this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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I would die for a FOSS car. The main barrier for that is airbags, people could just disable them, which wouldn't be good or fair to their passengers or future owners. I also worry about other dumb stuff people would do with a foss car. Of course, I still want one.
Not gonna happen for multiple obvious reasons, but here's one that would make you not want to buy one - it'd be a budget car for a price of a BMW.
And you're not gonna want to buy it second-hand, because of the risk of unimaginable extent of software garbage the previous owners would leave you with.
Tinker cars are for tinkering, good luck untinkering it.
If it’s software, you could just reinstall it.
Hardware would be a different story. But I’m not sure how that’s different than today. My friend has a RAV4 that he’s added several hardware hacks to. For example, there is a module you can add that will give you actual numbers for each tire’s pressure instead of the usual warning light that a tire is low with no indication of which one. It even shows up as an extra screen on the normal interface between the gauges.
You can already do that though. Basically any truck just has a control on the dash to disable the passenger side airbag in case you neet to put a car seat there. You can also just remove the airbags in any existing vehicle as is. It really isn't hard to do. People are just hesitant to do so because if you screw up then you can set the airbag off.
More importantly though why would the software being foss effect the airbags? The airbags shouldn't be interacting with the vehicle software at all.
People have been doing dumb things with their cars since the invention of cars. Making them harder to repair via locked down software isn't the fix for that.
Airbags are definitely a part of the can bus these days, they trigger based off of a number of inputs like the gyro, speed, acceleration, etc. I suppose they could just put in a seperate, secure system for the airbags that cannot be tampered with.
Theoretically there are ways to deal with modifications in that scenario.
Prusa for instance had a trace on the PCB of the mk3 that you had to cut to be able to flash a unsigned binary iirc. You voided the warranty or at least the parts that were affected by modifications.
Imagine something like this for a car. Not a binary blob but something signed or otherwise secured through a chain of trust for components the law decides to regulate. Driving data recorder in case of crash and airbags and such. All the other non safety components can be changed and nobody but you controls your data and your ability to repair. And if you decide to change said components you loose some rights regarding insurance, not warranty for the car itself.
Yes please.