A company needs funding before it can even start making a hardware project on the scale of a car, and it is vastly easier to obtain funding for a project like this than for one that would not screw over customers. Free markets are usually great, but they can have terribly misaligned incentives at times.
Gas companies are burning the world to the ground just to get a few more quarters of profit. They'll buy regulators and presidents of they have to. In fact one is openly selling himself to them at a bargain rate.
The answer which has worked before is to end the corruption and monopolies/oligopolies as we did before: anti trust. Voting in honest civil servants, voting out or jailing the corrupt, keeping money out of campaigns, and outlawing professional bribery (lobbying) are critical to enforce the rules that keep the playing field level.
Guess which party has sold out the hardest in the US? Which is led by a man who openly sells deregulation to polluting industrialists in exchange for campaign funds?
This is a misrepresentation of market forces. Markets produce many different products and services based on the assumption that consumers want them. Those consumers like stick and further diversify, the others die. This is what markets do, they don't have a crystal ball, instead they create products and services by trial and errors, and additionally execution can make or break a company.
When working as a vendor with mature automotive manufacturers they’ll often evaluate your company to ensure you’ll still be around over the timeframe that they intend to sell or service cars with your parts in them.
I avoid all the whizbang rent seeking bullshit just by driving horrible old cars.
I really hope someone makes a conversion kit for the computer in these cars. It would suck to be out on a new car, and just have a brick sitting in your driveway.
Bankrupt Fisker says it can't migrate its EVs to a new owner's server
> its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed
Ouch
Doctorow has a good point here.
Why was it bricked in first place? Cars don't brick themselves by entering tunnel or driving in wilderness.
I get it, he has to keep stirring up controversy to stay relevant, but Cory sometimes looses his marbles over irrelevant crap.
TFA doesn't say that all Fisker cars are bricked - It says that they become unusable do to minor maintenance issues that can't resolved without Fisker servers being online.
I wish I could buy an electric car with no radio transmitters and no ways to install software other than JTAG ports. I think that'll be possible in the relatively near future through EV conversions of legacy vehicles, though that route may have crash safety concerns.
If I ever get the funds I'm building this vehicle for sure, because it is pretty much guaranteed no one else will.
‘Cuz $DEITY knows that “bricked” has a very wide range of colloquial definitions.
Not all the links are behind paywalls. Fisker themselves are among the groups saying they don't know how to get the cars running again.
Eh ? Like any gambling game: Insert Coin
Allowing manufacturers to open/close your vehicles at whim sounds putting too many eggs at same basket. DMV is the one who knows who actually owns the car after all...