this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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Due to regulation, I think it's very unlikely that such a car will ever make it to the market. End customers aren't not meant to freely modify their cars and mess around with security-related systems. And while I'd highly appreciate the repairabilty aspects of such a model, I have serious doubts about the negative aspects when insuffiently skilled people start 'improving' their cars causing accidents etc.
That's what inspections are for.
Next you say i'm not allowed to run whatever OS i want on my phone/computer?
WTF are you talking about? People have been modding every square inch of their cars since cars were first built.
My father-in-law, who was 40 when my wife was born, told me at 82 that it's hard for people to understand how many of our rights were stripped away during his lifetime, and how many more rights are being stripped away in our lifetimes.
So a young person today is subjected to corporate propaganda that tells them they don't have the right to work on their own vehicles because of safety/ trademarks/ licensing/ subscriptions, etc., when it's all just a scam to force us to pay for what we used to do in the driveway on a Saturday afternoon.
You can hear that capitalist propaganda, but you can choose not to believe it.
Still, most of these modifications aren't legal on public roads in Europe unless you use certified parts and get the modifications approved. At least in Germany rules are really strict. If you replace your exhaust, rims, add a spoiler, change dampers or even use the wrong light bulbs, your vehicle's road license may be invalid and you might lose your insurance in case of an accident.
Thanks for that perspective. We don't have those kind sof rules in America. We have a very mature car culture here, with a very long tradition of modding.
It's nearly as important to some demographics as gun ownership. The government could never get away with totally restricting people from working on their cars.
People already have hardware access to their own cars and make stupid modifications all the time. That's what vehicle inspections are for. Heck, I know police aren't generally popular on this instance but stopping vehicles with unsafe modifications they spot on the roads falls under their purview too. I'm from a state with inspections but have a friend who wasn't and her stories about the beater cars they drove (missing floorboards, reach out the window and push on a metal rod to use the brake) tell me the system basically works. At least as well as it can while transportation infrastructure is arranged so cars are a basic necessity for huge swaths of the country.