Suddenly I no longer own a phone

Very much clickbait going from "My car is becoming a brick" in the title to "Well the technology lasts longer than gas cars but the smartphone features might stop working at some point" in the article. Also Tesla is not all EVs, they are especially bad in how they use software in cars.

First comment on the article is from Felon Flask.

I would very much like my next vehicle to have no electronics. Every time something significant goes wrong with a car I own, it's the electronics.

Classic car clubs would like a word…

Our cars are 2002, 2004 and 2014. I'd be scared to trade them in on anything new.

I think you are making a bit of a straw man here.

I don't. I couldn't care less about vehicle classes; I care about the fact that every new car (with the possible exception of the Slate truck, which doesn't count because it doesn't exist yet) is closed-source and enshittified to an unacceptable degree. The fine details of said enshittification are irrelevant; it's all unacceptable even down to the bottom of the market.

I own six cars, all built between 1990 and 2010. Every single one has electronics for stuff like engine control and separate electronics for music, but more importantly, none of them have a modem or Wi-Fi transceiver for receiving enshittified "updates" or violating my privacy.

I cannot buy an EV that acts the same, at any price. The only things that came close were the NiMH EVs leased to fleets in California in the late '90s (GM EV1, Toyota Rav4 EV, Ford Ranger EV, Chevy S-10 EV, and that's the whole list), and good fucking luck finding one of those that survived being returned to the manufacturer and scrapped and is actually offered for sale in 2025!

I think you are making a bit of a straw man here. An entry level nissan delivery vehicle has less electronics than the new i5 BMW is not a reasonable comparison.

For this to be a reasonable comparison of vehicles, you have to say that the top of the range i5 has more electronics than the top of the range hybrid or top of the range ice only BMW 5 series (which it does not). The electronics of the ice only 5 series is just as connected to the infotainment unit as the all electric BMW i5.

The electric motor will have fewer serviceable components than the ice unit, and will be cheaper to replace

People don't realize that like turtles, it's computers all the way down.

Control modules became common in the 70s. The vehicles that don’t have computers at all have been off the road for decades

For an example of an EV that doesn't use a computer, I give you the Flocken Elektrowagen or the Detroit Electric.

This has nothing to do with electrically powered vehicles specifically.

Who thinks their gas guzzling car is like a 1931 car that you just need a screwdriver a wrench and some boomer intelligence to repair?

What a shit take against EV cars.

First of all, there are internal-combustion cars that don't have computers at all. Or even electronics of any kind, for that matter. Second, even among cars that do use electronic fuel injection and such, a standalone microcontroller managing timing and air/fuel ratio is entirely different from (and vastly simpler than) this new shit where control of the car is intertwined with the infotainment unit.

I mean, sure, if you're comparing new electric car vs new ICE car, they both have closed-source bullshit. But that's the wrong comparison, because old ICE cars without that bullshit exist and old EVs don't.

Gas vehicles have the same if not more software than electric vehicles.

The amount of software you need is dependent on how many inputs and outputs the vehicle has.

Gas engines have way more inputs and outputs because they have way more moving parts and need to manage fuel ratios for thousands of revolutions per minute. Not to mention the inputs and outputs on a transmission, which electric vehicles don’t need.

Until someone is able to root or create an open platform then there will be a lot of EV waste in the years to come.