Tesla removes radios from new entry-level EVs

[davideduardo]

I have to say, when people are making their car buying decisions based more on the interior cab comprehensibility factor than the driving experience, it's safe to say automakers are losing their way.

We, of course, decided on the manufacturer and its driving experience well before we looked at details like seat adjustments, A/C ability to cool when it is 120° outside and the like. That is why we picked the Porsche line But the final decision over some other makes had to do with the safety and accessibility of controls, the screen display, the ability to tell the system things verbally, etc. All the final options were good driving machines to start with.

You mean they will put it in reverse. Though if they keep driving people off, I can see how you would've unintentionally prognosticated that their future will be in bicycles.

The "Big Three" have always wanted to make their cars in some way different as a way of establishing the brand. I remember the "push button" automatic transmission, which I thought was the product of a decision made by some marketing person rather than an actual driver or even an engineer.

I was waiting for some idiot to put the gas pedal on the left and the brake on the right.

 

[cc333]

So far, Tesla is the only mainstream automaker that is aggressively removing features arbitrarily, so for the time being, Tesla cars are the outliers as far as radio is concerned.

For the vast majority of other cars, AM/FM radios are still there, whether people use them or not.

c

 

[K.M. Richards]

The "Big Three" have always wanted to make their cars in some way different as a way of establishing the brand. I remember the "push button" automatic transmission, which I thought was the product of a decision made by some marketing person rather than an actual driver or even an engineer.

I often think smartphone apps are also designed by programmers who never actually have to use the app they are designing.

I was waiting for some idiot to put the gas pedal on the left and the brake on the right.

Elon is working on that, for the app that will let you drive using your smartphone. /s

 

[cc333]

Elon is working on that, for the app that will let you drive using your smartphone. /s

I don't like him very much, and I will never drive or be a passenger in any of his cars, if I can help it. I feel that they're unsafe compared to "dumb" cars that don't feature his faulty "full self driving" or "autopilot" features.

c

 

[KeithE4]

The "Big Three" have always wanted to make their cars in some way different as a way of establishing the brand. I remember the "push button" automatic transmission, which I thought was the product of a decision made by some marketing person rather than an actual driver or even an engineer.

My folks had a 1960 Plymouth Belvidere station wagon with the pushbuttons to the left of the steering column, as opposed to the normal shift lever on the right. Then again, the infamous Edsel had its transmission pushbuttons in the middle of the steering wheel.

 

[wadio]

I have to say, when people are making their car buying decisions based more on the interior cab comprehensibility factor than the driving experience, it's safe to say automakers are losing their way.

The last few compact SUVs I've rented while on vacation all drive pretty much the same. So I've decided to pay more attention to the Infotainment system on my next purchase.

 

[cc333]

The last few compact SUVs I've rented while on vacation all drive pretty much the same. So I've decided to pay more attention to the Infotainment system on my next purchase.

TL;DR I probably won't be making another new purchase any time soon because I feel like most "average" cars made within the past 10 or so years are less reliable and costlier to repair and maintain.

Reason: my last "new" car was a certified pre-owned Subaru bought in September of 2020 (it's a 2017 model). I bought it with I think 34k miles on it, and so far, it's been nothing but trouble. I've had to replace the transmission (at about 85k miles) and recently, the engine (didn't have much of a choice, because it basically stopped working and left me stranded more times than I can count).

To add insult to injury, it might need another transmission soon.

I'm not terribly picky about infotainment systems, so just about any old thing will do, as long as it's not broken.

c

 

[Theater of My Mind]

GM's platform just needs to be really good.

If it provides one with the entertainment desired and the information needed in an efficient way, people will not care if it is CarPlay or whatever.

Hands up, who trusts GM to update the proprietary entertainments systems in their vehicles on a long term basis? My guess is the updates end with the warranty period and then owners will be stuck with GM's EOL'ed tech.

With Android Auto (and I believe the same is true with Apple CarPlay), the updates go to your phone and the car's infotainment system just mirrors it. Safe to say most people keep their phones more up-to-date more than their vehicles.

 

[landtuna]

Then again, the infamous Edsel had its transmission pushbuttons in the middle of the steering wheel.

The Edsel wasn't so much "infamous" as it was a styling oddity. It was basically a Mercury with a weird grill. In fact, a lot of people described it as "a Mercury sucking on a lemon".

As far as pushbutton transmissions go, the Feds had a lot to do with those. Over the years they've required a measure of standardization in auto controls as a safety measure. I remember when I got my first motorcycle (back in the mid 50's) the shifter and foot brake were reversed. Riding other bikes later I would occasionally surprise myself by stabbing the foot brake when I thought I was downshifting. That also was done to standardize for safety reasons although my current Toyota Sienna (van) has it's shift lever on the dash instead of the center console or the steering column.

 

[landtuna]

TL;DR I probably won't be making another new purchase any time soon because I feel like most "average" cars made within the past 10 or so years are less reliable and costlier to repair and maintain.

According to the car experts you are correct.

I've had to replace the transmission (at about 85k miles)

If it has a CVT transmission that is probably the reason. Those are disasters. I would also stay away from DCT's (dual clutch transmissions). Plain old manual or automatics are still far and away better choices.

 

[yeoldeschool]

I think it's time for a federal law that says when a company decides to stop supporting closed source firmware or software, it must open source that code so others can take over the role of patching and maintaining it.

Just imagine our landfills not being choked with billions of devices every time a company like Microsoft wants to force mass movements from one version of Windows to the next. There's simply no reason any hardware should ever need to be discarded unless it physically fails. Forcing closed-source abandonware to be open-sourced would go a long way toward addressing this. And this could work just as well with aftermarket automotive equipment makers gaining access to abandoned automaker firmware and software.

(Little known fact: Windows XP was still being used until 2019 to run applications as security-dependent as ATMs thanks to Microsoft having continued quietly producing XP security updates to corporate users that whole time. Enthusiasts would get hold of these patches and produce clean XP SP3 ISOs nicely updated to fully modern patch and feature levels. Just one of many examples: https://archive.org/details/WindowsXPIntegralEdition-190112)

 

[cc333]

@landtuna I couldn't agree more!

A few years ago (2017, actually), we needed a 3/4 ton pickup to haul our two horses, and I insisted on getting an older truck because I felt it would be cheaper and easier to maintain.

We settled on a '94 GMC, and so far, I've been more or less proven correct (I say 'more or less' because we got ripped of by an unscrupulous mechanic about 6 years ago, and ended up having to pay 3x to repair things we had paid him to, but didn't).

c

 

[K.M. Richards]

I think it's time for a federal law that says when a company decides to stop supporting closed source firmware or software, it must open source that code so others can take over the role of patching and maintaining it.

I think such a law should prohibit websites from changing their HTML code to disallow access by browsers that have been "deprecated" by Microsoft.

I run the 64-bit version of Windows 7 here (mostly because the remote client interface to the Albuquerque station cluster does not work on higher versions of Windows) and I have been unable to access my primary investment account because Microsoft says my browser (Firefox) is "out of date". It is the highest release version that runs on Win 7 ... but I have had to resort to using an Android tablet just to download my monthly account statement (and a very rude woman at the firm where said account resides told me point blank in a phone call "we have no intention of switching the code back to something that a non-Microsoft approved browser can access".

For the moment, I am refusing to invest any more money there, but am leaving the account active to continue growing. It is a safe bet that before I open an account elsewhere I will be asking for assurances that they will not similarly march in lockstep with Microsoft.

I'm just glad that neither my car nor my television are Internet-dependent.

 

[Mediafrog+]

I think it's time for a federal law that says when a company decides to stop supporting closed source firmware or software, it must open source that code so others can take over the role of patching and maintaining it.

My proposal with Apple products: Once a device falls out of any sort of OS support you should be allowed to easily unlock the bootloader which would enable an alternate OS to be installed.

Just imagine our landfills not being choked with billions of devices every time a company like Microsoft wants to force mass movements from one version of Windows to the next. There's simply no reason any hardware should ever need to be discarded unless it physically fails.

Several hundred Linux distributions say hello, as do a number of other alternative operating systems.

 

[yeoldeschool]

I think such a law should prohibit websites from changing their HTML code to disallow access by browsers that have been "deprecated" by Microsoft.

Financial institutions don't always change their HTML to functionally exclude older browsers. Their lawyers, paranoid about anything out of decreed support interacting with their institutional servers, often simply order their webmasters to whitelist only the latest User-Agent HTTP headers, creating artificial usage barriers. You can tell your Firefox to claim that it's the current latest version of itself by going to the URL about:config, right-clicking within the list of configuration items, and choosing New > String, followed by entering general.useragent.override as the preference name and then the following as the preference value:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:144.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/144.0

After doing that, try the problematic financial site again and see if it now lets you in. (Some sites use JavaScript tricks and browser fingerprinting to try determining what you're "really" using, so this isn't guaranteed to work. But it works in at least half or more of cases.)

The current latest Microsoft Edge User-Agent HTTP header is as follows, if they don't allow Firefox at all:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/141.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/141.0.3537.99

You can use this page to see which HTTP headers your browser is sending to verify that your about:config change(s) are having an effect.

User-Agent string sources:
https://www.whatismybrowser.com/guides/the-latest-user-agent/

My proposal with Apple products: Once a device falls out of any sort of OS support you should be allowed to easily unlock the bootloader which would enable an alternate OS to be installed.

Thanks, I shouldn't have forgotten about that. It would definitely need to go into this theoretical law as well. I would go even further by requiring that the manufacturers who're abandoning their support for any hardware platform also disable any of the parts serialization nonsense that right-to-repair people like Louis Rossmann have been (rightly) fuming about lately.

Several hundred Linux distributions say hello, as do a number of other alternative operating systems.

I would love to see the emergence of companies that sell refurbished desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones in squeaky clean physical condition with alternative OSes like Linux and GrapheneOS pre-installed. Picture what companies like Carmax did to "normalize" the used car market for people unskilled in avoiding third degree burns from independent used car dealers and private party sales. Given the nature of this forum, many people here probably grew up typing g=c800:5 into debug, but there are countless people out there who freeze like deer in headlights at the prospects of installing operating systems and drivers.

Small business owners often attend corporate and government liquidation auctions to buy palettes of used computing devices they take home, factory restore, and then flip on eBay. I'd love to see a "Compumax" materialize that makes deals with e-waste processors to let purchasing agents pick over their comparatively abyssal inventories for all of the good, near-mint, and mint hardware before the rest goes to the chopping machines. Take the cherry-picked stuff to big service centers, sterilize and clean it inside and out, and then load it up with open source operating systems and price the results well beneath anything that's available new and pre-infected with the rootkit known as Microsoft Windows. This would benefit a lot of poor, budget-strapped, and tech averse people while keeping the earth's landfills emptier a little longer.

 

[Miss Tuned]

I would love to see the emergence of companies that sell refurbished desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones in squeaky clean physical condition with alternative OSes like Linux and GrapheneOS pre-installed.

I haven't bought a new computer for years. I always get a refurbished machine from a local supplier - most are ex-corporate computers that have passed three years old and have thus been thrown out by corporations, universities etc. They clean them up really nicely, often replace worn-out keyboard keys, if it's a laptop it generally gets a new battery, they feel like a new PC.

I'm typing this on a Dell Latitude 7320 with an 11th-gen i7 CPU. It was 2.5 years old when I bought it from the refurb supplier, its past life was at a university, and it cost about a quarter of the new price, even with Windows 11 included. These are really professionally done and if you didn't know, you'd think it was new.

I was a Linux user for nearly 20 years, starting with Ubuntu 6.06, but recently went back to Windows because I turned 40 and got tired of fixing Linux.

 

[Mediafrog+]

I have a suspicion that the current strict hardware requirements for Windows 11 may actually have a lot to do with the next version of Windows, which will likely be very heavy in AI functionality. Microsoft may be attempting to clear the deck of older equipment that won’t run “Windows 12” or whatever it winds up being named. Chatter is that we are still a couple of years away from that, with a possible late 2027 release date.

As such, if you have a computer that runs Windows 11, I would hold off on buying any new device until “Windows 12” is released, as you would then be assured of having adequate hardware for that platform which would also likely run the eventual “Windows 13”.

 

[K.M. Richards]

You can tell your Firefox to claim that it's the current latest version of itself by going to the URL about:config, right-clicking within the list of configuration items, and choosing New > String, followed by entering general.useragent.override as the preference name and then the following as the preference value:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:144.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/144.0

After doing that, try the problematic financial site again and see if it now lets you in. (Some sites use JavaScript tricks and browser fingerprinting to try determining what you're "really" using, so this isn't guaranteed to work. But it works in at least half or more of cases.)

You got me excited there for a minute, as I thought I was about to learn another useful configuration option (I am no stranger to about:config).

But your instructions did not work. Firefox will not let me right-click anywhere in the list, and the only options it gives for that configuration option is true/false or delete.

 

[yeoldeschool]

You got me excited there for a minute, as I thought I was about to learn another useful configuration option (I am no stranger to about:config).

But your instructions did not work. Firefox will not let me right-click anywhere in the list, and the only options it gives for that configuration option is true/false or delete.

I'm sorry. Apparently programmers can never leave well enough alone. Seems the way you do it is slightly different in the newer Firefox versions, including in the latest ESR. Do it the way this video shows instead. It's a small difference, and thankfully no more time-consuming.

 

[spunker88]

You got me excited there for a minute, as I thought I was about to learn another useful configuration option (I am no stranger to about:config).

But your instructions did not work. Firefox will not let me right-click anywhere in the list, and the only options it gives for that configuration option is true/false or delete.

You need to add it as a string, sounds like you added it as a boolean (which is the default option)

Hands up, who trusts GM to update the proprietary entertainments systems in their vehicles on a long term basis? My guess is the updates end with the warranty period and then owners will be stuck with GM's EOL'ed tech.

With Android Auto (and I believe the same is true with Apple CarPlay), the updates go to your phone and the car's infotainment system just mirrors it. Safe to say most people keep their phones more up-to-date more than their vehicles.

Exactly, they can make a great UI with great built in maps but are they going to still be releasing updates in 10+ years. How is it going to get real time traffic and road closure info onto the maps? I suspect they will want you to pay for a subscription for that. I'm already paying for a data plan on my phone and can mirror it to my car with Android Auto (or Carplay if Apple) and get all of the real time traffic, closing, etc. onto my car's screen without paying anything extra. Android Auto and Carplay have both been around for around a decade now and as far as I know its still working on those 2015 cars that came with it. I would not buy a new car that doesn't include Android Auto/Carplay even if the built in infotainment is great.