I would recommend you watch the talk in its entirety. The presenter explicitly addresses this point. She says modern cars are marvels of technology and the problems lie in the electronics/software architecture making the entire car operation dependent on every single part. That means if one part is broken (say central door locking) modern cars often will refuse to work at all.
This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues. Examples are given of specific models exhibiting such undesired behavior.
> the problems lie in the electronics/software architecture
Is this shown in data? My experience is quite different. <50% of my issues have been electrical in nature and the electrical ones are usually much cheaper to fix.
I agree with you an electronic failure can be easy to fix. Or it can be okay not to fix, for example i don't care if my central car computer can't control the opening/closing of my windows. The problem is, are manufacturers making it easy/cheap to fix? And are they making it so a tiny fault in a subsystem crashes the entire car to a halt? The answers are, in my humble opinion, no and yes respectively.
>This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues.
These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future. Computers become cheaper, we know that. Software does too, as it becomes tried and tests and its marginal cost drops, or it moves to open source.
We are still so early in the EV revolution. I know lots of people with lots of cars, and only a handful have EVs.
> These things feel like they'll be market-sorted in the future.
I've heard this argument in so many fields, but never seen it play out. Housing was supposed to be market-sorted, yet there are still millions of empty dwellings outnumbering by far homeless people.
In a field that's closer to HN fields of interest, i've heard the very same argument about FLOSS on smartphones. There certainly were some progress in Android land with the mandatory device trees, and on niche products like Librem/Pinephone, but there were also major regressions with for example iCloud/Knox locking becoming a pain for second-hand hardware.
Overall, i don't trust an industry whose greedy interest is to keep us buying more to regulate itself to provide better services for existing products.
I think part of this is a deliberate measure to make it harder for modern cars to be used as weapons (of course, there are other more prominent factors like fuel efficiency and safety in accidents). With crumple zones and crash sensors, vehicles are often rendered inert in the event of a collision, and I think this is intentional; compare that with the Nice truck (which was obviously much larger than a car) that barreled through 80 people.
It's basically the opposite of what you would want in a military vehicle.
This is a problem in itself, but is exacerbated by overcharging for replacement parts, and by lack of free-software support to hack around such issues. Examples are given of specific models exhibiting such undesired behavior.