The modern automobile is safer, cleaner, more efficient, and more technologically advanced than anything that came before it. Yet those improvements have come at a cost. For many owners, mechanics, and independent repair shops, that cost is repairability.
I mean you are mostly right and I was joking and exaggerating. I mean someone who can tear apart a transmission and put it back together and have it work better is obviously smart and intelligent.
Honestly I hate the direction cars are going. For example twenty years ago I could buy a new stereo at Walmart and have it installed in an hour. Now do that in a tesla. Yes some cars had different physical mounts and some had the door chimes built in such a way they would not work with aftermarket stereos but generally worked.
That was a solved problem. There was no reason to make this difficult.
I do too, I think general-purpose compute has become a too-cheap way to solve problems that have more durable (and repairable) mechanical solutions. It makes the sticker price lower even if the total cost over the lifetime of the vehicle (or laptop, or washing machine, etc.).
I think it would be nice to have a law that certain hardware needs to have user-autitable and user-replaceable control software. If you want to ship your hardware product with some preinstalled software, the source code must be publicly available. I don’t know how it would get passed in America because it would make consumer electronics more expensive to manufacture, but I think it would be helpful in the long term to legally decouple hardware from closed-source software.
I would go further than software. I think too much stuff is cheap. I’m not rich, I’m barely surviving. That said if things were more expensive but better I think that’s a net positive. Like you can buy a 50 vacuum, won’t do a good job won’t last long no hope to fix anything. If minimum was a 300 vacuum but it had a 15 year warrenty, mandatory suction and cleaning ability and user fixable wouldn’t that be better?
It’s similar to the old boot thing. A poor man buys a pair of boots for 10 dollars and lasts 2 months. A rich man buys a pair of boots for 200 and they last 4 years.
Being poor is very expensive!