Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I am back from vacation, UH and originally I wanted to do something related to Pie Day because March fourteen, three fourteen, that's Pie Day, and UH. I had hoped to do an episode about the equipment used to mass produce pies. But it's a strange thing, hard to find a lot of information on that. So that's gonna have to wait till next year because I need to get enough info to do a good episode, and I just couldn't scramble up enough for for today's. But I do have something else I want to talk about this very timely. The ongoing semiconductor chip shortage and its effect on multiple industries really sparked today's EPI swed that's a pun. So once upon a time, automobiles were pretty much just a pure representation of mechanical engineering. So if you were mechanically inclined and you add access to the right tools, you could perform many or practically all repair jobs on a car just by yourself. You can take on huge projects like rebuilding an engine, and if something went wrong with your car, then you could potentially diagnose the problem yourself, identify the solution, which might include getting a new part, and then see it through maybe even install that new part. Gear Heads could spend hours or, in the case of one neighbor that I knew back when I was a kid, years working on a project car to get to perform just the way they wanted it to. But over time our cars have become far more advanced, and now today cars have computer chips inside them, lots of computer chips. And I've seen different give different, very large numbers thrown around to say how many your typical car has, But I'm going to go on the conservative side. So a an internal combustion engine vehicle, you know, gas or diesel powered car might have around a thousand or more computer chips in it, and an electric car would likely have twice as many. Now that means that fixing a car today isn't as simple as getting out a wrench and putting in some elbow grease, don't forget the headlight fluid. But these days you might need some specialized equipment just to identify any issues that are going on, and if the problem happens to be a faulty chip, then you're likely going to have to seek out expert help to replace that kind of stuff. It's not the sort of thing that you can just, you know, spend us after Saturday afternoon in the garage tinkering around and fixing. The computer chips have made our cars far more advanced than they used to be, with features that range from safety measures that can potentially prevent accidents, to advanced entertainment features and lots more besides. However, it also means that it has become increasingly challenging to maintain and repair one's own car. Plus, as we have seen in the wake of the semiconductor chip shortage and the supply chain issues around the world, it also means that car manufacturers hit essentially a roadblock pun intended when those precious computer chips are in short supply, and that in turn affects us as the customers. You know, if I don't know if you've been car shopping over the last two years, but it's pretty grim. Even in the used car market. Prices are pretty high, and in fact, we've already seen this play out in the automotive world, as some car manufacturers have had to roll back on certain features just to get cars out to dealerships. For example, Ford is sending car dealerships some Ford Explorers that lack the microchips that would otherwise power the rear seat air conditioning and heating controls, and that means folks are writing in the back of those Ford Explorers will no longer be able to set their own climate control settings with those new cars, at least not initially. Ford hopes to send out those chips to dealerships within another year, which means that the people who purchased those Ford Explorers will then have to return to a dealership in order to get the chips installed in their vehicles to get that feature activated. Essentially, that's inconvenient, But on the flip side, if Ford didn't do this, then it wouldn't be able to bring Ford Explorers to dealerships at nearly the same rate. So with shortages in dealerships as it stands, and with the subsequent price hikes in all sorts of cars, there's a real need to get more cars out to potential customers. Also, it allows Ford to move partially built vehicles out of its factories where otherwise they're just taking up valuable space. Like that was something I didn't really think about before. But yeah, they're all these cars that are mostly built but still are lacking certain semiconductor chips for certain systems, and those cars are you know, their their physical things. They take up space and you only have so much room to hold stuff before you start really backing up. So it's a necessity for all along the supply chain. Other car companies have seen similar setbacks. It's not just Ford test Lea's old some electric cars without USB ports for charging electronics. Cadillac had to ship two Escalades without without the hands free driving option that was just deactivated. BMW got rid of some touch screens and some of its luxury vehicles. GM gutted some of its pickup truck models and removed systems that did everything from wireless charging UH to a fuel management system that would make trucks more fuel efficient. All of that had to be kind of put off to the side because there's just there wasn't the inventory too enabled those options. So I thought it might be interesting to kind of look back on the history of electronic systems and computer chips in cars. What got that all started in the first place. Now, in the very early days of automobiles, there was no such thing as a semiconductor chip. The history of semiconductors, you could argue, could be traced all the way back to the eighteen seventies, but there was no such thing as a semiconductor chip in the early days of automobiles. In fact, for the first few decades, there's no way to incorporate small, efficient electronics to manage systems because in the electronic space you still had people using stuff like vacuum tubes that would serve as diodes and amplifiers. Now, vacuum tubes are big, they're bulky, they give off a lot of heat, they're kind of like light bulbs, so they're also breakable. So that's that you couldn't really easily incorporate them into car systems in a way that would make sense. But by the late nineteen four thease you had some smarty pants folks over at Bell Laboratories inventing transistors. Now the transistors used semiconductor material to fulfill the same basic functions as vacuum tubes. Semiconductor really just means it's a material that can act either as a conductor that is, something that allows electricity to flow through it, or an insulator something that prevents electricity from flowing through it. Semiconductors can act as either. It all depends upon how you layer them. But I've done full episodes about semi connectors, so we're not going to go into detail here now. The early transistors that were developed out of Bell Laboratories were more proof of concept type of technologies. They were not practical for implementation. You would not be able to use them for anything practical because they were big and bulky and very delicate. But we were off to the races soon enough once the principle was proven and people understood how it worked. Transistors allowed engineers to miniaturize circuit elements in a way that just wasn't possible before. In fact, in nineteen fifty nine we got the first integrated circuit that came out of Texas Instruments, and the integrated circuit used a semiconductor substrate so that all the elements of a circuit could be printed directly onto that substrate, so there was no need for you know, tons of wires connecting different discrete components. Together to make a circuit, and that meant that engineers could make electronics at a fraction of the size of their predecessors. So devices like radios and televisions went from being these huge pieces of furniture to much more compact gadgets like pocket sized in the in the case of radios. Now, while the transistor debuted in the late nineteen forties, it wouldn't be until the late nineteen sixties that we would see production cars incorporate transistors in them to control a particular system. And that system at that time was fuel injection. So we should probably talk about what that means and and how we got there. So to do that, we need to talk about the basic principles behind internal combustion engine cars. And this is going to be very very high level because I've talked about this in previous episodes too, so I'm sure we all know that internal combustion engine cars burn fuel to produce the energy they need to make the car go. But what is actually going on here, Well, in the engine you have cylinders. These are the combustion chambers, and they're essentially you know, just that they're little explosion chambers. You could think of, uh, in that term. And this is where you get a mixture of fuel and air injected into the cylinder, uh, and that mixture gets compressed by a piston, and a spark from a spark plug then ignites that compressed mixture of air and fuel or gas or diesel in some cases, that causes a small explosion, and the force of that explosion pushes the piston outward through the cylinder, like, not completely out, but out to the other end of the cylinder. That piston is connected to a crank shaft via a piston rod, and that means that the force from these little explosions inside the cylinders transfer to the crank shaft, which then turns as a result, and that crankshaft provides the force for the drive train of the car, and ultimately that causes the car's wheels to turn, assuming, of course, we're talking about an internal combustion engine vehicle here. Now that's the super duper simplified version. I didn't talk about transmissions or anything like that, so a lot more goes into it. But um, you know, we can also talk about the various cycles or strokes that happened in a cylinder intake and exhaust and all that kind of stuff, But I think you get the general idea. Gas and air go into the cylinder, sparking knights the mixture. The explosion inside the cylinder drives the crank shaft to turn, and this happens over and over again as your car merrily putters down the interstate or whatever. Now I'm sure we also know all about the fire triangle, right then, In order to have fire, you know, combustion in other words, we need fuel, we need an oxidizer, and we need heat. So in the case with gas powered cars, the fuel is the gas, and the oxidizer is air, which has oxygen in it, and the heat comes from a spark generated by a spark plug. But while you need these three things to make fire, the precise mixture of fuel to air is something that we can play around with in order to make the most efficient fire, you know, or the hottest fire. And you probably know that fires in high oxygen environments tend to be super dangerous, like you don't want to have it happened on say a spacecraft, for example. So if you could tweak the mix of air and fuel so that you have just the right mixture, you could theoretically boost vehicle performance, and that performance might manifest as more power, or might mean that the vehicle is more fuel efficient or both. Now, in the olden days, cars had a device called a carburetor, and the way these things work is pretty darn and genious. Uh. They make use of a structure called a venturi. And essentially a venturi is a pathway. So just think of like a pipe and that this pipe narrows at one point and then widens out again. And so when fluid flows through a venturi and it starts to encounter that narrow section, the static pressure within the tube decreases. This creates a vacuum. So if you have air, which is a fluid, flowing through a venturi as it passes that narrow section, it creates this area of low pressure. So if you were to connect a line with fuel in it to this venturi, that low pressure would kind of act the same way we do when we use a straw to drink from a sody pop or whatever. The low pressure draws up the fuel which then can mix with the air in the venturi and then head on to some other element, in this case, the cylinders and an internal combustion engine. Now there's a lot more to carburetors than that, but I'll have to do a full episode on that at some point. Anyway, you can adjust carburetors with stuff like a choke, which refers to how much air you're allowing to pass through the system. So if you close the choke, then you have essentially shut off the air and it's gonna make the engine die because there won't be any air to mix with fuel and you won't be able to have ignition anymore. Now, that's not a precise way to control the mixture of air and fuel going to an engine. And you know, if you were driving a very old car, it often meant that you actually would have to manually adjust the choke on the engine several times as you were going through different you know, speeds and everything, just so that you can make sure that the engine was firing smoothly and that you had a good smooth ride. Obviously, in later days, all that was smoothed out quite a bit. You didn't have to, you know, ride the choke as it were. Also, if your car has more than one cylinder, and once you get past the earliest cars, they pretty much all did well a carburetor wasn't the best way to get fuel and air to those cylinders because the cylinders weren't getting the same mixture of air and fuel due to being different distances from the carburetor. Right, So, like a cylinder that was further away from the carburetor was getting probably a little less fuel than the ones that were closer. So a cylinder, you know, you wanted to you wanted to have all the same amounts that you would have the smooth operation of your vehicle, but it just wasn't easy to do with the carburetor based system. Uh, some vehicles would actually have twin carburetors which would be paired to different cylinders to reduce this, but then that required frequent tuneups to make sure that the two pair, that the two carburetors were working well together so that you had this smooth engine operation. Fuel injection would change all that, but we'll talk about that more after we come back from this quick break. Okay, So, fuel injection systems, they use essentially a nozzle that sprays fuel as like a very fine missed into a flow of air, and some cars use a single nozzle for all the cylinders, and so it provides the source of fuel to all cylinders and an engine. Effect. A lot of cars use this. Uh, some vehicles actually have an injector for every cylinder, or they might use a single injector for a pair of cylinders. So if it's like a four cylinder engine, you might have to fuel injectors, but the principle remains the same. The injector shoots out a fine mist of fuel which then mixes with air and that then goes on to the combustion chamber a k a. The cylinders. Now, the first fuel injection systems were mechanical in nature. That meant that they used actual mechanical operations of the vehicle to work. There were no electronic components to them. But in the late nineteen five d s, a company called Bendix developed an electronic fuel injection system. Now, Bendix was a company that made parts that car manufacturers would then incorporate into their vehicles. So Bendix typically made stuff like brake pads and that kind of thing, and then car manufacturers would order those from Bendix and then put them into their cars. So in the mid to late nineteen fifties, Bendix developed a fuel injection system that used transistors to control the system itself so that it would inject the right mix of fuel and air at the right time in the cylinder cycle. Is to make it as efficient as possible, and this was intended to be an upgrade option on a vehicle called the Rambler Rebel, which came out of American Motors Corporation or a mc UH. There was also supposed to be included in a few Chrysler cars, and Bendix called this the electrojector I guess for injector. There was really just one issue. It didn't work so well. In fact, it caused so many problems and was so difficult to install and to tune that both AMC and Chrysler abandoned it. Chrysler actually built a few production vehicles fewer than three dozen, I think, using this system, but then ended up retrofitting all of those with carburetors and you know, just essentially ripped out the fuel injection systems because they were causing so many problems. So we almost got the first transistorized electronic system in a car as early as around n seven, but in truth it would take another decade to work out all the kinks, and it was a German company that did it. Bosch, refined the approach and produced an electronic fuel injection system that that company called jet Tronic. Man, you getta love the fifties and sixties and their their ip names. So the first car manufacturer to use the jetronic system was Volkswagen, which incorporated the Jetronic into the company's Type three fast Back and square Back nine models. So this wasn't the Volkswagen bug. You should look at pictures of the fast back and square back if you are unfamiliar with what those look like. Now, this electronic system was a big leap forward for the car industry, but you probably wouldn't call it a computer chip. Still, it was a move toward using electronics and then later computers to control specific functions in the car in order to improve performance and efficiency. The unintended consequence was, of course, that should something go wrong with the electronics, it became a lot more challenging for the average car owner to do their own maintenance and repairs. Now, if you're really cynical, you could argue that maybe that consequence wasn't so unintended because that move would end up having a huge benefit to car dealerships down the road pun intended because if you have no option but to seek out repairs from an authorized dealer of a specific car, make well, then what you got there is a closed ecosystem and a guaranteed revenue stream for the dealership. Right. But I would like to think that at least early on, that wasn't a huge factor that went into the development of electronic car systems. It definitely feels that way now, like it feels like it falls into that realm of things like planned obsolescence and and making sure people have to go through a specific channel in order to get any repairs done. It's one of the big uh foundational points in the right to repair movement. It's it's something that that that movement opposes because it locks customers into a closed system and gives the customer and no other options when it comes to maintenance and repair. But that's another matter. Anyway, back to our history of the computerization of cars. Up until the early nineteen seventies, the main focus on car performance wasn't so much on fuel efficiency, but rather on performance and power. Fuel was considered to be plentiful, and you know, car pollution was definitely a thing that concerned some folks, but it hadn't reached a point where governments were really stepping in in a big way. Uh. Fun fact, I looked to see when smog first became a real issue in Los Angeles, a city that became famous for smog, and it turns out that it was first really considered a major issue as early as nineteen forty three. Now, at that point, the general belief was that the smog was largely the result of pollution belching factories and production plants, which, don't get me wrong, We're certainly contributing to the problem. But the weird thing was that even as you know, the state of California was passing restrictions and regulations on companies that would cut way back on those emissions, they still had a smog problem. And it wasn't until the nineteen fifties that folks started to connect that to the fact that cars also amant a lot of pollution. So I don't mean to say that cars are the one and only source of air pollution, that is not what I'm saying, but they are a significant source. Um. So that was something that really wasn't evident until the nineteen fifties. Anyway, my point is that car manufacturers didn't really have a huge incentive to focus on systems to improve fuel efficiency up through the nineteen sixties. But some you know, air cleanliness regulations, emissions restrictions as well as the oil crisis of the early nineteen seventies would change things dramatically. At that point, you then had regions like California creating tighter emissions standards to cut back on air pollution. And California is the most populated state in the US UH these days, it has ten million more people than Texas, which is in second place. So you know, if you're a car manufacturer, you couldn't just right off California, right That's that's a huge market. So the car manufacturers had to adapt and create vehicles that met California's stricter standards, and then other states and the federal government would follow California's lead, and that really necessitated a change in focus and to make sure that cars became more efficient and admitted less pollution. Those changes pushed electronic systems forward in the automotive industry. With electronics, car companies could boost efficiency and reduce waste and pollution, and customers could benefit from this as well, they could purchase vehicles that had better mileage, so you didn't have to refill the tank quite so frequently. And during an era of fuel shortages, that really became important. I mean, this was the same era that saw the rise of things like the compact and subcompact ours in the United States, because suddenly fuel efficiency became more important than performance. So necessity really drove innovation at this point. Now, in addition to fuel injection, an early system that received the electronic overhaul was the ignition system. Now, as that name indicates, the ignition system's purpose is to provide the ignition or spark that ignites the mixture of fuel and air in the combustion chamber. So you have one electronic system that's controlling the injection process, so it's mixing the fuel and air together and timing those injections into the combustion chamber precisely. Then you had another system that would have very precise timing for igniting that mixture to get the maximum amount of out of it and to use you know, to use the maximum efficiency of fuel use. Uh So, yeah, igniting at just the right point the process gives the optimal amount of output. Also, even up through the early nineteen eighties, a lot of cars that were being sold we're still relying on carburetors rather than fuel injection. There were electronic ignition systems designed to work with carburetor based vehicles, but that pairing wasn't ideal uh and computer controlled carburetors frequently needed tricky repairs, so fuel injection ended up becoming the way to go, So we pretty much said goodbye to carburetors by the mid eighties. A computer controlled fuel injection system could handle situations that carburetors just weren't good for. For example, let's say you were taking a trip up to the mountains and you drive from like a low area up the mountain, and as you're climbing those mountain roads moving into higher altitudes, your carburetor might encounter issues in pulling the right amount of air to mix with fuel. The air's thinner and the car brat might struggle a bit, and so car engine performance would suffer as you would go further up the mountain. Computer controlled fuel injection systems could measure the change in air mixtures and trigger the intake system to pull in more air in order to compensate for that. Over time, the industry began to refer to these types of electronic systems as engine control units or e c USE, and what followed was an era of systems dedicated to very specific, singular purposes. So it wasn't like cars had hundreds of general purpose computers installed in them, right. Like sometimes when we say you could think of thousands of computers being inside a single car, we're not talking about the same thing like a laptop or desktop computer that's meant to do pretty much any program you run on it, right, or any program that it's hardware can support. Now, we're talking about very specific computers that that do one thing and that's all they have to do. Uh. They started off with dozens and then later hundreds and now thousands of individual electronic systems that can control or monitor one specific function within the vehicle. Something else that developed largely in the late seventies and into the eighties. We're onboard diagnostic systems or o b d s. So these are electronic systems that can diagnose issues with a car and give repair technicians information they need to address specific issues. So let's say that your car has a problem with the fuel injection system, then the o b D getting feedback from the e c U that controls the fuel injection system, would log that as a problem. UH. The I often think of these these as sort of the check engine light situations because that's typically how the driver would be alerted to the issue. Like if it wasn't something that was overtly obvious as you drove the vehicle, but it still was going wrong and the check engine light comes on, you might think, well, it can't be that serious and don't feel anything. But it could just be that there is one system that is important to the operation of the vehicle that has indicated there's a problem and sent that message to the O b D. So the indicator of the check engine light tells you you need to take your car in for service. And at that point a technician would connect their computer system to your car in order to see what was wrong. Uh. And frequently the O b D will output a result in a numeric code, and you then have to, you know, look at a document that has a whole list of codes in it, match the code that came up in the computer system, and then find out what the diagnosis is, what's the problem. In other words, and there's a bigger picture element to O b d s as well as technicians accessed car O b d s and they logged problems. That data could then go back to car manufacturers themselves, and the car companies would get real time, real world feedback on vehicle performance across a fleet of cars. And that might mean that a company sees that there's a particular make and model that requires more frequent servicing than other cars, and that could indicate a flaw in the vehicle's design, which would be something that a car company would probably want to get on top of an engineer out of future models. Might even necessitate a recall in some cases, something that companies would prefer to avoid. Um And you know, the data could also indicate things like driving behaviors, like you might be able to make some pretty broad conclusions about how people are driving those vehicles that in turn, when analyzed, might give you enough information to tell you what customers are really valuing, Like what's what's important to customers based upon the way they drive. That might mean that you build that in to future car designs. You might say, well, shows here that people like cars that have a lot of aggressive pickups, So let's focus on that for the next generation of this vehicle, because that's how the customers are driving it now. Now. In the early days, companies have their own proprietary O B D systems, and this made it really tricky for independent repair shops because they would need specific tools and specific computer systems to handle the different types of cars that might come into the shop. I mean there could be different connectors for example, so you know, you couldn't have a universal computer to diagnose every car that came into the shop because you have different connectors to work with. You had different UH proprietary languages working, and you had different codes error codes as well, so you could get an error code from one company that means something specific and for a different company it means something totally different. In fact, sometimes you could get very creations from model to model within the same car manufacturer. So it was a real chaotic mess, very complicated. Over time, the industry settled on a standard which simplified things a great deal, and a large part of that came due to the participation of the Society of Automotive Engineers, an independent organization that recommended companies in the industry adopt standardized connectors and diagnostic sets, but it took a while, Like it wasn't until the late eighties that we really started to see progress on that front. So there was a lot of competing standards is the wrong word, but competing technologies in the space up to that point. By the early ninety nineties, the introduction of O b D two simplified things further. California passed a law that required all vehicles sold in the state to incorporate O b D two in them, which again essentially forced the automotive industry to go with a widespread adoption plan, because I mean, if you're gonna do that for California, you might as well do it for everywhere in the United States. Right in Europe, the standard is not called O b D two, it's e o b D, but it's largely I mean, it's based on the same principles. We'll talk more about O b D two as well as computerized cars after this quick break. So the O b D two interface, it's not just for figuring out why your cars making that weird noise or whatever. It's not just for diagnosing problems. It's also used during emissions testing. During those tests and engineer logs your car's performance against legal restrictions on emissions. So you might remember that Volkswagen, the company that really got the ball rolling with electronic systems and cars, got into major trouble several years ago when investigators discovered that the company had installed a system meant to full emissions testing equipment for their diesel vehicles. Volkswagon was claiming that their diesel vehicles were very efficient, very clean, and it turned out they weren't really living up to that that claim. Essentially, the cars computer system would detect when it was being put into test mode and it would go into a more efficient, less powerful operational mode so that it wouldn't produce as many emissions while it was being tested, So essentially it wasn't really performing the way it went on the road, and once it detected that it was disconnected from the testing system, the car would switch back into its normal operational parameters, which meant that it was also generating more emissions while putting out more power. And once that was discovered, Volkswagen had some really tough questions to answer and a whole lot of money to pay back. By the late ninety nineties, another major development in the industry was the installation and of telematics systems and cars. Now these include a transceiver capable of transmitting data to a car manufacturer's network, kind of like a little cell phone inside the car that has you know, a direct line to the car company, um the bat line, if you will. Now the car companies didn't even have to wait to get data from repair centers. Once they use this, the cars on the road could actually share information about their performance and driver behaviors directly to car companies. The early incorporation of transceivers was a little rocky. It was hard for car companies to you know, actually handle all the data and to respond in a timely fashion, so stuff like remote diagnostics wasn't always feasible. But over time the industry developed better analytics and data management practices, and you often will hear of car companies Tesla in particular, using these systems not just to receive data but also to transmit updates to car systems over the air. And these over the air updates can address issues that otherwise might be difficult or impossible for a driver to detect before they become a serious problem. And then sometimes it's just a tweak to improve, you know, some quality of life aspect to the car. But it's kind of interesting that you can have updates sent to your car without having to, you know, bring it in to a dealership or repair shop. Today we've got so many different computer systems and vehicles that you could probably say it's more computer now than car twisted and evil. U sorry, prepareaphrasing obi Wan there anyway. Everything from door locks to climate control, to entertainment suites to navigation systems, all of them have their own dedicated computer systems and subsystems. Chip design and manufacturing companies produce chips specifically for the automotive industry, like designed specifically for car systems, and so the global chip short has really hit automakers particularly hard, and it will likely take some time to recover. Even as production increases and supply chain smooth out, there will likely be a gap while car manufacturing facilities are able to get these components and get back to installing them into new vehicles. On the one hand, these systems have completely transformed the experience we have with our personal vehicles. They help make our cars safer and more efficient. They give us a lot of features that we end up liking. On the manufacturing side, they create lots of options to market cars to different demographics. So in other words, they can, you know, create a lot of different price points for different types of vehicles and thus maximize profit for dealerships and manufacturers. But they also create the obstacles we've seen over the last couple of years. A shortage creates a market where car prices skyrocket, and you see that even in the used market, and the work computerized the car, the harder it is to tackle d I Y projects. So that's the big trade off. I think on the whole, it's a good thing to have these computerized systems, at least in the ones that genuinely make a difference when it comes to things like car safety and efficiency. It would be very hard to achieve those same outcomes relying purely on mechanical systems and people being good drivers. Whenever you have to rely on the people doing stuff, that's where you really run into a lot of problems, right, Because I mean, I'm sure you all know someone that you can think of as the person you would rather not be in the driver's seat whenever you have to go on a trip, right. Not not throwing any shade, not cast calling any judgments out, just that there are people who are not great drivers, and so you kind of want all the systems that you can have that will help boost that person's driving cape abilities in order to you know, maybe prevent accidents from happening. So yeah, there definitely is a trade off. Um. I definitely feel for the gear heads who absolutely love to get their hands dirty and work on systems, because it gets increasingly more difficult as cars getting more computerized. Not saying it's impossible, but you might not be able to do everything. You might be limited to a subset of basic maintenance and repair that you can do. I know a lot of people have called me out in the past for saying this, but I also think that those people are old and they've been working on cars that are from like the seventies or earlier, and so they don't necessarily appreciate how, um, how how obtuse, how opaque some of these systems can get when they are so heavily reliant on computers. Anyway, I thought that that would be an interesting thing to look at sort of the history of the computerization of the car. Uh, and of course, as we shift more towards electric vehicles, we're seeing even more computerization, things like being able to monitor battery life and recharging and all that kind of stuff. It's it's creating even more of a computerized future for our cars. So here's the hope that the right to repair allows for more options when it comes to repairing cars. I do think the days of the d I Y approach to maintenance and repair are going to be severely limited with future vehicles. Not to say that it will be completely gone, but a lot of it will be restricted to the point where you will have to take it in two perhaps uh and authorized dealership or something along those lines. But the right to repair hopefully will mean that you'll have more options, like you'll be able to take it to an independent repair shop that has access to the correct tools to be able to do that work. But I do see that that's just a trend that's going to continue. I don't see that going backward anytime soon. Anyway. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, I welcome you to reach out to me and let me know. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I am back from vacation, UH and originally I wanted to do something related to Pie Day because March fourteen, three fourteen, that's Pie Day, and UH. I had hoped to do an episode about the equipment used to mass produce pies. But it's a strange thing, hard to find a lot of information on that. So that's gonna have to wait till next year because I need to get enough info to do a good episode, and I just couldn't scramble up enough for for today's. But I do have something else I want to talk about this very timely. The ongoing semiconductor chip shortage and its effect on multiple industries really sparked today's EPI swed that's a pun. So once upon a time, automobiles were pretty much just a pure representation of mechanical engineering. So if you were mechanically inclined and you add access to the right tools, you could perform many or practically all repair jobs on a car just by yourself. You can take on huge projects like rebuilding an engine, and if something went wrong with your car, then you could potentially diagnose the problem yourself, identify the solution, which might include getting a new part, and then see it through maybe even install that new part. Gear Heads could spend hours or, in the case of one neighbor that I knew back when I was a kid, years working on a project car to get to perform just the way they wanted it to. But over time our cars have become far more advanced, and now today cars have computer chips inside them, lots of computer chips. And I've seen different give different, very large numbers thrown around to say how many your typical car has, But I'm going to go on the conservative side. So a an internal combustion engine vehicle, you know, gas or diesel powered car might have around a thousand or more computer chips in it, and an electric car would likely have twice as many. Now that means that fixing a car today isn't as simple as getting out a wrench and putting in some elbow grease, don't forget the headlight fluid. But these days you might need some specialized equipment just to identify any issues that are going on, and if the problem happens to be a faulty chip, then you're likely going to have to seek out expert help to replace that kind of stuff. It's not the sort of thing that you can just, you know, spend us after Saturday afternoon in the garage tinkering around and fixing. The computer chips have made our cars far more advanced than they used to be, with features that range from safety measures that can potentially prevent accidents, to advanced entertainment features and lots more besides. However, it also means that it has become increasingly challenging to maintain and repair one's own car. Plus, as we have seen in the wake of the semiconductor chip shortage and the supply chain issues around the world, it also means that car manufacturers hit essentially a roadblock pun intended when those precious computer chips are in short supply, and that in turn affects us as the customers. You know, if I don't know if you've been car shopping over the last two years, but it's pretty grim. Even in the used car market. Prices are pretty high, and in fact, we've already seen this play out in the automotive world, as some car manufacturers have had to roll back on certain features just to get cars out to dealerships. For example, Ford is sending car dealerships some Ford Explorers that lack the microchips that would otherwise power the rear seat air conditioning and heating controls, and that means folks are writing in the back of those Ford Explorers will no longer be able to set their own climate control settings with those new cars, at least not initially. Ford hopes to send out those chips to dealerships within another year, which means that the people who purchased those Ford Explorers will then have to return to a dealership in order to get the chips installed in their vehicles to get that feature activated. Essentially, that's inconvenient, But on the flip side, if Ford didn't do this, then it wouldn't be able to bring Ford Explorers to dealerships at nearly the same rate. So with shortages in dealerships as it stands, and with the subsequent price hikes in all sorts of cars, there's a real need to get more cars out to potential customers. Also, it allows Ford to move partially built vehicles out of its factories where otherwise they're just taking up valuable space. Like that was something I didn't really think about before. But yeah, they're all these cars that are mostly built but still are lacking certain semiconductor chips for certain systems, and those cars are you know, their their physical things. They take up space and you only have so much room to hold stuff before you start really backing up. So it's a necessity for all along the supply chain. Other car companies have seen similar setbacks. It's not just Ford test Lea's old some electric cars without USB ports for charging electronics. Cadillac had to ship two Escalades without without the hands free driving option that was just deactivated. BMW got rid of some touch screens and some of its luxury vehicles. GM gutted some of its pickup truck models and removed systems that did everything from wireless charging UH to a fuel management system that would make trucks more fuel efficient. All of that had to be kind of put off to the side because there's just there wasn't the inventory too enabled those options. So I thought it might be interesting to kind of look back on the history of electronic systems and computer chips in cars. What got that all started in the first place. Now, in the very early days of automobiles, there was no such thing as a semiconductor chip. The history of semiconductors, you could argue, could be traced all the way back to the eighteen seventies, but there was no such thing as a semiconductor chip in the early days of automobiles. In fact, for the first few decades, there's no way to incorporate small, efficient electronics to manage systems because in the electronic space you still had people using stuff like vacuum tubes that would serve as diodes and amplifiers. Now, vacuum tubes are big, they're bulky, they give off a lot of heat, they're kind of like light bulbs, so they're also breakable. So that's that you couldn't really easily incorporate them into car systems in a way that would make sense. But by the late nineteen four thease you had some smarty pants folks over at Bell Laboratories inventing transistors. Now the transistors used semiconductor material to fulfill the same basic functions as vacuum tubes. Semiconductor really just means it's a material that can act either as a conductor that is, something that allows electricity to flow through it, or an insulator something that prevents electricity from flowing through it. Semiconductors can act as either. It all depends upon how you layer them. But I've done full episodes about semi connectors, so we're not going to go into detail here now. The early transistors that were developed out of Bell Laboratories were more proof of concept type of technologies. They were not practical for implementation. You would not be able to use them for anything practical because they were big and bulky and very delicate. But we were off to the races soon enough once the principle was proven and people understood how it worked. Transistors allowed engineers to miniaturize circuit elements in a way that just wasn't possible before. In fact, in nineteen fifty nine we got the first integrated circuit that came out of Texas Instruments, and the integrated circuit used a semiconductor substrate so that all the elements of a circuit could be printed directly onto that substrate, so there was no need for you know, tons of wires connecting different discrete components. Together to make a circuit, and that meant that engineers could make electronics at a fraction of the size of their predecessors. So devices like radios and televisions went from being these huge pieces of furniture to much more compact gadgets like pocket sized in the in the case of radios. Now, while the transistor debuted in the late nineteen forties, it wouldn't be until the late nineteen sixties that we would see production cars incorporate transistors in them to control a particular system. And that system at that time was fuel injection. So we should probably talk about what that means and and how we got there. So to do that, we need to talk about the basic principles behind internal combustion engine cars. And this is going to be very very high level because I've talked about this in previous episodes too, so I'm sure we all know that internal combustion engine cars burn fuel to produce the energy they need to make the car go. But what is actually going on here, Well, in the engine you have cylinders. These are the combustion chambers, and they're essentially you know, just that they're little explosion chambers. You could think of, uh, in that term. And this is where you get a mixture of fuel and air injected into the cylinder, uh, and that mixture gets compressed by a piston, and a spark from a spark plug then ignites that compressed mixture of air and fuel or gas or diesel in some cases, that causes a small explosion, and the force of that explosion pushes the piston outward through the cylinder, like, not completely out, but out to the other end of the cylinder. That piston is connected to a crank shaft via a piston rod, and that means that the force from these little explosions inside the cylinders transfer to the crank shaft, which then turns as a result, and that crankshaft provides the force for the drive train of the car, and ultimately that causes the car's wheels to turn, assuming, of course, we're talking about an internal combustion engine vehicle here. Now that's the super duper simplified version. I didn't talk about transmissions or anything like that, so a lot more goes into it. But um, you know, we can also talk about the various cycles or strokes that happened in a cylinder intake and exhaust and all that kind of stuff, But I think you get the general idea. Gas and air go into the cylinder, sparking knights the mixture. The explosion inside the cylinder drives the crank shaft to turn, and this happens over and over again as your car merrily putters down the interstate or whatever. Now I'm sure we also know all about the fire triangle, right then, In order to have fire, you know, combustion in other words, we need fuel, we need an oxidizer, and we need heat. So in the case with gas powered cars, the fuel is the gas, and the oxidizer is air, which has oxygen in it, and the heat comes from a spark generated by a spark plug. But while you need these three things to make fire, the precise mixture of fuel to air is something that we can play around with in order to make the most efficient fire, you know, or the hottest fire. And you probably know that fires in high oxygen environments tend to be super dangerous, like you don't want to have it happened on say a spacecraft, for example. So if you could tweak the mix of air and fuel so that you have just the right mixture, you could theoretically boost vehicle performance, and that performance might manifest as more power, or might mean that the vehicle is more fuel efficient or both. Now, in the olden days, cars had a device called a carburetor, and the way these things work is pretty darn and genious. Uh. They make use of a structure called a venturi. And essentially a venturi is a pathway. So just think of like a pipe and that this pipe narrows at one point and then widens out again. And so when fluid flows through a venturi and it starts to encounter that narrow section, the static pressure within the tube decreases. This creates a vacuum. So if you have air, which is a fluid, flowing through a venturi as it passes that narrow section, it creates this area of low pressure. So if you were to connect a line with fuel in it to this venturi, that low pressure would kind of act the same way we do when we use a straw to drink from a sody pop or whatever. The low pressure draws up the fuel which then can mix with the air in the venturi and then head on to some other element, in this case, the cylinders and an internal combustion engine. Now there's a lot more to carburetors than that, but I'll have to do a full episode on that at some point. Anyway, you can adjust carburetors with stuff like a choke, which refers to how much air you're allowing to pass through the system. So if you close the choke, then you have essentially shut off the air and it's gonna make the engine die because there won't be any air to mix with fuel and you won't be able to have ignition anymore. Now, that's not a precise way to control the mixture of air and fuel going to an engine. And you know, if you were driving a very old car, it often meant that you actually would have to manually adjust the choke on the engine several times as you were going through different you know, speeds and everything, just so that you can make sure that the engine was firing smoothly and that you had a good smooth ride. Obviously, in later days, all that was smoothed out quite a bit. You didn't have to, you know, ride the choke as it were. Also, if your car has more than one cylinder, and once you get past the earliest cars, they pretty much all did well a carburetor wasn't the best way to get fuel and air to those cylinders because the cylinders weren't getting the same mixture of air and fuel due to being different distances from the carburetor. Right, So, like a cylinder that was further away from the carburetor was getting probably a little less fuel than the ones that were closer. So a cylinder, you know, you wanted to you wanted to have all the same amounts that you would have the smooth operation of your vehicle, but it just wasn't easy to do with the carburetor based system. Uh, some vehicles would actually have twin carburetors which would be paired to different cylinders to reduce this, but then that required frequent tuneups to make sure that the two pair, that the two carburetors were working well together so that you had this smooth engine operation. Fuel injection would change all that, but we'll talk about that more after we come back from this quick break. Okay, So, fuel injection systems, they use essentially a nozzle that sprays fuel as like a very fine missed into a flow of air, and some cars use a single nozzle for all the cylinders, and so it provides the source of fuel to all cylinders and an engine. Effect. A lot of cars use this. Uh, some vehicles actually have an injector for every cylinder, or they might use a single injector for a pair of cylinders. So if it's like a four cylinder engine, you might have to fuel injectors, but the principle remains the same. The injector shoots out a fine mist of fuel which then mixes with air and that then goes on to the combustion chamber a k a. The cylinders. Now, the first fuel injection systems were mechanical in nature. That meant that they used actual mechanical operations of the vehicle to work. There were no electronic components to them. But in the late nineteen five d s, a company called Bendix developed an electronic fuel injection system. Now, Bendix was a company that made parts that car manufacturers would then incorporate into their vehicles. So Bendix typically made stuff like brake pads and that kind of thing, and then car manufacturers would order those from Bendix and then put them into their cars. So in the mid to late nineteen fifties, Bendix developed a fuel injection system that used transistors to control the system itself so that it would inject the right mix of fuel and air at the right time in the cylinder cycle. Is to make it as efficient as possible, and this was intended to be an upgrade option on a vehicle called the Rambler Rebel, which came out of American Motors Corporation or a mc UH. There was also supposed to be included in a few Chrysler cars, and Bendix called this the electrojector I guess for injector. There was really just one issue. It didn't work so well. In fact, it caused so many problems and was so difficult to install and to tune that both AMC and Chrysler abandoned it. Chrysler actually built a few production vehicles fewer than three dozen, I think, using this system, but then ended up retrofitting all of those with carburetors and you know, just essentially ripped out the fuel injection systems because they were causing so many problems. So we almost got the first transistorized electronic system in a car as early as around n seven, but in truth it would take another decade to work out all the kinks, and it was a German company that did it. Bosch, refined the approach and produced an electronic fuel injection system that that company called jet Tronic. Man, you getta love the fifties and sixties and their their ip names. So the first car manufacturer to use the jetronic system was Volkswagen, which incorporated the Jetronic into the company's Type three fast Back and square Back nine models. So this wasn't the Volkswagen bug. You should look at pictures of the fast back and square back if you are unfamiliar with what those look like. Now, this electronic system was a big leap forward for the car industry, but you probably wouldn't call it a computer chip. Still, it was a move toward using electronics and then later computers to control specific functions in the car in order to improve performance and efficiency. The unintended consequence was, of course, that should something go wrong with the electronics, it became a lot more challenging for the average car owner to do their own maintenance and repairs. Now, if you're really cynical, you could argue that maybe that consequence wasn't so unintended because that move would end up having a huge benefit to car dealerships down the road pun intended because if you have no option but to seek out repairs from an authorized dealer of a specific car, make well, then what you got there is a closed ecosystem and a guaranteed revenue stream for the dealership. Right. But I would like to think that at least early on, that wasn't a huge factor that went into the development of electronic car systems. It definitely feels that way now, like it feels like it falls into that realm of things like planned obsolescence and and making sure people have to go through a specific channel in order to get any repairs done. It's one of the big uh foundational points in the right to repair movement. It's it's something that that that movement opposes because it locks customers into a closed system and gives the customer and no other options when it comes to maintenance and repair. But that's another matter. Anyway, back to our history of the computerization of cars. Up until the early nineteen seventies, the main focus on car performance wasn't so much on fuel efficiency, but rather on performance and power. Fuel was considered to be plentiful, and you know, car pollution was definitely a thing that concerned some folks, but it hadn't reached a point where governments were really stepping in in a big way. Uh. Fun fact, I looked to see when smog first became a real issue in Los Angeles, a city that became famous for smog, and it turns out that it was first really considered a major issue as early as nineteen forty three. Now, at that point, the general belief was that the smog was largely the result of pollution belching factories and production plants, which, don't get me wrong, We're certainly contributing to the problem. But the weird thing was that even as you know, the state of California was passing restrictions and regulations on companies that would cut way back on those emissions, they still had a smog problem. And it wasn't until the nineteen fifties that folks started to connect that to the fact that cars also amant a lot of pollution. So I don't mean to say that cars are the one and only source of air pollution, that is not what I'm saying, but they are a significant source. Um. So that was something that really wasn't evident until the nineteen fifties. Anyway, my point is that car manufacturers didn't really have a huge incentive to focus on systems to improve fuel efficiency up through the nineteen sixties. But some you know, air cleanliness regulations, emissions restrictions as well as the oil crisis of the early nineteen seventies would change things dramatically. At that point, you then had regions like California creating tighter emissions standards to cut back on air pollution. And California is the most populated state in the US UH these days, it has ten million more people than Texas, which is in second place. So you know, if you're a car manufacturer, you couldn't just right off California, right That's that's a huge market. So the car manufacturers had to adapt and create vehicles that met California's stricter standards, and then other states and the federal government would follow California's lead, and that really necessitated a change in focus and to make sure that cars became more efficient and admitted less pollution. Those changes pushed electronic systems forward in the automotive industry. With electronics, car companies could boost efficiency and reduce waste and pollution, and customers could benefit from this as well, they could purchase vehicles that had better mileage, so you didn't have to refill the tank quite so frequently. And during an era of fuel shortages, that really became important. I mean, this was the same era that saw the rise of things like the compact and subcompact ours in the United States, because suddenly fuel efficiency became more important than performance. So necessity really drove innovation at this point. Now, in addition to fuel injection, an early system that received the electronic overhaul was the ignition system. Now, as that name indicates, the ignition system's purpose is to provide the ignition or spark that ignites the mixture of fuel and air in the combustion chamber. So you have one electronic system that's controlling the injection process, so it's mixing the fuel and air together and timing those injections into the combustion chamber precisely. Then you had another system that would have very precise timing for igniting that mixture to get the maximum amount of out of it and to use you know, to use the maximum efficiency of fuel use. Uh So, yeah, igniting at just the right point the process gives the optimal amount of output. Also, even up through the early nineteen eighties, a lot of cars that were being sold we're still relying on carburetors rather than fuel injection. There were electronic ignition systems designed to work with carburetor based vehicles, but that pairing wasn't ideal uh and computer controlled carburetors frequently needed tricky repairs, so fuel injection ended up becoming the way to go, So we pretty much said goodbye to carburetors by the mid eighties. A computer controlled fuel injection system could handle situations that carburetors just weren't good for. For example, let's say you were taking a trip up to the mountains and you drive from like a low area up the mountain, and as you're climbing those mountain roads moving into higher altitudes, your carburetor might encounter issues in pulling the right amount of air to mix with fuel. The air's thinner and the car brat might struggle a bit, and so car engine performance would suffer as you would go further up the mountain. Computer controlled fuel injection systems could measure the change in air mixtures and trigger the intake system to pull in more air in order to compensate for that. Over time, the industry began to refer to these types of electronic systems as engine control units or e c USE, and what followed was an era of systems dedicated to very specific, singular purposes. So it wasn't like cars had hundreds of general purpose computers installed in them, right. Like sometimes when we say you could think of thousands of computers being inside a single car, we're not talking about the same thing like a laptop or desktop computer that's meant to do pretty much any program you run on it, right, or any program that it's hardware can support. Now, we're talking about very specific computers that that do one thing and that's all they have to do. Uh. They started off with dozens and then later hundreds and now thousands of individual electronic systems that can control or monitor one specific function within the vehicle. Something else that developed largely in the late seventies and into the eighties. We're onboard diagnostic systems or o b d s. So these are electronic systems that can diagnose issues with a car and give repair technicians information they need to address specific issues. So let's say that your car has a problem with the fuel injection system, then the o b D getting feedback from the e c U that controls the fuel injection system, would log that as a problem. UH. The I often think of these these as sort of the check engine light situations because that's typically how the driver would be alerted to the issue. Like if it wasn't something that was overtly obvious as you drove the vehicle, but it still was going wrong and the check engine light comes on, you might think, well, it can't be that serious and don't feel anything. But it could just be that there is one system that is important to the operation of the vehicle that has indicated there's a problem and sent that message to the O b D. So the indicator of the check engine light tells you you need to take your car in for service. And at that point a technician would connect their computer system to your car in order to see what was wrong. Uh. And frequently the O b D will output a result in a numeric code, and you then have to, you know, look at a document that has a whole list of codes in it, match the code that came up in the computer system, and then find out what the diagnosis is, what's the problem. In other words, and there's a bigger picture element to O b d s as well as technicians accessed car O b d s and they logged problems. That data could then go back to car manufacturers themselves, and the car companies would get real time, real world feedback on vehicle performance across a fleet of cars. And that might mean that a company sees that there's a particular make and model that requires more frequent servicing than other cars, and that could indicate a flaw in the vehicle's design, which would be something that a car company would probably want to get on top of an engineer out of future models. Might even necessitate a recall in some cases, something that companies would prefer to avoid. Um And you know, the data could also indicate things like driving behaviors, like you might be able to make some pretty broad conclusions about how people are driving those vehicles that in turn, when analyzed, might give you enough information to tell you what customers are really valuing, Like what's what's important to customers based upon the way they drive. That might mean that you build that in to future car designs. You might say, well, shows here that people like cars that have a lot of aggressive pickups, So let's focus on that for the next generation of this vehicle, because that's how the customers are driving it now. Now. In the early days, companies have their own proprietary O B D systems, and this made it really tricky for independent repair shops because they would need specific tools and specific computer systems to handle the different types of cars that might come into the shop. I mean there could be different connectors for example, so you know, you couldn't have a universal computer to diagnose every car that came into the shop because you have different connectors to work with. You had different UH proprietary languages working, and you had different codes error codes as well, so you could get an error code from one company that means something specific and for a different company it means something totally different. In fact, sometimes you could get very creations from model to model within the same car manufacturer. So it was a real chaotic mess, very complicated. Over time, the industry settled on a standard which simplified things a great deal, and a large part of that came due to the participation of the Society of Automotive Engineers, an independent organization that recommended companies in the industry adopt standardized connectors and diagnostic sets, but it took a while, Like it wasn't until the late eighties that we really started to see progress on that front. So there was a lot of competing standards is the wrong word, but competing technologies in the space up to that point. By the early ninety nineties, the introduction of O b D two simplified things further. California passed a law that required all vehicles sold in the state to incorporate O b D two in them, which again essentially forced the automotive industry to go with a widespread adoption plan, because I mean, if you're gonna do that for California, you might as well do it for everywhere in the United States. Right in Europe, the standard is not called O b D two, it's e o b D, but it's largely I mean, it's based on the same principles. We'll talk more about O b D two as well as computerized cars after this quick break. So the O b D two interface, it's not just for figuring out why your cars making that weird noise or whatever. It's not just for diagnosing problems. It's also used during emissions testing. During those tests and engineer logs your car's performance against legal restrictions on emissions. So you might remember that Volkswagen, the company that really got the ball rolling with electronic systems and cars, got into major trouble several years ago when investigators discovered that the company had installed a system meant to full emissions testing equipment for their diesel vehicles. Volkswagon was claiming that their diesel vehicles were very efficient, very clean, and it turned out they weren't really living up to that that claim. Essentially, the cars computer system would detect when it was being put into test mode and it would go into a more efficient, less powerful operational mode so that it wouldn't produce as many emissions while it was being tested, So essentially it wasn't really performing the way it went on the road, and once it detected that it was disconnected from the testing system, the car would switch back into its normal operational parameters, which meant that it was also generating more emissions while putting out more power. And once that was discovered, Volkswagen had some really tough questions to answer and a whole lot of money to pay back. By the late ninety nineties, another major development in the industry was the installation and of telematics systems and cars. Now these include a transceiver capable of transmitting data to a car manufacturer's network, kind of like a little cell phone inside the car that has you know, a direct line to the car company, um the bat line, if you will. Now the car companies didn't even have to wait to get data from repair centers. Once they use this, the cars on the road could actually share information about their performance and driver behaviors directly to car companies. The early incorporation of transceivers was a little rocky. It was hard for car companies to you know, actually handle all the data and to respond in a timely fashion, so stuff like remote diagnostics wasn't always feasible. But over time the industry developed better analytics and data management practices, and you often will hear of car companies Tesla in particular, using these systems not just to receive data but also to transmit updates to car systems over the air. And these over the air updates can address issues that otherwise might be difficult or impossible for a driver to detect before they become a serious problem. And then sometimes it's just a tweak to improve, you know, some quality of life aspect to the car. But it's kind of interesting that you can have updates sent to your car without having to, you know, bring it in to a dealership or repair shop. Today we've got so many different computer systems and vehicles that you could probably say it's more computer now than car twisted and evil. U sorry, prepareaphrasing obi Wan there anyway. Everything from door locks to climate control, to entertainment suites to navigation systems, all of them have their own dedicated computer systems and subsystems. Chip design and manufacturing companies produce chips specifically for the automotive industry, like designed specifically for car systems, and so the global chip short has really hit automakers particularly hard, and it will likely take some time to recover. Even as production increases and supply chain smooth out, there will likely be a gap while car manufacturing facilities are able to get these components and get back to installing them into new vehicles. On the one hand, these systems have completely transformed the experience we have with our personal vehicles. They help make our cars safer and more efficient. They give us a lot of features that we end up liking. On the manufacturing side, they create lots of options to market cars to different demographics. So in other words, they can, you know, create a lot of different price points for different types of vehicles and thus maximize profit for dealerships and manufacturers. But they also create the obstacles we've seen over the last couple of years. A shortage creates a market where car prices skyrocket, and you see that even in the used market, and the work computerized the car, the harder it is to tackle d I Y projects. So that's the big trade off. I think on the whole, it's a good thing to have these computerized systems, at least in the ones that genuinely make a difference when it comes to things like car safety and efficiency. It would be very hard to achieve those same outcomes relying purely on mechanical systems and people being good drivers. Whenever you have to rely on the people doing stuff, that's where you really run into a lot of problems, right, Because I mean, I'm sure you all know someone that you can think of as the person you would rather not be in the driver's seat whenever you have to go on a trip, right. Not not throwing any shade, not cast calling any judgments out, just that there are people who are not great drivers, and so you kind of want all the systems that you can have that will help boost that person's driving cape abilities in order to you know, maybe prevent accidents from happening. So yeah, there definitely is a trade off. Um. I definitely feel for the gear heads who absolutely love to get their hands dirty and work on systems, because it gets increasingly more difficult as cars getting more computerized. Not saying it's impossible, but you might not be able to do everything. You might be limited to a subset of basic maintenance and repair that you can do. I know a lot of people have called me out in the past for saying this, but I also think that those people are old and they've been working on cars that are from like the seventies or earlier, and so they don't necessarily appreciate how, um, how how obtuse, how opaque some of these systems can get when they are so heavily reliant on computers. Anyway, I thought that that would be an interesting thing to look at sort of the history of the computerization of the car. Uh, and of course, as we shift more towards electric vehicles, we're seeing even more computerization, things like being able to monitor battery life and recharging and all that kind of stuff. It's it's creating even more of a computerized future for our cars. So here's the hope that the right to repair allows for more options when it comes to repairing cars. I do think the days of the d I Y approach to maintenance and repair are going to be severely limited with future vehicles. Not to say that it will be completely gone, but a lot of it will be restricted to the point where you will have to take it in two perhaps uh and authorized dealership or something along those lines. But the right to repair hopefully will mean that you'll have more options, like you'll be able to take it to an independent repair shop that has access to the correct tools to be able to do that work. But I do see that that's just a trend that's going to continue. I don't see that going backward anytime soon. Anyway. If you have any suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, I welcome you to reach out to me and let me know. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Y tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. 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