jimswhims
It seems like a kind of niche field with a lot of pitfalls and poor availability of information but it seems like it's possible to do if you buy some budget key programmer, as long as you can figure out which encryption type the immobiliser uses. There should be an FCC id on the key fob somewhere, then it should be possible to figure out which type of encryption it uses, there's usually some codename like ID46 or something like that.
From that article it seems like it was easier to do for that car than it is for most new-ish cars.
These are 2 of the programmers i'm looking at getting, also expensive but worth IMO, if you can get the right one, make a couple of spares for yourself, family, friends etc, then sell it on or maybe even run a (less extortionate, hopefully) side hustle yourself.
https://www.xhorsevvdi.com/wholesale/vvdi-key-tester.html https://store.autel.com/products/autel-maxiim-km100
My own theory is that he sees himself as a kind of Hari Seldon figure (can't remember for sure but think I saw him wearing a "Foundation" t-shirt at some event). Or someone like Alan Saul from Neal Asher's "Owner" series.
This delusional belief, along with typical emotional/ego issues, may be what gives him that righteous fervour for "making life interplanetary" or whatever.
I just had the browser window maximized while I was away from it for a while. This would make a nice active desktop, though I don't know enough about the software stacks involved with that to know whether it's possible.
I had a go at getting chatgpt to classify them by pasting in the link/title pairs from the onetab export tool and asking it to group them into similar topics. It was promising but didn't really scale due to the limit on message size. I'm sure a tweaked/retrained AI would do a pretty good job, not sure if there's tools out there already to do this.
It's irritating that many of the people who resist EV adoption because "it won't work, there's not enough chargers" seem to be more amenable to the idea of hydrogen, despite all the extra infrastructure/energy needed for production, cooling and transport, when electrical infrastructure is already ubiquitous. I don't know if it's that people are more conditioned to the idea of putting liquid in a tank to power a vehicle than plugging it in.
Nothing against hydrogen per se, I'm sure it'll have its uses, but electricity has a much shorter lead time to take up the current energy deficit from cutting fossil fuels.
Coal vs. nuclear is the other major head-scratcher, but I guess that's down to the green movement's own lack of awareness of the severity of global warming back when they were campaigning against nuclear.
Anything that gets petrol-heads on board with EVs is good IMO, hope they don't get burned for it.
It's egregious the way plastic is thrown at every problem. Diligently cultivated by decades of industry marketing, it seems the meanest transient need by a human seems to justify some plastic container, which could have a much longer and more meaningful useful lifetime, that gets thrown away immediately and will be floating around in the environment for centuries after. A bottle of water, mouthful of yogurt, A thimbleful of cosmetic cream or sunscreen, a single meal etc.
Even the longer use stuff is appalling when you think of the relative time-scales of use and breakdown. Toothpaste tubes, toothbrush, floss dispenser, one or two months, then centuries in the environment. All those tech gadgets and kitchen appliances, CDs, monitors, furniture. Our species has too high a regard for itself in some ways. On the one hand we consider ourselves the only species with the capability for empathy, love etc, are undoubtedly one of the most conscious, but somehow completely blind to the suffering we cause.
This should be right up there with global warming. At least with this, the problem is easier for anyone to understand and care about because of the direct threat to our own health. Just you'd have a lot of pushback from the industry.
This repairability movement needs to become mainstream, although of course vested interests from this disposable age will oppose it. Of the approximately "one credit card worth" of microplastic we all ingest every week, a lot of it is (and over time will be even more) down to plastic from ditched broken crap. Not to mention the animals that will be choking on all this stuff centuries after we're all gone.
Losing forest isn't good, of course, but Tesla is what made the current EV revolution, and its associated positive potential for CO2 reductions, possible. Before that it was in the realm of science fiction. Not that it solves all our problems, of course, far from it, but it's a huge step.
Musk has the right of it in this case IMO. I know he can be abrasive, and his Twitter/X misadventure and right-wing conspiracy leanings are saddening but, for me, his positive contributions far outweigh those issues.