Downloading an update: the rise of the digital car.

[Vindekarr]

Let's face it: the age when a car was a purely metal thing are long gone; nowadays a car is as much a relative to your computer than it is to a Beetle or Model T. With cars able to scan every "wired" component(wheels, engine, suspensions, brakes, gearbox) 30 times a second and adjust them for safety or performance, the car industry has come to focus as much on electronic stability control and Microadjusting Rear Doublewishbones(MRDS) as bolting the doors on properly and making sure it's got an engine. But the biggest change that I, as someone who's only recently bought a new car for the first time after learning to drive '60s cars, is that servicing isn't something you neccessarily have to go to a garage for.

 

This morning my car recieved a patch. A patch. For the engine. Intellectually my experience as a mechanic tells me that I shouldn't be surprised-my car is half computer anyway, but it still gave me a bit of a surprise, the thought that the company, all those thousands of kilometres away in Japan, can make changes and improvements without ever even having to touch the vehicle-by simply installing new software to adjust the onboard OS. It's sort of scary really, yet part of me feels extremely excited aswell.

 

The time once was that every few years a manufacturer would "update" a car with new bits, maybe more power, and to get it, you had to buy a whole new car. Now though, Nissan, McLaren, and BMW have released the concept of "updates" for your car much like you would update your computer or Iphone. With Nissan going as far as to sell the updates between models as kits to customers with older cars, allowing them to have the latest model of certain types, for a few hundred rather than the $90 grand it would cost to buy a new GT-R.

 

How times change, I remember when a car was just a hunk of metal with wheels and seats. We had more planets back then, too, and the idea of a mobile phone with a clock was still a very great and slightly distrusted novelty. That was only 10 years ago, too.

Edited June 8, 2012 by Vindekarr

[HeyYou]

I fondly remember the days when I DIDN'T need a computer engineering degree to work on my car...... :)

[K00L]

How times change, I remember when a car was just a hunk of metal with wheels and seats. We had more planets back then, too, and the idea of a mobile phone with a clock was still a very great and slightly distrusted novelty. That was only 10 years ago, too.

Weird, how fast everything changes... :unsure:

I MISS PLUTO!!!