to the Internet. You may have a functioning car today, but there’s no telling when—or how—it could stop running.
…The lesson is clear: In today’s cars, the engine or electric motor isn’t always what keeps you moving—the software does. When that software vanishes with a bankrupt company, your car can go from daily driver to expensive paperweight overnight. And in the age of software-defined vehicles, owning a car increasingly means betting on the survival of its code. When that code dies, the driveway or highway—not the repair shop—becomes the final stop.
It used to be the case that when one bought something, one really owned it and could do what one liked with it. But many electronic items are no longer really bought. You may think you are buying it but in reality you are merely renting it from the ‘seller’. I remember the first time I became aware that buying something was not the same as owning it. It was with ebooks. I recall NPR reporting how Amazon yanked back copies of books because of some dispute with the publisher.
More people are getting used to reading e-books on devices like the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle. Recently Kindle owners who had purchased George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm had their books snatched back by Amazon when a rights issue arose. The buyers were credited their $9.99, but such a recall could never have happened with actual books.
One can find older cars on the road long after the car company has gone out of business because mechanics could fix it and find parts for it. That will no longer be the case. When one of these new car companies goes bust, their cars will become bricks.
“Your call is important to us. We are experiencing higher call volumes at present. If your vehicle is stuck on a level crossing or grade crossing, please dial “9”then “7” on the next menu, and listen to the options on the automatic emergency operative sub-menu as the options may have changed. For train timetable information, tap the blue button.”
Means exist to store vast amounts of data -- well, vast by ordinary consumer standards -- locally, and relatively cheaply, so a lot of the time the cloud isn’t even necessary. As you suggested, it’s more about corporate control and squeezing out a bit of extra profit than anything which benefits the consumer.
Fortunately I have never needed “the cloud” for anything personal outside of maybe things involving my smartphone (admittedly I do not know how some of it works). All my entertainment media is hardcopy (books, videos, music), my car is an older model with very little electronics and I use it as little as possible (so it will likely have a long lifespan), and none of my software (aside from Firefox) requires an internet connection for anything other than updates. I do make limited use of the cloud for work-related purposes, but if anything goes wrong that’s the company’s issue, not mine.
Not sure if that’s a privilege in some respects, or habits and preferences from before the cloud existing having future-proofed me from present-day manipulations, or even both.
It has been, for a long itme, a question between electronic and manual (mechanical) ways of doing things. Electronic is convenient, but manual is sure.
There isn’t anything except corporate greed and stupidity standing in the way of us having the best of both of these: electronic with manual backup. And, with things that *have to work* every time, i.e. the consequences of not working would be extremely serious, manual backup is absolutely required.
After all, even the USS Enterprise had manual override.
It’s becoming unavoidable when purchasing a new product to get something that doesn’t have a lot of functions that have migrated to software control. First world problems, no question, but it can be exasperating to buy something after some research (e.g. in my case Consumer Reports) only to find that a function I consider to be basic to require the download of an app to a phone and synching the two. Even worse when the app requires creation of an account; I’m sorry, I don’t want to create an account so I can convince my new dishwasher to delay starting until the household is down for the night.
Then, of course, there seems to be no way to report software problems beyond leaving a critical review for an app.
Software updates for our electric car are automatically installed, sometimes changing behavior. I can only hope that extensive safety testing is done, but as a retired software engineer, I know full well how many bugs can be present, manifesting when just the right/wrong combination of events coincide. I had a minor issue with our car synching with bluetooth; there seems to be no way to report a bug to the company. For a safety issue, I suppose I’d have to file a complaint with the NTSB. Not a comforting thought given the current administration’s tendency to gut or otherwise incapacitate agencies.
The enshittification of life is massively enabled by the neoliberal ideology that everything gets better with unfettered market forces (Teddy Roosevelt fought the ‘robber barons’ but you will not read that in school, once all schools have been privatized).
I’ve been thinking about car windows for a long time, and they’re not even software that needs updates. The problems with windows, below, are exponentially magnified when it’s software.
Should your car ever be sinking in water, you cannot open the door against the weight of the water until the water is up the level of the top of the door. I do not see myself sitting calmly while the water rises over my head until it reaches that height. So, with manual handles that rolled the windows up and down, you could conveniently escape, or get your kids out, through the windows, before you were at great depths.
Now, you’d better hope that your battery doesn’t short out before the window is down, or you’ll be trapped. They even had a car-safety show about this on TV: it’s apparently very difficult to break car windows, so they recommended that you have this little kit in the car consisting of a thing with a special point that you put against a particular spot on the window (it’s the lower right-hand corner, for no reason that I know of) and then you hit it with just the right tap with the other thing in the kit. And, voila, it shatters the glass, although the glass doesn’t fall out. You then get to try to punch out the shattered glass and crawl out over shards of it in the windowframe, but, oh well.
But, I was wondering: how do you practice this technique? How many windows are you willing to buy and shatter until you have it down? Or, do you just plan to wait until you and your children are trapped in a car that is sinking fast, and try to learn the technique in a panic?
Now, most of us will go our entire lives without needing this, but low probability or not, it’s your life. It’s like the Tesla doors that couldn’t be opened in a fire: that will never happen to most people, but, it was their lives. I seem to recall that Mitch McConnell’s sister drowned when her Tesla sank in some body of water, I suppose it might happen with any model of car with electronic windows, meaning, all of them.
So, I just wish that there was a handle to roll the windows down, in case. I’m a big fan of automatic windows, but I wish there was a manual override (although, I recall that Sulu always said that it was Not Responding, Captain.)
There were apparently manual override devices to open the doors in the Tesla that caught fire, but they were tucked away, difficult to find or even to remember. Just mounted in the doors, within eyesight, easy to remember and grab and operate, would do it.
So yes, the forced dependence on software, the complete enshittification of every once-reliable manual thing, can have very devastating results, and not just the very bad ones discussed in this thread. I am not looking forward to the manual devices that I have now expiring. As for a car, I rather think I might prefer some kind of 1986 Honda Civic, should I be able resurrect one. I *really* don’t think those are safe, and driving at all is, of course, about the most dangerous thing you can do already.
The cloud is really just offsite data storage, and there are already problems with overbearing and autoritarian governments like the current UK government demanding unfettered access to your personal data, which is why I far prefer to keep everything airgapped on my own personal; hard drive. The problem arises when modern PCs come with such limited memory storage in order to force you to pay to use the cloud; personally, I would like to therefore be able to buy a backup memory unit that I can plug into a USB port that acts just like the main emory storage on older PC models.
I like cloud storage because off-site backup is a pain in the backside otherwise, and also because it allows me to have access to the same data across multiple devices with very little setup or maintenance. However, anything I really care about is also synced or backed up to at least one other device I have personal control over.
The important thing is to understand the trade-offs and make choices intentionally, rather than just going with the defaults. And wherever possible, to use open standards and formats so that you’re not locked in to anybody’s platform -- and where it’s not possible, think seriously about the risks and implications associated with that.
garnetstar @6: My mother-in-law sent us a little device that breaks glass if you press on it a bit. It comes with a sample glass circle you can practice on (only once, of course).
Until the fall of 2023 we had a car made in 1999, manual transmission, manual windows. Unfortunately it came to the end of its useful life. 🙁
Ah, anat @9, that sounds like a useful device! It’d be rather prudent to have in a car, I think, wish I had one. I really don’t know what I’ll do when I have to get an all-software car.
@garnetstar #10:
Google “break car window tool”?