SIMON SAYS

by Simon Hastelow

Progress or P**s take?

Cars, trucks and 4x4s are being built with more and more technology onboard, in some cases this is a good thing, in others it is purely a gimmick to attract a buyer.

Then there are the instances where it is just infuriating!

I realise that there are a good number of us that see any form of technology in our vehicles as intrusive. ECUs are treated like spawn of the devil, but we couldn’t stem the tide so had to accept them. My main complaint remains that, even with all the latest tech, the fuel economy has remained fairly static for 30 years or more.

Land Rover fitted 25 ECUs to the Discovery 4, but still barely got above 20mpg for petrol and 30mpg for diesel - worse than the Discovery I achieved in 1989! But its not all about fuel, they did pack them with all kinds of other gadgets and gizmos.

However there are two new-ish developments which are cause for concern for any motoring enthusiast who enjoys adapting, modifying or tinkering with their vehicles.

The first is still to do with wiring, sensors and ECUs. Many vehicles are fitted with a CAN-BUS (Controller Area Network) which allows all of the various components on a vehicle to communicate with the ECU. This generally works perfectly enough for ‘normal’ car owners, but breaking into the system to fit a pair of auxiliary lights, for instance, or a reversing camera can be troublesome.

If the after-market kit is fitted badly, sensors might detect the installation as a problem and disable something else. Or it might not work at all.

There are CAN readers available which allow you to read signals in the wiring and find the ones to cut or splice, but even then it is not certain. The fitment of a CAN module made specifically for your car might be required to detect and interface with the relevant signals. All to fit a pair of lights that used to, back in the old days, just require a black and red wire, and a switch or relay.

I recently watched the installation of a very neat looking grille mounted lightbar on a Toyota Yaris GR (the ‘hot-hatch’ that everyone is raving about). The bar itself cost £396, but the additional wiring, CAN module and CAN reader pushed the total cost to £700, plus installation costs!

The main issue was that the Yaris GR has a different ECU to the standard Yaris, as you might expect, so the system had to be read using a CAN reader, diagnosed and ‘hacked’ to allow the fitment of the light.

This isn't even my main gripe!

I saw a motoring journalist on Twitter bemoaning that a new BMW was fitted with a ‘High Beam Assist’ function. In fact this had been standard on BMW vehicles for around 10 years, it auto-dips the headlight main beam so that you don’t mistakenly blind oncoming drivers.

However to activate the function on his car he had to pay a fee of £160 for the ‘upgrade’. This was then remotely switched on by BMW via an app.

If this wasn’t enough of a p**s take, the ‘upgrade’ is linked to the owner’s BMW account, so if he sells the car and removes his personal information from the car, the High-Beam-Assist function is disabled and the next owner has to pay again! For a light function that is already built into the car!

You might have already seen videos on social media of Teslas being ‘updated’ while parked overnight at the dealership. Rows of cars with their lights flashing while the ECU receives the latest communications from Elon Musk. This is the future we are facing.

It might not be a bad thing for urban transport, automatic speed limiters linked to your location via GPS are certain to be implemented before too long, as are collision avoidance systems to protect pedestrians, but there are millions of people who live, work and drive outside of urban areas for whom the ‘bigbrother’ systems are mostly redundant.

As a fifty-something bloke, who often experiences episodes of brain-fade when trying to remember how to do something on my phone or computer, I don’t relish the thought of computerised driving. We may have to wait until after the apocalypse before our skills in fixing stuff with a hammer and driving a manual gearbox might once again be regarded as important.