A kid in one of my classes shared how the Toyota Corolla has 24 CPUs all set to the lowest common denominator, and how there was good money hooking up a laptop to the car and resetting those CPUs for better gas mileage, or in tandem with a better carburetor programming for 0-60 faster and so on. Sounds to me just like the kids in the 1950s who souped up old cars. A fine American tradition. And these kids make good money souping up modern cars, competing on design.
But apparently not for long. Anthony sends this in...
Long ago the big three became the only three when they pooled their patents and made it impossible for anyone else to get into the business. When an insider like John DeLorean designed his way around them, they simply set him up on some outrageous coke deal.
When we bailed out FORD, GM Chrysler (YES! Ford was bailed out too!) in 2008 we should have done so at the price of open sourcing all of their patents. Now, we taxpayers are presently, every day, bailing out the auto companies again in anticipation of the next crash. The FEDS are pushing subprime auto loans to people who can barely raise a fog on a mirror can buy a new car. It does not take much to qualify as an UBER driver, but if you qualify, you are automatically approved for the purchase of a new car. Kicker: weekly payments direct from Uber to the loan company, up to 30% interest. So even the critical article misses, literally, the money shot:
I think we need to go one better: mag lev transport, privately owned, in which the basic pod, like the inside of a telephone, is the same in all instances, but you can customize your "body by Fisher" to ride the mag lev rails. Leave internal combustion for off-roading.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
But apparently not for long. Anthony sends this in...
You can't tinker with your own car because there is a copyright on it. You really don't own your car.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-dont-really-own-your-car
Yes, I know, you can pay through the nose for your custom auto, but I would like Open Source autos to do for the automobile industry what Uber has done for the taxi industry. I'm hopeful open source cars will crush these old dinosaur car companies once and forall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_car
It would be nice to return to coach design being separate from chassis and engine design. We need new versions of coach builders like Fleetwood or Pinifarini or Duesenberg. Yes, I want to drive my open source LaGrande Torpedo.
Long ago the big three became the only three when they pooled their patents and made it impossible for anyone else to get into the business. When an insider like John DeLorean designed his way around them, they simply set him up on some outrageous coke deal.
When we bailed out FORD, GM Chrysler (YES! Ford was bailed out too!) in 2008 we should have done so at the price of open sourcing all of their patents. Now, we taxpayers are presently, every day, bailing out the auto companies again in anticipation of the next crash. The FEDS are pushing subprime auto loans to people who can barely raise a fog on a mirror can buy a new car. It does not take much to qualify as an UBER driver, but if you qualify, you are automatically approved for the purchase of a new car. Kicker: weekly payments direct from Uber to the loan company, up to 30% interest. So even the critical article misses, literally, the money shot:
In theory, this has been good for Uber (the company gets more supply of the one commodity — drivers — it needs most). And it's good for drivers (they get access to vehicles they might not be able to finance otherwise, and at lower prices).Yes, the prices are lower than you can get yourself with shot credit, but not lower than you can get with cash. So here we are again, when this goes bad, we'll see credit destruction and thus credit deflation. Those people are working for the finance company, not themselves.
I think we need to go one better: mag lev transport, privately owned, in which the basic pod, like the inside of a telephone, is the same in all instances, but you can customize your "body by Fisher" to ride the mag lev rails. Leave internal combustion for off-roading.
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
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