Ironically, my cars don’t run Linux for the same reason my computers do: I’m militant about protecting my property rights and privacy, so I refuse to have any car new enough to have “infotainment” because it’s all closed-source and Tivoized. It’s effectively hostile, despite the Linux kernel at the bottom of it.
I’ll buy a car made after the mid-2000s when I can re-flash the whole thing with non-DRM’d community-supported software, and not a minute before.
I mean; there’s nothing stopping you from using a car from an earlier era; and bodging in an Android Tablet into your dashboard as an infotainment system.
The thing doesn’t need to be concerned with your climate controls or anything else on your CAN bus for security reasons anyways. So you can leave those controls as they are and just let the tablet replace your Radio effectively for 100% DRM free media enjoyment with your favorite fully rooted and flashed tablet running whatever FLOSS version of Android firmware you like.
I’m in the same boat. So much that I just paid a bunch to replace the transmission of my 2012… I could probably have not done that and invested in something newer, but I don’t… want that…
I’ll stick with just getting more of this exact car when this one isn’t repairable anymore (it has telemetry, but it can’t be accessed without plugging in directly, which isn’t typically a huge concern I have) Or when they can be flashed, as you say. Like I’d love to have an EV because I rarely drive far, but I absolutely won’t buy a spymobile to get one.
Yeah, just like how DIYing car repairs and modifications has been illegal for decades now.
…oh wait.
Back in reality, yet again “X but on a computer” is not somehow magically different from “X”, and pretending it is as an excuse to curtail property rights is nothing but authoritarian fearmongering.
You literally cannot mess with your emissions system legally… nor can you disable or modify certain safety systems (seat belts, etc). Software that goes into vehicles requires validation testing. You might be fine doing 1 off things, but there will never be a “flash able” car on the market that let’s you bring your own software, and honestly I’m good with that. I don’t need your massive multiple ton machine bluescreening down the highway or locking up the breaks randomly because you installed the wrong module.
You literally cannot mess with your emissions system legally…
First of all, that’s a Clean Air Act thing with limited purpose and scope, not a blanket restriction on owners’ right to modify their property. Moreover, it is certainly not a restriction imposed and enforced by manufacturers that somehow justifies making the software closed-source and DRM’d. I want to make it clear here that, by supporting closed-source vehicle software, what you are really supporting is private enforcement of laws instead of government enforcement of laws, which is incredibly fucked up.
Second, it is not true that the act of messing with the emissions system is itself illegal. What’s illegal is the act of using the vehicle on public roads afterwards. You can use your emissions-system-modified car off-road or on private property (e.g. farms or racetracks) all you want.
Third, the way that law is implemented is, frankly, bad and wrong anyway. Instead of saying that parts need to be EPA-certified (or, in practice, CARB-certified) to be legal to use and that the ECU has to report “ready,” what it should do is say you can modify it however you want but that it has to pass a real “stick-a-probe-in-the-tailpipe-and-actually-fucking-measure” emissions test instead of a bullshit “visually inspect and plug a computer into the OBD2 port” test.
…nor can you disable or modify certain safety systems (seat belts, etc).
No, that’s a lie. It is perfectly legal to swap your factory seat belts for a DOT-approved and properly-installed four-point racing harness, for instance.
I don’t need your massive multiple ton machine bluescreening down the highway or locking up the breaks randomly because you installed the wrong module.
That sort of thing could already happen for decades due to people fucking up their mechanical modification of the brakes, yet that’s always been allowed. In practice, it isn’t actually a widespread problem because people aren’t actually as suicidally moronic as you seem to think they are, and that isn’t going to magically change just because a computer is involved. Your argument is nothing but exactly the kind of fearmongering that I’m calling bullshit on.
Sure, and for the eight years I owned it before it broke down beyond being worth repairing, I had no problem with those. The infotainment system did kinda suck, but it was a 2014 so I think it would get some leeway for that even if it weren’t Microsoft powered.
The emblem just offended my sensibilities. I never pulled it off, though, because the friends who rode with me all knew how passionately I feel about Linux (they mostly also work with it - I try not to proselytize to the disinterested) and found it funny.
According to KBB, the car was worth $8k when it broke down. I put almost double that into repairing the same part of the engine at three different mechanics before giving up. Sadly, for some silly reason, Ford no longer makes the Flex. I think the Explorer is pretty close, but I couldn’t find one close enough to test drive. I would have loved to convert my car to an EV, but I wouldn’t trust my own work on that front and didn’t want to pay as much as would cost to have a professional do it.
Every time I get into my new vehicle - a 2024 Ford Edge - I think to myself how much I miss the Flex. That said, I did get a great deal on the Edge.
That’s so painful and I feel for you.
I had the same situation with a Honda Element. (I’ve heard of people going to Flexes as a more recent but similar body haha)
Except for me, I broke it myself, and it was a VERY PARTICULAR bolt that nobody wanted to touch. Thing was leaking oil all over the place and nothing could fix it.
Turned a ~$4000 sale price to $800 junker haul-away. :(
But I got 219,000 miles out of it, so…
Here’s to those roomy boxy brick cars everybody called ugly but were absolutely awesome and refused to die…until they did. 🍻
Honestly, it was a car, a thing; I can’t claim legitimate pain. It makes me a little sad on occasion, but overall in my life it won’t matter. My mom, who loved aphorisms, would have said “by the time you’ve been married twice, you’ll forget all about it.” I plan to maintain my first and current marriage, but the sentiment fits.
I am very sorry for the loss of your Element! I was only in one once, but I loved the way the dials worked. Perhaps this humorous lyric from the song “Swagless” by Spose might provide some comfort:
I could sign and drive a boxy Honda SUV and not be in my element
219,000 is pretty solid for any car. I think I bought my Flex at 83,000 miles and sold it at under 100,000. Maybe the starting mileage was 73,000, but somewhere in that vicinity. That included using it as my primary transport vehicle when moving across several hundred miles (which, TBH, is probably what killed it - but I appreciated that I was able to use it and its vast cargo capacity.)
With reference to the toast at the end of the comment, I’ve always loved boxy vehicles. As a kid, my favorite vehicle was my dad’s 1984 Toyota Celica (though his was maroon, unlike the picture). It’s also the car in which I learned to drive a manual.
They don’t make many boxy cars anymore. The first time I saw a Flex was on the highway and I said to my passengers “what was that?! I want one” then several years later I had referenced it so much my wife said to me some form of “FINE, shut up about it and go buy one.” Several hours later I drove home my favorite vehicle so far.
I think I bought my Flex at 83,000 miles and sold it at under 100,000. Maybe the starting mileage was 73,000, but somewhere in that vicinity. That included using it as my primary transport vehicle when moving across several hundred miles
Whether it was <17,000 miles or <27,000 miles, if you put that little mileage on a car in eight years IMO you should reconsider whether you need to own one at all.
It’s worth noting that much of that time was during a lockdown and subsequent years involved working from home. Also in the intervening time I bought my wife an EV, which provides most of my transportation.
The gas vehicle is used about once a week to pick up heavy or large things or to take large boxes to the recycling area; plus there are occasions where my wife is out in her EV and I have to go somewhere. During these occasions I am grateful to have my own transportation.
It’s true that I don’t get much use out of the car, but I live in a fairly rural area. The closest non residential building that I know of is 2-3 miles away and I have limited mobility due to an injury. There’s no presence whatsoever of any Uber type services; I don’t even know of a taxi industry, though there likely is one. If I didn’t have reliable transportation I would be pretty screwed. Even during the week or two between when my Flex broke down and I replaced it, I had to cancel two doctor appointments and miss other things I wanted to do.
I probably would survive if all we had was my wife’s car, but I would lose to a lot of convenience and my schedule would definitely get more complicated.
SYNC 4 is QNX, the next gen units like the one in the new Lincoln Nautilis is QNX + Android with some Linux on other ECUs. MS is firmly gone from Ford vehicles.
This is useful information and the depth of your knowledge is impressive. Not that I expect operating system expertise from a car salesperson who has no reason to have any, but my salesperson told me it was still Microsoft. Thank you.
Suddenly I miss the Flex just a tiny, tiny bit less.
There’s zero MS in the stack on anything with SYNC4 and newer. Your salesperson is wrong. Even development is largely done on Ubuntu. SYNC 4 has two front ends, one’s Qt which has some Panasonic outsourcing baggage, the newer one is web based. The latter is what’s in the Mach-e. Since about 2017 all of this has moved in house. Ford hired the whole BlackBerry mobile R&D org in late 2016 - people, offices and everything. It’s had an honest-to-god software org since then.
Your Flex probably had the older SYNC iteration that was MS developed. BTW I’m not sure if it was Windows based or whether it was QNX with MS devs creating the software stack on top of it.
Most cars already run on Linux
Ironically, my cars don’t run Linux for the same reason my computers do: I’m militant about protecting my property rights and privacy, so I refuse to have any car new enough to have “infotainment” because it’s all closed-source and Tivoized. It’s effectively hostile, despite the Linux kernel at the bottom of it.
I’ll buy a car made after the mid-2000s when I can re-flash the whole thing with non-DRM’d community-supported software, and not a minute before.
I mean; there’s nothing stopping you from using a car from an earlier era; and bodging in an Android Tablet into your dashboard as an infotainment system.
The thing doesn’t need to be concerned with your climate controls or anything else on your CAN bus for security reasons anyways. So you can leave those controls as they are and just let the tablet replace your Radio effectively for 100% DRM free media enjoyment with your favorite fully rooted and flashed tablet running whatever FLOSS version of Android firmware you like.
Personally there’s just certain controls in a car I firmly believe should NEVER be digitized anyways.
I’m in the same boat. So much that I just paid a bunch to replace the transmission of my 2012… I could probably have not done that and invested in something newer, but I don’t… want that…
I’ll stick with just getting more of this exact car when this one isn’t repairable anymore (it has telemetry, but it can’t be accessed without plugging in directly, which isn’t typically a huge concern I have) Or when they can be flashed, as you say. Like I’d love to have an EV because I rarely drive far, but I absolutely won’t buy a spymobile to get one.
I’m taking the same strategy. I never thought I’d be a classic car person.
That’ll literally never happen due to testing and safety requirements.
Yeah, just like how DIYing car repairs and modifications has been illegal for decades now.
…oh wait.
Back in reality, yet again “X but on a computer” is not somehow magically different from “X”, and pretending it is as an excuse to curtail property rights is nothing but authoritarian fearmongering.
You literally cannot mess with your emissions system legally… nor can you disable or modify certain safety systems (seat belts, etc). Software that goes into vehicles requires validation testing. You might be fine doing 1 off things, but there will never be a “flash able” car on the market that let’s you bring your own software, and honestly I’m good with that. I don’t need your massive multiple ton machine bluescreening down the highway or locking up the breaks randomly because you installed the wrong module.
First of all, that’s a Clean Air Act thing with limited purpose and scope, not a blanket restriction on owners’ right to modify their property. Moreover, it is certainly not a restriction imposed and enforced by manufacturers that somehow justifies making the software closed-source and DRM’d. I want to make it clear here that, by supporting closed-source vehicle software, what you are really supporting is private enforcement of laws instead of government enforcement of laws, which is incredibly fucked up.
Second, it is not true that the act of messing with the emissions system is itself illegal. What’s illegal is the act of using the vehicle on public roads afterwards. You can use your emissions-system-modified car off-road or on private property (e.g. farms or racetracks) all you want.
Third, the way that law is implemented is, frankly, bad and wrong anyway. Instead of saying that parts need to be EPA-certified (or, in practice, CARB-certified) to be legal to use and that the ECU has to report “ready,” what it should do is say you can modify it however you want but that it has to pass a real “stick-a-probe-in-the-tailpipe-and-actually-fucking-measure” emissions test instead of a bullshit “visually inspect and plug a computer into the OBD2 port” test.
No, that’s a lie. It is perfectly legal to swap your factory seat belts for a DOT-approved and properly-installed four-point racing harness, for instance.
That sort of thing could already happen for decades due to people fucking up their mechanical modification of the brakes, yet that’s always been allowed. In practice, it isn’t actually a widespread problem because people aren’t actually as suicidally moronic as you seem to think they are, and that isn’t going to magically change just because a computer is involved. Your argument is nothing but exactly the kind of fearmongering that I’m calling bullshit on.
Until recently, I had a Ford Flex.
The only thing I didn’t like about it was the proud “powered by Microsoft” emblem (and its implications).
The entertainment system might run something windows based, but there are dozens of microcontrollers that do run linux.
Sure, and for the eight years I owned it before it broke down beyond being worth repairing, I had no problem with those. The infotainment system did kinda suck, but it was a 2014 so I think it would get some leeway for that even if it weren’t Microsoft powered.
The emblem just offended my sensibilities. I never pulled it off, though, because the friends who rode with me all knew how passionately I feel about Linux (they mostly also work with it - I try not to proselytize to the disinterested) and found it funny.
According to KBB, the car was worth $8k when it broke down. I put almost double that into repairing the same part of the engine at three different mechanics before giving up. Sadly, for some silly reason, Ford no longer makes the Flex. I think the Explorer is pretty close, but I couldn’t find one close enough to test drive. I would have loved to convert my car to an EV, but I wouldn’t trust my own work on that front and didn’t want to pay as much as would cost to have a professional do it.
Every time I get into my new vehicle - a 2024 Ford Edge - I think to myself how much I miss the Flex. That said, I did get a great deal on the Edge.
That’s so painful and I feel for you. I had the same situation with a Honda Element. (I’ve heard of people going to Flexes as a more recent but similar body haha)
Except for me, I broke it myself, and it was a VERY PARTICULAR bolt that nobody wanted to touch. Thing was leaking oil all over the place and nothing could fix it.
Turned a ~$4000 sale price to $800 junker haul-away. :(
But I got 219,000 miles out of it, so…
Here’s to those roomy boxy brick cars everybody called ugly but were absolutely awesome and refused to die…until they did. 🍻
Honestly, it was a car, a thing; I can’t claim legitimate pain. It makes me a little sad on occasion, but overall in my life it won’t matter. My mom, who loved aphorisms, would have said “by the time you’ve been married twice, you’ll forget all about it.” I plan to maintain my first and current marriage, but the sentiment fits.
I am very sorry for the loss of your Element! I was only in one once, but I loved the way the dials worked. Perhaps this humorous lyric from the song “Swagless” by Spose might provide some comfort:
219,000 is pretty solid for any car. I think I bought my Flex at 83,000 miles and sold it at under 100,000. Maybe the starting mileage was 73,000, but somewhere in that vicinity. That included using it as my primary transport vehicle when moving across several hundred miles (which, TBH, is probably what killed it - but I appreciated that I was able to use it and its vast cargo capacity.)
With reference to the toast at the end of the comment, I’ve always loved boxy vehicles. As a kid, my favorite vehicle was my dad’s 1984 Toyota Celica (though his was maroon, unlike the picture). It’s also the car in which I learned to drive a manual.
They don’t make many boxy cars anymore. The first time I saw a Flex was on the highway and I said to my passengers “what was that?! I want one” then several years later I had referenced it so much my wife said to me some form of “FINE, shut up about it and go buy one.” Several hours later I drove home my favorite vehicle so far.
Thanks for the response!
Whether it was <17,000 miles or <27,000 miles, if you put that little mileage on a car in eight years IMO you should reconsider whether you need to own one at all.
It’s worth noting that much of that time was during a lockdown and subsequent years involved working from home. Also in the intervening time I bought my wife an EV, which provides most of my transportation.
The gas vehicle is used about once a week to pick up heavy or large things or to take large boxes to the recycling area; plus there are occasions where my wife is out in her EV and I have to go somewhere. During these occasions I am grateful to have my own transportation.
It’s true that I don’t get much use out of the car, but I live in a fairly rural area. The closest non residential building that I know of is 2-3 miles away and I have limited mobility due to an injury. There’s no presence whatsoever of any Uber type services; I don’t even know of a taxi industry, though there likely is one. If I didn’t have reliable transportation I would be pretty screwed. Even during the week or two between when my Flex broke down and I replaced it, I had to cancel two doctor appointments and miss other things I wanted to do.
I probably would survive if all we had was my wife’s car, but I would lose to a lot of convenience and my schedule would definitely get more complicated.
SYNC 4 is QNX, the next gen units like the one in the new Lincoln Nautilis is QNX + Android with some Linux on other ECUs. MS is firmly gone from Ford vehicles.
This is useful information and the depth of your knowledge is impressive. Not that I expect operating system expertise from a car salesperson who has no reason to have any, but my salesperson told me it was still Microsoft. Thank you.
Suddenly I miss the Flex just a tiny, tiny bit less.
There’s zero MS in the stack on anything with SYNC4 and newer. Your salesperson is wrong. Even development is largely done on Ubuntu. SYNC 4 has two front ends, one’s Qt which has some Panasonic outsourcing baggage, the newer one is web based. The latter is what’s in the Mach-e. Since about 2017 all of this has moved in house. Ford hired the whole BlackBerry mobile R&D org in late 2016 - people, offices and everything. It’s had an honest-to-god software org since then.
Your Flex probably had the older SYNC iteration that was MS developed. BTW I’m not sure if it was Windows based or whether it was QNX with MS devs creating the software stack on top of it.
Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of
scienceinfotainment development?To a degree yes, but this madman probably has the ECU running Linux.
Linux is not a real-time OS*. For a car ECU, something like Speeduino would be a more appropriate choice.
(* Or wasn’t until a week or so ago, at least. https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-years-later-real-time-linux-makes-it-to-the-kernel-really/)
That’s the joke 😉
You could certainly do it but let’s hope that fuel injection timings and realtime system response aren’t that important to you.
https://lwn.net/Articles/816298/
Worked with the guy, he was a true kernel monster.
That’s really cool! Do you know of real-world systems using this?
Know some router platforms that used this and vfio to implement dpdk switching and routing under a Linux control plane.
Brilliant guys worked on that, think some of the smartnics like Amazon and oracles use it too.