Great Wall Motor unveils $9k electric urban car with nearly 200-mile range

Re:Great Wall Motor unveils $9k electric urban car with near... by devy on Friday December 28, 2018 @10:52AM (#18777405)

Automobiles nowadays are more like electronics with more sophisticated ECUs and drive-by-wire technologies on throttle, breaks etc. With self-driving on the horizon, they are going to be more compute intensive and be more powerful in computing than your smartphones and your average personal computers. Btw, electric vehicles are more suitable for self-driving due to the electricity requirements of AI computing.

Are you ever going to be able to fix them yourself if they are broken? Probably not (unless you have a electronic shop with all the equipments and are savvy in electronics like iFixIt guys do, but even then you can't fix a IC chip if it's fried.)

Just like an iPhone, as it's more integrated and smarter and more powers, the repairability is going down. So get used to it.

PS: on the flip side, more IC chips in designs generally provide a more solid and reliable product (probably with exception) and cheaper the cost due to economy of scale in manufacturing and reduced in labor, which is why you can have an EV with 200miles of range with less than $10k price tag.

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Re:Great Wall Motor unveils $9k electric urban car with near... by pard68 on Friday December 28, 2018 @12:12PM (#18777980)

My grandfather was a mechanic. In the 80s ECUs became the normative and he was unable to keep up with the electronic side of mechanical work and had to retire. I was talking to my mechanic last week about this and he said he would probably be out of a job in another decade because the next generation of mechanics are going to be electricians.

[ Parent | on HN ]