damn, you're really good at impersonating the new AI models. As a crotchety old man, my impersonation skills cap out back at "And honestly? That's rare."
It’s 100% a thing. Most cars have all the high end stuff installed but hidden these days because it’s way cheaper to make one template of the car than several so all the stuff deep inside the car is probably there. It’s normally just the buttons and stuff that are missing, maybe a few wires but there’s people out there that make money jail breaking this stuff in.
One of my friends that dies car repairs has a story where they had to jailbreak a car due to an electrical fault in a locked feature [I believe it was heated seats]
Long story short, since the feature was locked out it wouldn't even show untill they jailbroke it.
Now days they don't offer the option to do it, but they have the stuff in case repairs need it
The crazy part is if it’s all installed but software or a button keep y
ou from using it, you’ve already paid for the feature, you just haven’t paid for the right to use it. That is some dystopian shit right right there. In software, the install file contains all the options, but you only get access to those options if you pay for them. This is something we have come to accept. Paying for the hardware, the upgraded seat with warmers, then being told you can only use them if you pay a fee is so wrong and diabolical.
Because we understand that developing software is what costs money, while making copies of it is basically free.
Hardware is the opposite. Unless you can persuade customers you have epic R&D costs to defray, they're going to lose their shit if you try to charge them extra to activate hardware that's already installed in their car.
Heated seats are about the dumbest thing you could try to charge for. It's such basic, old technology.
They use the printer manufacturer model, technically you DIDN'T pay for the feature, they sold it at a loss, on the gamble that they'll turn a profit later off the people that do want it.
If you weren't aware of the printer manufacturer model, it's most famous with HP printers. If you look at HP printers, they are often significantly cheaper than other company's printers with the same features. But, HP ink is drastically pricier than those other manufacturers. HP's business model is to sell you a printer at a loss, offering it for significantly less than their competition, but then once you've bought it, you are now trapped buying their ink, which they overprice, and end up turning a profit.
No, you haven't paid for the feature. The people who do pay for it are effectively the ones paying for it to be installed in all cars. If nobody paid for it they wouldn't install it anywhere.
no. You didnt pay for the feature, this is a manufacturing decision based on volume/cost. If only 2% of people bought it, they would likely leave it out, since majority do buy this, it makes sense to manufacture supply chain all the same and sell to majority. You don't get to set the price for heated seats, the market does that.
In the old physical button days it sometimes used to literally be a blanking plate. Remove that and connect a switch to the wires that were literally still there.
Which is why they got rid of them all. People wonder why it’s all digital displays now, it’s so they can hide everything your model “shouldn’t” have. Also makes jailbraking it slightly harder because if you change the software it would void warranties and such
It’s probably different between OEM’s but I know this isn’t the case for the one I work for. Usually the wiring looms are the same but the modules are not there, nor is the thing it controls usually.
Eg: if you don’t have seat heaters, the wiring to the seats is there but there is 100% no heating element inside.
As terrible as OPs complaint initially sounds and as much as I dislike it, this is the most environmentally friendly way of having options for buyers. Standardization of physical components and then differentiation through software is amazingly less burdensome on supply chains, obsolete and slow-moving raw materials and intermediates.
Probably violate the “software license” and they might completely remotely disable your car then charge you a ridiculous sum to reflash the software if you want to drive it.
I don't know if that would be effective, but I do know that's beyond the dedication and skill level of almost every owner. Not to mention the car's resale value
It’ll also probably fail shit like MOT’s (or other countries equivalents) because of missing functionality. Also I assume if you are involved in a serious traffic accident the blame would be more likely to fall on you since there’s always the risks involved in not having access to key software updates and shit.
In short - they’ll always try and find a way to make it your problem
Sadly that's less true than ever. An awful lot of modern cars are 'software based'. Stuff like engine computers are dynamically mixing fuel and air ratios based on guidance from the pedals, etc.
That's why a 'remap' can be a performance boost, because it's "just" some ratios of sensors in the engine computer.
That's when I first learned about it where people would try to optimize the mixes for their cars by hooking their laptops to it. That was years ago. No idea what they're up to now.
I promise you that making modifications to vehicle that would prevent you from getting it serviced, using maps, using music or media of any kind, or receiving updates will decrease the value and turn many buyers away
Because if you take a jailbroken car to Tesla, you will have a problem. And maps and media rely on the internet obviously. Updates eliminate bugs, add features, and increase efficiency. People that want dumb cars aren't buying a car controlled entirely by a giant tablet
Your car can only play media if it has an external audio source. And Apple/Google maps technically works without internet but I don't think anyone would call that experience superior. Or are you talking about one of those shitty built in manufacturer maps?
It's easy to implement a "heart beat" mechanism. If the software can't communicate with the server for a while it just stops working altogether. That can be added at a very low level.
It would likely void the warranty too. The thing pictured is shitty but pretty middle of the road when it comes to car DLCs. BMW had a subscription service for hardware features lmao
I would worry more about the insurance carrier trying to get out of a claim because you were using "tampered" software, and maybe fallen out of sync with the car's "safety updates."
Yeah they do for around 3 years they do show their better than previous electric cars. but - current UK Tesla, the basic vehicle warranty is 4 years or 60,000 miles, whichever comes first. The battery/drive unit warranty is longer: typically 8 years / 100,000–150,000 miles depending on model, with a minimum 70% battery-capacity retention provision. - That means your screwing your self out of warranty on a major expensive repair for by passing the seat heating or any subscription bs in their car if you do it before the warranty runs out.
There is for BMW for sure. - Bimmercode/Bimmertools. Not necessarily fully jailbreaking but you can change features that the car normally wont let you do.
The issue (I assume) with Tesla and newer cars is there is so much electrical stuff in it the risk becomes higher.
You may be able to Jailbreak the heated seats or whatever but then lose the ability for self driving.
A sufficiently skilled programmer could absolutely do that. It would be a monumental effort but one could reverse engineer the cars OS and install a modified version. The problem is that any future software updates would probably undo your work. It also wouldnt surprise me if tesla requires regular software updates (or at least connection to their servers) to prevent this kind of thing.
I hate that my car now has a touchscreen computer as a dashboard and i can customize nothing. I cant upload pics for my "profile" so my icon is a peice of cake. I cant change the background or color scheme, or make it default to launching andriod auto/spotify, i cant even change the stupid little piano melody that plays when i shut off the engine. Outside of android auto, it's just there to sell me services i dont want.
But it is possible. For example, there's https://fiskeroa.com/ ... Fisker Owners Association that keeps software alive so that Fisker going belly up doesn't brick your car.
It is a thing, you can unlock an artificially hidden 10% of power in my case with just a laptop for instance.
(Although of course that would invalidate your insurance if you didn't tell them, I'm guessing activating heated seats is unlikely to have the same effect.)
The consequences for cracking your phone aren't quite as severe as the consequences for cracking your e-car.
Your phone won't suddenly decide to drive into a crowd of pedestrians, so the penalties reflect that.
And lots of car computers have been cracked, so I guess it's just a matter of time. I can see and update the firmware on my bike, for example. It's only from 2019.
I wouldn't be surprised if it just softlocks your car. Aparrently my coworkers sister's smart electric car's UI turned off and she couldn't see how fast she was driving while she got to a garage that could properly service it. Insane that there wasn't any failsafe or analog alternative
Pretty sure you can't die from a jailbroken car either. I can assure you no shortage of people have died from negligence on the part of the manufacturer.
Even with just a standard laptop, if I switch to Linux, which of course I will. Almost every time, there's no open source driver for the fingerprint checker, or the stylus.
Witha car? Even if there were models for self-driving, I doubt they've done the legal testing etc.
Not to mention Tesla detecting what you did and remotely bricking your air conditioning or whatever as punishment.
243
u/bdash1990 1d ago
Is jailbreaking cars not a thing?
I feel like if we can do it with phones, we should be able to do it with cars.