CUcurun1r·Mar 14, 2014
As long as the carmaker is open about things, the increasing complexity doesn't have to be bad news for tinkerers. It's not officially released yet, but https://github.com/timdorr/model-s-api shows the promise of Tesla's commitment to openness. It won't allow the "how does my car work?" type of tinkering, but it allows the "how can I use my car in interesting ways?" tinkering.
It's much the same as computers. The original Apples were understandable devices. The lack of miniaturization meant that hackers could figure out how everything was working and play with it. That activity would be ridiculous with modern-day CPUs/components as the complexity has increased by orders of magnitude and the miniaturization has reached levels where specialized equipment is needed to look at what's going on that costs well beyond what can fit in a hobbyist'
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s budget. Yet modern-day computers are still programmable and people are still learning and hacking. The only difference is that this learning is happening a few abstraction levels removed from the actual hardware. The same will be true with cars, provided manufacturers are as cooperative as Tesla seems to be.