Ugh. Lately I've seen so much car tech become a case of "just because they could, doesn't mean they should". For example, the article states "So it slowly cleans and sterilizes the screen, and when the UV light is taken away, the surface goes back to being water-resistant, allowing the moisture to bead up and roll off the surface." Uhh, that seems like a pretty obvious problem in a car, all to save from the 5 seconds it takes to wipe a touchscreen.
There is just such an annoying push towards high-tech "gadgetization" of cars even when they provide a worse user experience in every way. Case in point, I hate auto-windshield wipers. Where I live we get a lot of "misty" rain, so I often need to turn the wipers on manually anyway. Auto-wipers just solved a problem I never had (I mean does someone somehow forget to turn on their wipers when it's raining?) and they work worse than plain, intermittent normal wipers.
Another ridiculous example. My car has the concept of different profiles for different drivers to remember different settings like seat position (that's good), but the copying of garage door signals is part of that profile. So I did the song and dance to record my garage door opener in my profile, only realizing it isn't available in my spouse's profile, and there is no way to transfer it over. So I have to do the same cumbersome recording procedure for each driver, which is nuts. As opposed to my old car where there was a simple physical button on the ceiling, it was one and done, and it was much easier to hit the physical button while pulling into my driveway than futzing on a touchscreen.
> I mean does someone somehow forget to turn on their wipers when it's raining
I personally really like my auto-wipers. Not because I forget to turn them on, but because when it rains here in Phoenix (an admittedly infrequent event), we go from regular rain to no rain to misting to hurricane style rain in the course of a 10 minute period. It's extremely convenient being able to set it to auto and not have to constantly fiddle with the speeds as the desert rains rapidly change. It lets me focus on the roads more, which is a must during rain here because people seem to forget how to drive on wet roads here.
There's bound to be a market for cheap vehicles in the US. It's crazy to me that Europe has several models with MSRP below EUR 10k (Dacias at EUR 7k) and here there's just 2 or 3 below $20k.
Every other material good I can think of is cheaper in the US (from new homes to electronics and apparel), but cars are 2x the price of their European counterparts?
In 2008 or so a friend of mine bought a Nissan Versa for $9990. That was the actual MSRP not a deal. It wasn't a great car, but what happened to that market?
Yep, that is some 4 years + ago, cars have lately become relatively much more expensive (blame it on COVID, on inflation, on scarcity of components, whatever), I would say starting after 2020.
A part of it may be due to the fact that those entry levels (I mean the setups with the least of accessories) are not anymore manufactured (and possibly never really existed or sold as they were too basic) in the sense that the new bare minimum has raised a bit.
When I bought my car in 2013 I had the option to go up a trim level for things like an infotainment system and push button start etc. It was not a dramatic cost increase but I chose not to because I prefer a key and I never use the slow outdated GPS cars have anyway. I'm really glad I did. My car has a radio with bluetooth, what else do I need?
My wife's Sienna is a "Limited" trim with every possible feature, and we never use anything other than the memory seats.
There are plenty of advances in cars that are well worth it. I'm not against "improving materials to make things work better". I'm against adding tech that makes things work worse.
The water beads up and falls down the screen per the quote I added. That may be fine for something like a self-cleaning solar panel, but on an indoor touch screen (a) I highly doubt you wouldn't have some sort of streaks or trails on the screen that you'd want to wipe away, and (b) where is that water going to go? A teeny little puddle at the bottom of your touchscreen nightly seems like a pretty obvious downside to me.
> I highly doubt you wouldn't have some sort of streaks or trails on the screen that you'd want to wipe away
Streaks or trails on the self cleaning device? That's their whole selling point, I don't think a company like GM would humiliate themselves like that after all the R&D and testing.
>where is that water going to go?
Who knows, maybe some drip chamber. Dishwashers have beads all the time, well designed ones prevent them from ending up on your wooden, porous floors. That's an obvious issue, I'm sure the engineers at GM have thought that one out. If they didn't and it's some maintenance nightmare, then they'll probably not continue with the device in their cars but we just have to wait and see.
Car side windows are currently transparent to UVA.
This method depends on the screen not being exposed to UVA while the driver is touching the screen, so any car equipped with this would need to have the side windows tinted against UVA.
This is something that should be required by the DOT anyway... 90 minutes of UVA exposure a day is a significant carcinogen, but since the glass blocks UVB you don't get a sunburn and don't realize you should be wearing sunscreen while you commute.
UVA through car windows is such a significant factor that in the US melanoma is most common on the left side of the body where a driver is exposed to the sun.
Each LED (any LED) generates a single wavelength of light - this is a fundamental property as a result of the way that LEDs use semiconductors to make light. Normal screens use a Red, Green and a Blue and then mix them to make colours in the visible light spectrum.
For this process they need a wavelength outside the visible light spectrum (UV), and so they need a completely separate LED as the normal R, G and B are all in the visible spectrum.
> Normal screens use a Red, Green and a Blue and then mix them to make colours in the visible light spectrum.
I believe most screens use a white backlight and then each pixel filters this to red, green or blue. OLED and micro led screens use a separate set of leds per pixel.
There is just such an annoying push towards high-tech "gadgetization" of cars even when they provide a worse user experience in every way. Case in point, I hate auto-windshield wipers. Where I live we get a lot of "misty" rain, so I often need to turn the wipers on manually anyway. Auto-wipers just solved a problem I never had (I mean does someone somehow forget to turn on their wipers when it's raining?) and they work worse than plain, intermittent normal wipers.
Another ridiculous example. My car has the concept of different profiles for different drivers to remember different settings like seat position (that's good), but the copying of garage door signals is part of that profile. So I did the song and dance to record my garage door opener in my profile, only realizing it isn't available in my spouse's profile, and there is no way to transfer it over. So I have to do the same cumbersome recording procedure for each driver, which is nuts. As opposed to my old car where there was a simple physical button on the ceiling, it was one and done, and it was much easier to hit the physical button while pulling into my driveway than futzing on a touchscreen.