These definitely exist. They are typically referred to as ‘compliance cars’ - i.e. the manufacturer is obligated, usually by regulations, to produce an EV, but they don’t want to spend money designing a new platform for it - so they take an existing model, rip out the engine, cram a motor and batteries wherever they will fit and call it good. Examples: Volkswagen eGolf, Fiat 500e, Mercedes B Class EV. Ford Focus Electric…

However, doing this means you are constrained to the shape of the combustion vehicle it is based on. So the aerodynamics may not be optimal to get the best range, you may have a transmission tunnel taking up space in the interior that is no longer necessary, directly swapping the position of the engine and the motor/inverter means you lose the opportunity to repurpose the front of the car for additional storage - ultimately it ends up compromised in one way or another.

If on the other hand you design the platform from the ground up to handle an electric drivetrain then all of these points can be taken into account.

(And regarding cars in general becoming rolling computers: this is not an EV specific issue, unfortunately.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

See also: Sam Alt(ernative to)man.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. So yeah, I’m super fucked.

Although, I would be a cyborg (Skitarii) with a pretty sweet collection of servo skulls and a cool weapon, so I’ve got that going for me.

• Tesla absolutely sell software locked heated seats as DLC, as well as subscriptions for “self driving” packages.
• They will advertise/upsell their own services in their app, including free trials of their “premium” features.
• If you think they are using your driving data (including camera feeds) in any responsible way then I have a bridge to sell you. There have been documented cases of Tesla employees watching their customers fuck on the interior cameras.

For context - I used to own one.

If this works in any way, shape or form for BMW then you can bet that any other manufacturer selling “connected vehicles” will sit up and take notice.

If my brand new car started pushing dashboard ads to me, it would be rejected and returned to the dealer immediately. That is the only kind of pushback they would pay attention to.

Apart from the times that the US applied export controls to encryption software.

Same, I set it up a few years ago and both me and my partner have been using it since then with no issues at all, it’s completely replaced Google Photos for us.

We’ve also set up immich-frame and repurposed an old Google Nest hub to use as a digital photo frame.

This might not actually be the first one, but one of the earliest games I definitely remember actually buying with my own money was Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 2. I would have been around 7 or so.

Definitely worth it, great game and the demos on the CD introduced me to Transport Tycoon, and the XCom and Worms franchises - and things kind of snowballed from there!

You are assuming that they have a personality to begin with.

I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.

There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’…