When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?

Scary to think that the answer will be no.

Depends on the manufacturer. A lot of American and European “smart” cars work fine without an internet connection. You need to use a key fob, and apps cloud maps or streaming apps obviously won’t work, but the basic driving, climate, and media stuff should work.
A lot of American and European cars actually kill your cloud service access if you don’t keep paying a subscription fee.
- I have zero use for a cloud connected car lol.
- I think they keep an IOT connection alive to get the data they need from the car, they just kill your enjoyment of it. What happens if it would truly drop, your guess is as good as mine.
  And that is with vested manufacturers. With startups it could be much worse.
Makes you wonder about ice cars too.
- Absolutely, in that the more software in a vehicle, the more likely it is to brick once a company folds. ICE cars are less likely since they don't have most of the software, but there are some that are computers on wheels still (and I'm sure the amount will continue to increase).
- Maybe just in terms of their electronics, such as updates and extended services.
  I do wonder if things like heated seat subscription in EV's and ICE car's will keep functioning after the company disappears.
- Yeah they'll likely end up melting once global temperatures rise high enough.

I think that that can be generalized to:

"When

<cloud-connected device company>

shuts down, will their

still work?"

Cars are a particularly problematic example, because they have a long life and are expensive, but generally-speaking, I think that when someone buys a cloud-connected device, it's a good idea to think "what exactly is going to happen if this company goes under and stops providing online services, or just discontinues service at some point" at the outset.

Might be cars or smartwatches or live service video games. They all run into similar issues.

Yup, that's why I don't buy that crap. I would love an EV, but they all seem to spy on their drivers and I'm concerned that all that spyware isn't properly protected anyway.
An EV really shouldn't be all that complicated, and there's zero reason for it to connect to the outside world. All it needs to do is:
charge the battery
regulate the battery's temperature
discharge the battery to make it go
None of that requires power, and that whole process is much simpler than my ICE car, which doesn't have any external communication either. Give me an EV without all the smart crap and I'll probably buy it.
- That's not an EV issue that's a modern car issue.
  One of the worst privacy risks was Buick who didn't even make EVs.
- I got bad news about ICE cars made in the past decade.
Yep, and precisely why I refuse to buy anything that requires an internet connection to work. I'm even wary of services that lock me in for longer than maybe 6 months. The only annual subscription I have is for my VPN.
An actual device/machine that I plan to use for years? Hell no. Offline only is a must have.
A car is also difficult to ignore, compared to something smaller.
A small expensive device that stopped working because the company shut it down is annoying, but you can at least put it to the side and ignore it.
You can't really do that to a car that has functionally become a paperweight because the parent company has gone under.
This was really thrown into sharp focus for me a couple of years back, when I read an article about how people with ocular implants are being left to go blind again because the company who made their implant has been bought by another company who doesn't want to continue support.
I just can't think about how callous that is, and if a company doesn't give a shit about that, why would they give a shit about a car?
- Sounds like this
- Never heard about it but it sounds crazy.
I really hope some massive EV startup goes under and bricks thousands of cars. It might be the last straw that forces lawmakers to regulate services shutting down (keep providing the service or open source all your code so that some else can keep providing that service)
One thing is the risk that your device might become a paperweight with $300 smartwatches or home automation systems, another is to have them with $30,000 cars.
The problem is not that there is a risk, the problem is how the magnitude of the potential loss from that kind of risk when the risk applies to cars.
Rationally there should be a lot more consumer protection rules on things were people have to work many months or even years to earn enough to buy them than in things that cost the income of a few days or weeks of work, at the very least the kind of information forcing the full disclosure upfront to customers of such risks and their consequences (if a brand's electric car will literaly become a paper-weight once support from the manufacturer ends, that should be shown in every advert for that product using a very large font).
The current combination having such risks associated with massive potential losses whilst the manufacturers actually hide that from customers and do little or nothing to reduce the impact of such risks, is unnacceptable.
because they have a long life
Not as long as it could be and that's intentional. My '97 piece of crap will outlive most EVs anv even most new ICEs.
- Evs will outlast ice cars as there are less moving parts. All we need now is 3rd party car battery replacement as a standard.

I'm looking forward to the "how to hack your Tesla to 100% operational functionality using a raspberry pi 9 and this dongle, run your car with your phone!" youtube videos (or whatever streaming service steps over its flaming corpse to replace) it in the next few decades

People have already been jailbreaking Teslas to unlock full self-driving, which is a $10k software patch.
- Wait, a Tesla in its default configuration doesn't allow self driving?
And somehow the RPi9 will still need some $90 5V20A USB power supply
- You can connect it to the Tesla's battery and it will drain them more in 5 minutes of operation that driving the car for 200 miles does, but at least it will be able to run a full LLM and render billions of triangles with full raytracing at 200 fps on a 4K display.
- https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50
  50 hp for $1k
  I can't find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.
- I've been waiting years for Tesla hacks to add power or remove Autopilot or remove software-locked batteries or unlock paid features.
  It's unlikely to happen while Musk can still afford to throw lawyers at them and sue them into oblivion.
That should be a thing - some place where all the connectors from various parts are marked and you can just remove the Tesla brain and put an RPi in place.
But I don't think it is =\
- Well, someone did it at least partly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdPRhkbeQJk
  Altough in this case it's to improve acceleration, not anything related to privacy.
Should be happening now but I understand these things take time.
Opencore Legacy Patcher, but for cars. Nice.

Ever drive in a car with a big screen from like 10+ years ago that has the most outdated, useless UI?

Now imagine that's your whole car.

I miss the days when the radio was its own separate thing in a car. Hate the outdated UI? Just replace the radio head unit with a modern one.
Nowadays it's a lot more difficult. There is a module called iDatalink Maestro that allows you to still maintain most factory features after replacing your head unit, but a lot of cars tend to be incompatible—especially EVs—as more and more features become integrated into the stereo. The days of modular components in cars is nearing an end.
- Especially EVs, or especially Teslas?
You can get that experience with new cars too. Especially anything made by BMW who presumably don't extend their craftsmanship ideals to their software.
- I reckon it all comes from the stupid ass tesla hype, both Hyundai Group then later VW Group came out and said they will be putting back physical buttons.
  Other than that, they should also fuck off with their software, make it be able to control the functions of the car, everyone uses carplay/android auto anyway, so what's the point of all the other stuff.

Will a new anything work if the manufacturer kills off the entirely unnecessarily forced network features?

This is not an EV problem, this is an MBA grifting problem.

Still, as from a mechanical engineer perspective I would trust slightly more a combustion motor system to work offline rather than an electrical, where I could never know how the motor really works and relays on.
Personally I enjoy driving a 1987 bensine Ford.
- I also do have a degree in mech eng and electrics as well. Electrics are much, much simpler, the reason EVs have a reputation for being hard to service is that they are new and chock full of online bullshit, which is true of new ICE cars as well. If it was just the battery and the motors, it's incredibly simple.
- The same is true of any modern ICE, you're not exactly gonna get source code or schematics for drivetrain management
- What would be more complex an electric fan, or a fan with an internal combustion engine? It's all the add ins that make cars complex. The motors are always simple.

Finally people are starting to ask the questions that actually matter.

Yeah well I raised this question six years ago and muskrat fanbois got me banned from like four EV 'the other site' communities.
- Can you name one of these that exist in an EV that doesn't exist in an ICE vehicle? The issue is the same across the board. Notice a child can build a remote control car. Nothing complicated about a battery (gas tank) and a motor. It's the controllers to the windows, locks, on screen entertainment, wipers, sun roof, trunk/hood latches, antilock breaks, that become the worry of software/firmware being tied into.
  The ice motor ends up being more complicated, as you regulate timing for spark plugs, fuel injectors, and how lean the fuel is as it enters at different speeds. Electric motors don't need that part.
Tech folks love to put questions the way "what if someone can own you via this thing", and normies intuitively defend against that - they feel the implication that they can be owned and not know it is an insult, while it's just truth. They also irrationally think that a system allowing to own people is a two-edged sword while it isn't, they kinda feel empowered by complexity they don't know. A bit like people not having a B52 plane feel awe before it and the ordnance it can drop.
However, if you put the question like this, what happens with all those pyramids of crap when they are not maintained anymore, it may work.
- "im not owned! im not owned!!", i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob

Companies should be required to maintain a stash of plans and source code which is automatically released upon the company stopping operations, unless the IP is bought.

unless the IP is bought
It's always bought on liquidation. The creditors require it to be sold to legally satisfy them. What's worse is that the IP may only be licensed in the first place.
Novell was re-awarded OS code which it sold -- a term I use based on talking to people in the room on both the seller and buyer side of the negotiation table at the time, but merely second-hand knowledge. Novell was awarded ownership as the fact of the sale became a poker chip in a US$5bn lawsuit that could be refuted to give an advantage to one adversary in that lawsuit.
Novell hasn't done a thing with it in 20 years. The code is essentially dead because it would cost too much to restart and update.
This was how the original Unix died, and doesn't violate your plan. Counterexampled?

As long as they're a smartphone on wheels the answer is no.

We want real cars again, even if electric.

My smartphone still works without service. Just as a tablet/computer device. Cars should be the same.
- If Google or Apple went out of business (depending on which phone you have) you'd stop getting updates and it'd stop working.
As a member of /c/FuckCars I say we don't want cars at all. We want robust public transportation, and bicycle paths. Entire cities designed around going green. People want to get angry at the Starbucks CEO for using a private jet, and reasonably so, but NOBODY wants to take responsibility for the toll each car puts on the environment. Yes, even the electric cars. That electric energy still has to come from somewhere.
- Public transportation does not operate in the middle of nowhere where the closest store is more than half an hour away.
- Name checks out. I'm all for public transportation, but to think that it will eliminate cars is nonsense.
- That doesn't work for people like me who might drive 10 miles to work and then at the drop of a hat have to travel to another location 60 miles away, then have to travel back to the original location before the end of the day.
- You people proselytize more than Linux evangelists and perhaps even Mormons do, and not even as entertainingly. Even if I agree with you, I don’t want to hear about fuckcars in every damn thread.
- Dense cities and the consumerist lifestyles that exist inside them can not be "green" no matter how much green lipstick you put on it. Their very existence is destructive to the environment and disruptive of nature, switching out cars for bicycles or buses isn't even scratching the surface of the issue.
- I'm with you on everything here except the very last sentence.
  EV impact is more about toxic particles from tire and brake wear, and greater road wear when most EVs are heavier than similar ICE vehicles. The cleanliness of an EV's power source has been debunked over and over again, showing it's still a net positive environmental impact to run an EV off dirty energy, compared to an ICE car burning gas or diesel.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electric-cars-are-cleaner-even-when-the-power-comes-from-coal/
  https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-definitely-better-climate-gas-powered-cars
- Yep. This exactly.

This is not just something that can impact EVs. NFC door locks, smart infotainment, displays for gauges. None of that is EV specific these days.

These cars were clearly not designed to work without cloud connectivity and or an authenticated account. That seems bonkers. China is huge and has lots of remote areas. How were these cars going to work when they couldn’t phone home?

IMHO, a lot of cars have gone way overboard with “smart” features, but this manufacturer’s problems are the result of cutting corners and not designing for some common use cases.

NFC door locks, smart infotainment, displays for gauges
And I don't need any of that.
Give me a simple car and I'll buy it.
- The ages of cars on the road has been increasing. As reliability and prices continue to go up, more and more people hold on to their cars.
Or when the network that the car relies on no longer exists. My old e-reader's mobile connectivity no longer works because the phone company providing the service turned the 3G network off in the upgrade to 4G.
It's just 17 years old. People tend to keep cars for about that long. What happens then? Does it just become limited to basics only, or become a big metal brick?
- People stop paying for smart car’s online services all the time.
  You typically lose access maps or only get basic offline maps without traffic and charging stations listed. You also lose the ability to use streaming apps, the ability to remotely control locks, windows, cameras and climate from your phone, stolen vehicle tracking, alarm notifications, etc.
  But if you have CarPlay / Android auto, the good maps and streaming apps can be pumped in from your phone.
NFC door locks have a sliding panel with a key override. Usually a shit lock that can be opened by any amateur... One of the many reasons I don't have one.
At least the cars can be updated (at least until the manufacturer says fuck it). A ton of those 'smart' devices have no such capability so when a vulnerability is found it won't ever be fixed.
- This is why I won’t touch a car that doesn’t have Android Auto, CarPlay, etc. I want to be able to update my audio apps and maps, even when the manufacturer decides to stop updating my head unit.
Probably just should said “phone key” instead of assuming NFC. It looks like a lot of these cars use other technologies to unlock without a fob.

It's not your car if someone else controls it.

Cars are the tip of the iceberg. What about smart home appliances, like garage door openers, or door locks? They all come with their stupid apps, and once the company is dead, suddenly your home stops working.

We really need mandatory standards: post APIs for client-server connectivity and make the connection URL configurable.

1000%, we need to demand minimum functionality or stop perpetuating these fucking things by purchasing flawed products from flawed companies.
- Or, you know, regulate them
There are a lot of manufacturer-agnostic smart home devices out there, and with just a tiny bit of research online it’s not difficult to avoid anything that is overly tied to a cloud service. Z-wave, ZigBee, Thread/Matter devices are all locally controlled and don’t require a specific companies app or environment — it’s only really the cheapest, bottom-of-the-barrel WiFi based devices that rely on cloud services that you have to be careful of. As with anything, you get what you pay for.
Even if the Internet were destroyed tomorrow, my smart door locks would continue to function — not only are they Z-wave based (so local control using a documented protocol which has Open Source drivers available), but they work even if not “connected”. I can even add new door codes via the touchscreen interface if I wanted to.
The garage door scenario can be a bit more tricky, as there aren’t a lot of good “open” options out there. However, AFAIK all of them continue to work as a traditional garage door opener if the online service becomes unavailable. I have a smart Liftmaster garage door opener (which came with the house when we bought it), and while it’s manufacturer has done some shenanigans in regards to their API to force everyone to use their app (which doesn’t integrate with anything), it still works as a traditional non-smart garage door opener. The button in the garage still works, as does the remote on the outside of the garage, the remotes it came with, and the Homelink integration in both of our vehicles.
With my IONIQ 5, the online features while nice are mostly just a bonus. The car still drives without them, the climate control still works without being online — most of what I lose are “nice-to-have” features like remote door lock/unlock, live weather forecasts, calendar integration, and remote climate control. But it isn’t as if the car stops being drivable if the online service goes down. And besides which, so long as CarPlay and Android Auto are supported, I can always rely on them instead for many of the same functions.
Some cars have much more integration than mine — and the loss of those services may be more annoying.
Agreed! The most promising standard is called matter. Vote with your wallet!

Looking at Aging Wheels YouTube channel with his fleet of non working Wheegos, the answer is no, they won't.

A lot of his problems are also from the lack of available parts.
Which is why he has multiples of some of the orphaned cars in his fleet.
- That's why I bought an electric car from a car company. Mostly the same parts besides the drivetrain.
- Yeah, but hes got 4 and none of them work. Or at least the one working one is also breaking down a lot.

cars? what about all those charging stations that don't have payment by card and require you to setup an account through a mobile app like what kind of cuntery is that.

A lot of car parks are becoming like this. It's especially frustrating when you try to download the app but you have no signal and there's no other way to pay.
- I checked it and remembered correctly that in the EU at least they made it mandatory to have it on chargers
  The new EU regulation AFIR (Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulation) stipulates that fast-charging stations with an output of 50 kw or more must be equipped or retrofitted with the option of card payment with immediate effect. The AFIR came into force on 13 April 2024 and takes precedence over national laws.
- My favorite thing about that is when you fill in the required info and need an email but because you gotta enter it each time using a temporary email doesn't work. Then you get spammed to death by them....
Its an asset, it will be sold off, spun off or recovered.

That's cool and scary but it also (mostly) applies to most new ICE cars as well.

Can you explain how? I'm at a bit of a loss how.
- Most cars nowadays, EV or not, are cloud-connected and designed with build-in obsolescence.

As long as the car isn’t dependent on an Internet connection or the manufacturer’s server and the ports aren’t proprietary, I think you’re good. I expect a car to have these.

Woah woah woah. You can't "disrupt" the car industry without a subscription based model that can brick your hardware at a moments notice.

I'm pissed that even non-ev vehicles make it impossible/expensive to swap out the head unit for something you like.

Aw yeah we need the right to repair on that pronto. Like climate and infotainment should be totally different systems and control panels. A car should function 100% with the infotainment system offline.

Why wouldn't they? You plug it in and keep driving. It's not any different from petrol cars.

Unless they have a massive infotainment system that requires cloud services to work properly or the main way to access your car is the app on your phone (and other shit like this).
Also who's gonna guarantee spare parts in case something breaks down in 5 years time? Will I be able to fix their car or will it be a paper weight?
- My point was, the same applies to petrol car. They all have infotainment and need spare parts.
Take a look at the YouTube channel "Aging Wheels", they have acquired and daily driven a Coda, an EV that the parent company shut down, you can see their journey in the channel.
- Yeah, he's up to owning four of them, two of which are purely parts cars and one of which is currently apparently irrevocably broken with its parking pawl latched into place and thus immobile in his garage without hooking it with a wrecker and literally dragging it on the tires.
  And that guy pretty much knows what he's doing with various offbeat EV's, and has a huge amount of shop space and apparently funds at his disposal to just fuck with these things as a hobby. The average owner, meanwhile, has no chance.
- A rare Aging Wheels enjoyer in the wild! That dude has single-handedly gotten me more interested in automobile history and just how cars do things in general.
They might keep driving, but some infotainment features (or even other features that are tied to subscriptions) might stop working.
Depending on the implementation of these features that could mean the car constantly shows error messages, or the infotainment freezes, or in the worst case the car won't even start or charge.
Some of these concerns are true for newer cars of traditional manufacturers: what happens when their online services become unavailable?
Depends actually. If Tesla shut down, that would disrupt a lot of fast charging. The charger handshakes with the car which allows it to auto bill to your card stored on Tesla's servers. For non-Teslas, they have to use the app to start charging.
- Plenty of ways to charge an EV without Tesla's superchargers. Sure, superchargers were their biggest selling point before dipshit fired the whole supercharger team, but it's not like any Tesla is bricked purely from lack of Tesla's charging network.

Seeing as my car works when an internet connection is not available it will work. The bigger issue is charging networks. If Tesla went belly up, then charging on their network (L2 chargers should be fine unless they configured to not be free) would be dicey.

With more market saturation, we'll see more standardization. Imagine if the original ICE cars took a proprietary gas pump. LOL, the market would have fixed that horseshit with the quickness.
A huge selling point for pistol-caliber guns is if they take Glock magazines. They're cheap, reliable and available everywhere. I'll likely never own a Glock, but magazine compatibility would sway my purchase towards another manufacturer that doesn't have a proprietary mag.
Charging will eventually be a self-solving problem. Right now it seems the manufacturers are trying to get ahead by saying, "Our model charges at X (number of) stations! They only have Y. Pick me!" If I can ever afford an EV, the most standard, "normal" option, whatever this is, is where I'm buying.
And if the free market doesn't quickly arrive at a standard, time for the legislative hammer. While I'm leery of fucking around, I do so love how Europe says, "Nope! Every device sold here must be compatible." Phone chargers and such.

I look forward to the day when my refrigerator stops working because the company went bankrupt, or because their server was down.

Samsung are pretty close.
- That's not on purpose they are just defective shit boxes engineered by the cheapest guy on fiverr

Im sure the budding EV home brew community will get an OS going here soon

Sono Sion shut down, and good luck even getting your money back. Of course and shamelessly, Sono Motors and their CEOs get to continue to cruise through it. Wait EV startups out until they release is my advice, too much of an industry and competing markets locking new competition out. The only incentive to purchase into them, paying less, is also what puts your money at risk.

Sono Sion wasn't even Chinese. it was fully German. The dangerous thing about Chinese EVs is that they are much more certain to deliver, and that gives more of a false sense of security that they will continue to maintain and conform to regulations.

Mostly, yes, but the fact that we can't definitively say "yes" is a problem.

I think ford and gm have turnkey crate motors and I suspect the vehicles have the same systems. Might be fun problem to solve.

I don't think it's too far out of the realm of possibility considering numerous people buy crashed/scrapped EVs and adapt them into old vehicles or modify them into Franken-cars on Youtube.
- There was that one guy on YouTube and he rebuilt a military humvee with telsa motors.

Will VW support Rivan owners ?

I saw a YouTube video where a guy had a dent in the back left of his rivan and the body shop wanted 40k to fix it because the car is really easy to work on.
- So while this repair isn’t perfect, it’s pretty darn close. It’s not known how much the customer paid for the repair, but other claims on RivianForums estimate that PDR for similar damage on the R1T ranged between $4,000 and $6,000. And, thankfully, this process didn’t involve cutting and paintwork that could have stretched the undertaking by weeks or months, rather than days.
  I had not seen that. Interesting that carriage house sized business found benefit from 21st century automotive design.

My assumption would be that they'll work better.

The scariest part of technology is software updates.