Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "An honest conversation with the man, the legend, Rich Benoit" video.

  1. I maintain my old car myself and I'd say switching to electric car wouldn't be that different. Some things to consider: (1) There's no available information on the cars because manufacturers declare everything as trade secret. As such, diagnosing stuff is hard. This is actually not much worse than ICE cars because for example my year 1999 VW Passat doesn't have publicly available information from the manufacturer either and I have to dig for information in various non-official sources and 3rd party paper manuals. This is same as not having the schematics for Apple products that Louis is talking about. I don't need source code for the ECU but I would need official spec for e.g. diagnostic channel 10 subchannel 2: what values are in the spec and what sensor does measure this channel. Note that in case of VAG (VW, Audi, etc) even the channel handshake is secret so obviously that should be publicly specified, too. Having secret handshakes that are not about security (the protocol is just proprietary even if it uses standard voltages and standard voltages but it doesn't have any secret keys or anything like that!) are just about making things harder unless you pay extra random for the manufacturer to get the official tool to read the diagnostic channels. The official tool costs about $4000 and 3rd party cell phone hardware + software license to do the same thing costs $70. The 3rd party hardware and software has been created only through reverse engineering because even they couldn't get the required information so you're basically paying the 3rd party for the reverse engineering work, not because the software does something special. (2) At least here in Finland, all electrical work is so heavily restricted that any work on the circuits exceeding 50 V are not allowed even if you know what you're doing, unless you're officially licensed to work as an electrician by the government. In practice the license is so hard to acquire that even if you know 100% of the information / already have all the skills needed it still requires minimum of 1 year of supervised work experience on the field to get license for yourself. So hobbyists cannot fix electric cars here unless the legislation is fixed. The point (1) is not that different from the current situation with ICE cars so that wouldn't affect my ability to maintain my own car. It's the same as Louis having to source Apple schematics from shady sources so it just makes things harder in practice but not impossible. The point (2) is a new problem where legislation that's originally created to improve safety in housing wiring is now affecting my ability maintain my own car. And unless right-to-repair is first made reality, there's no real incentive to even start to fix point (2). It's a variant of chicken and egg problem and in this case it doesn't make sense to fix legislation unless we have clear way to actually have the parts needed for the repairs in the future. And if we had right-to-repair that would already allow licensed electricity technicians to start providing services for car high voltage work without manufacturer license.
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