If you want something more car-shaped, the Renault Zoe has very few tech feature.
Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it! No radar, lane assist, carplay or anything like that.
Cstomers only want 3 things. A comfortable ride, a safe journey, and $thing. The problem is, everyone's one more thing is different. I want DAB radio, you want cruise control, she wants lane assist, he wants automatic parking.
Creating a dozen different SKUs for all those things is complicated. Getting regulatory approval for every variation is expensive.
So most manufacturers sell only a few variations of their models.
> Cstomers only want 3 things. A comfortable ride, a safe journey, and $thing. The problem is, everyone's one more thing is different. I want DAB radio, you want cruise control, she wants lane assist, he wants automatic parking.
This is the correct answer. And on top of this, new cars also compete with used cars. The very few people who don’t want any $thing are often not picky buyers and are more likely to just buy a cheaper used car. They wouldn’t be a buyer even if automakers did build a car for them.
For some reason new electric cars have to be expensive. A 2024 leaf with the 212mi-range battery starts at 36k, a Model 3 starts at 38k. I want cheap and minimal, like a honda fit without the infotainment garbage and manditory data collection.
> Cstomers only want 3 things. A comfortable ride, a safe journey, and $thing. The problem is, everyone's one more thing is different. I want DAB radio, you want cruise control, she wants lane assist, he wants automatic parking.
Every car has a radio. And DAB support has no real effect on cost and I don't think the radio chip is what OP has in mind for "low tech".
The rest of that has a very clear divide. Cruise control is low tech and negligible cost, especially on an electric vehicle. Lane assist and automatic parking are high tech and need pricey extra parts to implement.
And this logic doesn't explain why plenty of low tech non-electric cars exist.
Someone else already replied about how the examples you gave changed to add flashy high tech stuff.
Not necessarily radar, these days. My car (2023 Civic) does it entirely with the camera at the top of the windshield. Very well, too, in the daytime (it can get confused and brake spuriously in oncoming headlight glare at night).
Wouldn't it be fun if electric cars were the same way as PC's. Plug and play the parts you want, switch motor / battery.. choose a new chassis as you wish. And LED lights of course.
The only reason that exists for PCs is the same reason we even use the word “PC”: they’re all just legacy holdovers from manufacturers copying IBM.
And really, the subset of the market that still follows these standards is small, and shrinking. The vast majority of PCs today are laptops with few, if any, swappable parts.
Pretty much the only segment where this still exists is the enthusiast subset of the gaming PC market.
Also, server hardware. It isn't as it is only kept around for those stubborn gamer enthusiast. The enthusiast market more or less is an extra revenue stream for a lot of hardware that is developed for the server market first.
It is a bit more complex than that of course and generally speaking you are right.
Server hardware has abandoned a good bit of interchangeability too. While you can still usually count on socketed CPUs, socketed memory, and interchangeable storage, there's a lot of proprietary components used on servers beyond that. Motherboard and power supply form factors are often proprietary, and it is not uncommon for expansion cards to be proprietary or non-standard implementations.
Things like ATX power supplies, ATX/mATX motherboards, tower cases, are pretty squarely for the PC gaming segment now. It's difficult to even find a "business" motherboard these days, where as 20 years ago, they were nearly all designed with this use-case first. There's ASRock Rack type stuff that targets some custom server-type use cases, but the big server manufacturers make their own proprietary stuff.
even supermicro, which used to be the goto for DIY servers, has been trending toward more proprietary (and more expensive) components.
there are options out there for itx and matx server chassis, even ATX and EATX.
Silverstone in particular has some interesting options for rack mount workstations based around 360mm AIO water-cooling, ATX boards and PSUs, consumer GPUs, etc. though those are meant more for the half and quarter rack enclosures designed to be installed in a home or office environment.
Yeah, ATX/EATX exist, and they probably will exist in non-zero production for another 50 or more years given the historical momentum.
But most of the market is Dell/Lenovo/HP/Supermicro (and in China, a couple other players).
Silverstone is an absolutely tiny business by comparison. Their US office is 1/6th of a shared warehouse space in an LA suburb, next to a laminate flooring retailer.
Also workstations. Why would i want an RTX 4090 for music production for example. Or a laptop which will be permanently attached to a bigger display a keyboard a mouse and a USB hub.
I didn't say they didn't exist, I said the market is shrinking. They used to be an ubiquitous form factor, they're now uncommon outside of the enthusiast market. Only 20% of PCs are desktops of any kind, and a good portion of those are now SFF or other designs.
You mean like the magic reboot you do in Teslas because the infotainment shit crashes in them? I've seen infotainment systems crash in so many cars, and people have to call the dealer to get the fucking Konami code to reboot the system. Don't you dare unplug the battery to reset it either, because you'll likely fuck something up even worse.
This stability thing is just a weak excuse used by car companies.
I may be wrong, but I think infotainment does not have any access to vital parts of the car (engine, brakes, steering etc.) so has no way to mess it up and kill someone. Hence lower quality standards in it, as it's not safety-critical.
Yes, if you want to go low-tech, Renault (and Dacia) is a good option.
Before recent legislative troubles (lol), France was also working on a law that would give consumer unions (think iFixit but with publicly available finance) the right to give "repairability indexes" on multiple products, including cars, that would have to be presented to the buyer, even second-hand buyers.
They have terrible rear visibility because modern crash standards (and the laws of physics) require that. 80s cars had much better rear visibility, but the roofs would easily flatten and those cars were generally deathtraps for any kind of crash. Modern cars handle crashes much better with stronger roof pillars and a high "beltline" (the line between the metal parts of the doors and the windows) and side-impact protection beams in the doors, but that comes at the cost of visibility.
Luckily, modern technology solves this, and more, if you get the backup camera (now legally required in US) and the rear blind-spot-detection radar. Visibility with those is much better than it was in the old days, as long as you know how to use them. However, they do all come at a cost, especially the blind-spot radars.
> Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it! No radar, lane assist, carplay or anything like that.
According to Kia’s website, the cheapest Soul you can buy has CarPlay/Android Auto. Standard feature on the “LX”, 8in touchscreen.
Does it even cost anything for an automaker to allow phones to use the screen for CarPlay/Android Auto? The cost savings must be so miniscule, and the convenience of being able to use your phone to navigate/listen to music and other audio is immense.
They technically do not have to “build” anything. All cars already have a screen, it is just a matter of programming the firmware to allow a phone to use it for CarPlay/Android Auto.
The only reason an automaker does not include the ability to use CarPlay/Android Auto is because they want to lock-in the customer to their UI and avoid becoming a commodity.
There is no licensing cost for Carplay, nor does Apple Pay car makers. It is purely a customer satisfaction feature. The implementation is technically pretty simple to setup on the scale of any mass-market vehicle. You can think of it as a web page with a video player on it connected via USB/Wifi.
Erm, have you ever seen a German car? Pick any Audi, Mercedes, BMW and god forbid a Porsche and you'll have an options catalogue of epic proportions.
Different SKUs is an absolute non-issue in the car industry when it comes to tech gizmos and other optional extras. You want different suspension? No biggie. Manual vs automatic? Sure. Different kind of entertainment system? Of course. Different (branded) speakers? Yup.
It can be done, but at a high cost. None of those cars you listed are inexpensive by any means.
By contrast, budget-friendly Japanese cars don't have options like this; you get maybe 3 option packages to choose from and that's it. Manufacturing is much simpler and gets better economies of scale when everyone gets the same thing.
And yet, in the late '80s or early '90s, the future was supposed to be made-to-order cars that were delivered to your door. If anything, we've regressed from the level of customization that was available decades ago.
There are new EU rules that apply to new cars. All of them have to have some safety related features including automatic braking, rear view cameras and equipment to check your alcohol level. The latter does not do anything yet but it has to be there as prepation for the future
Not sure about other regions, but in the EU, low tech cars are not allowed.
Required safety systems include emergency breaking, emergency lane-keeping, intelligent speed assistance (car must use cameras or GPS to determine current speed limit), driver attention warning systems and many more.
That fancy screen is really not a cost factor. These days you can buy after-market screens with Car Play and Android auto support for 100 EURs or less. But all the safety systems needs lots of sensors, and also the ability to auto-brake and auto-steer in emergency situations.
It's a good start, but a grander vision would be to reduce or eliminate the need for cars altogether. You can build and sustain a mighty civilization without automobiles at all.
Here in the UK, almost 17% (about nine million people) live outside towns and villages. A trip to the local shop can be several miles on roads that don't have pavements and public transport is of the "one bus a day" type if you are lucky. There are a few people who cycle but they're dedicated and for most it is not an option. Cars are an essential.
As I understand it, that’s not _strictly_ true. 17% live in “rural” areas, but this includes towns and villages in rural areas. It’s 8% for “rural village and fringe” [0], or much less for actually outside of towns and villages. Unless you have other stats to share?
I have lived in several towns and cities in the UK.
The problem is that even in reasonable sized towns not having a car is very limiting. The solution is much better public transport - more frequent is the big thing. That is the difference
On the other hand I did not have a car in London (which has very frequent public transport until quite late in the night), nor in Manchester (not as good, but OK) until I had a child. It was no problem. paying for the occasional taxi and hiring cars for trips when needed was a lot cheaper than running a car and more convenient too.
There is no way to provide a public transport service from the village 9 miles away with 4,000 people to my village of 150 at 2145 on a Friday night. It would have to literally be a taxi going out and back to transport one person.
Europe has generally done a very good job with urban transit. The real problem is that long-distance train trips cost a fortune, typically several times more than a budget airline. And ticketing systems between countries (within the EU) are poorly integrated.
Despite many years of hand-wringing about environmental impacts of air travel, almost nothing has been done to address this.
Agreed. Electric cars are frankly a pretty poor solution to the issue of carbon emissions. A far better, more long term solution already exists - high density, walkable neighbourhoods and high frequency, well run public transport systems.
> These days you can buy after-market screens with Car Play and Android auto support for 100 EURs or less.
Wish this was true. I wanted to buy one for myself, but even the most expensive aftermarket CarPlay units are absolutely terrible. Laggy & unresponsive touch screens, underpowered internals, gaudy designs etc.
I wonder why it’s still such a challenge to make something that feels as good as a first gen iPad from 2010.
> I wonder why it’s still such a challenge to make something that feels as good as a first gen iPad from 2010.
Cars have a unique set of operating requirements. During the course of a year, my car could be -40F or 160F inside, depending on if it’s winter or summer. Electronics that operate reliably in that temp range are expensive.
I believe the Zoe's successor is the Renault 5 e (the A290 seems to be a performance version of the 5e). The Renault 5 has advanced ADAS, since it's required for all new cars, and is, according to Renault, "packed with electrical and digital technology": https://media.renault.com/renault-5-e-tech-electric-the-elec...
So the unit economics of electric cars are quite different from gas cars (ICE = internal combustion). Electric car companies don't make money on low cost cars -- and neither can ICE cars!
Basic ICE cars are essentially sold at cost, sometimes as loss leaders, because the manufacturers make a long-tail of money supplying parts and maintenance for the cars over their lifetime; for 10-20 years they now have a (variable) recurring revenue stream. So a lot of automakers' incentives are to get as large of a fleet as possible.
Electric cars inherently have much less of a maintenance burden because there are way fewer moving parts in a motor versus an engine. For example, there's no oil changes ever 3k miles or timing belts to replace ever 30k miles.
That means, for electric car companies, business model options are
a) introduce SaaS subscriptions for electronic features (a - la Tesla Autopilot premium, supercharger network subscriptions)
b) introduce unnecessary complexity to increase maintenance revenue (gullwing doors)
c) sell at a profit margin off the factory. Can have higher margins and higher total profit for luxury cars versus basic cars
And Tesla's recent push towards robotaxis of their existing fleet would be a totally killer disruption of the unit economics by generating recurring revenue off their fleet.
So all the incentives for electric cars point towards high tech luxury, not basic eco-cars. There may be an exception to the rule in some countries, and those may be related to government subsidies.
> Basic ICE cars are essentially sold at cost, sometimes as loss leaders, because the manufacturers make a long-tail of money supplying parts and maintenance for the cars over their lifetime
Not just that but fuel economy regulations, (like CAFE in the USA) mandated average fleet fuel economy that must be met for automakers to avoid fines. GM had to sell a bunch of Cavaliers to be able to sell a bunch of (profitable) Silverados and Suburbans. With hybrids and EVs these days, regulations no longer favor the small car.
> a) introduce SaaS subscriptions for electronic feature
All the manufacturing are talking about is the need for the 'vehicle as a platform' to sell subscriptions, services and driver data. I've seen so many PowerPoints about this, it's nauseating.
> Electric cars inherently have much less of a maintenance burden because there are way fewer moving parts in a motor versus an engine.
A modern ICE outlasts the rest of the car. You might replace the alternator or water pump, but those are made by third parties not the OEM. You will replace the oil, but again, the OEM doesn't make that.
The dealers make a lot of money on after sales, but (except Tesla) those are independent third parties. The manufacture doesn't get much after sales.
OEM parts do sell for more than third party. And so there is money in OEM parts, but after 5 years most people are buying replacement parts from the third party (the OEM doesn't make those parts - they are buying from a third party and putting a markup on them). Sometimes people will buy OEM parts instead of a third party as OEM tends to give much higher quality vs random third party.
The big reason screens matter for electric cars is planning long range trips with stops at a battery charge location. Without the map/screen in-car you can’t integrate battery level with routing. Maybe you’re fine doing this manually, but range anxiety is the big reason consumers who can afford electric don’t buy electric, so it seems self defeating to remove features that help with that. The screens and stuff aren’t that much extra, often it helps save more on tooling/logistics for plastic buttons and dials.
Additionally, CarPlay/Android Auto is a hard requirement for me and many other consumers these days. I wouldn’t consider a car - gas or electric - without it. I opted for a Mercedes gas car in part because there was no overall good electric car with wireless CarPlay in my price range.
> The big reason screens matter for electric cars is planning long range trips with stops at a battery charge location.
But that doesn't explain why automakers are moving the regular controls from physical buttons to the touchscreen. That's the part that I consider a serious problem.
Buttons are surprisingly expensive; not just the button itself but the wiring and the labor. Let's WAG at $20 per button. $20 * a few dozen buttons is real money.
No, buttons are not that expensive, that's silly. Cars have had buttons for ages, and they certainly weren't more expensive decades ago.
The big reason touchscreens are so favored is because they don't require that you finalize your user-interface design decisions so early in the design cycle. With physical buttons, you have to design molds etc. to have the parts ready for final assembly. What if you want to make a change? Whereas with a touchscreen UI, you can worry about UI details any time and just make changes in software, even after the car has been sold if necessary. So for the early design process, you just specify the size screen you want, and design the molds for the bezels etc.
I assume you mistyped, and meant "wiring". I don't think so: usually, the buttons will be on assemblies with many buttons together (such as the A/C control panel on my 2015 car), with a PCB inside and probably a small microcontroller to talk on the CAN bus, so in the factory, the worker only needs to plug in one electrical connector. That's really no different than a touchscreen system, which also would presumably have a single connector for the whole assembly.
Yes, I understand that it's a cost-savings measure by the automakers, but that's not relevant to me as a car owner.
If the added expense is so onerous to the automaker, then they can raise the price of the car to make up for it. I'd buy that, where I won't buy a car that has inferior controls. Why would I, when there is still a plethora of older cars available that better meet my needs?
If there was a model with buttons that was $1000 more than a model using a touchscreen to turn the wipers on and adjust the AC, I would absolutely pay the $1000.
I drive a twenty year old Volvo, and I went to a dealer to buy a new one a few months ago. I didn't buy anything because basic functions are all behind crappy screen UIs instead of good old buttons.
I would definitely pay an extra $1,000 for a version with actual buttons... and a smaller screen.
Would you pay the extra $10k or $20k for the custom built interface, though? It’s only $1000 if the majority of buyers are willing to pay that (which they are not).
Maybe, maybe not. If you posed it to customers in that way, many would object. If you didn't, then a $1000 price increase wouldn't really be noticed.
But it doesn't matter how many are willing. All I'm saying is that this is a thing that matters a great deal to me. It's pretty close to a dealbreaker. Even if I'm the only one that feels that way, it's still how I feel.
The auto industry appears to not want to make cars that I'd actually want to buy. Fair enough.
But I do find it interesting that one of the things that I was always taught was a strength of our economic system is that it will produce a wide enough variety of goods that pretty much everyone will find a version of a product that they'd actually want. That it appears that it can't looks like a kind of failure to me.
> But I do find it interesting that one of the things that I was always taught was a strength of our economic system is that it will produce a wide enough variety of goods that pretty much everyone will find a version of a product that they'd actually want. That it appears that it can't looks like a kind of failure to me.
heck, finding a sub-6" cellphone is next to impossible, outright impossible if you want high end features. and phones are way easier to create in different configurations than cars are.
The populations in developed nations are generally getting older, and people are living longer. Older people have bad eyesight for close-up things, so large-screen smartphones make a lot of sense.
No need for all that custom UI tech in the car, just provide a documented API and open-source app you can run on your phone or even dedicate a tablet for it.
Proprietary screens and their supporting computers will be obsolete quickly, will break easily and be exorbitantly expensive to fix/replace, and of course there's a good chance they will also surveil everything you do, mostly for the benefit of the manufacturer.
Just say no to smart appliances, especially something as central as your personal transport.
I have no confidence that auto/carplay of today will work with whatever phone I have in 12 years. Car makers want to ship their cars and forget about them. They hate warranty work. Tesla does software updates but the others don't want to (they do but only when they must or if they can charge for them - the maps on my 12 year old car are way out of date because like most car buyers I won't pay to update them). I'm not even sure that phones in 12 years will have communications (usb, bluetooth, wifi) compatible with the infotainment system in today's new cars. I am sure I will not be using today's phone as 5g towers will be shutting down.
But if it's a documented API with open-source 'reference' app, everyone can make new versions, enhancements, etc.
And for sure, assuming a popular standard physical/radio interface is used now, it will still be supported, either through backwards-compatibility in the standard, or with gateway dongles etc, far into the future.
I have no confidence you'll be able to get a replacement screen or computer mainboard etc for any car you buy today, in 12 years, and almost certainly not in 20,30, etc.
I have a head unit from 2014 that has CarPlay. I have never updated it and it works fine with latest iOS. I don’t see why it can’t do the same for another ten years.
> I don’t see why it can’t do the same for another ten years.
There is no reason it cannot work for 10 years, but also no reason it has to. Computer companies have a bad habit for dropping support for stuff when it is a few years old.
Thing is, we do have that "document API". CAN bus has been a thing for a long time (and is still in use even today), and has documented ways of communicating with everything modern Body Control Units and Engine Control Units do. For everything else, we have the ever valid DIN size standard. Both of these together make for an easy to upgrade system, including options to use Open Source head units. Just looking for a radio and nothing else? Go for it. Want all the fancy bells and whistles that Android Auto or Car Play provides? You got it. Even the steering wheel controls have a standard.
So the question is, why do they keep re-designing the head unit as a monolithic brick, and make it non-replaceable? I can't say for sure why, but my guess is that they've since added their own team for "Smart this" and "subscription that", and removing those sources of revenue is far more expensive than rebuilding the head unit each year.
Lived in China 2009-2022, when I arrived they were just starting to experience the boom - and forced China-style adoption (aka "all gas scooters are banned starting from tomorrow" out of blue) - of electric scooters. At that time I wondered, why not just "put two scooters together" with a shell, and voila, a car!
Fast forward to 2020s and that's exactly what's going on. There is a lot of EV "cars" cars in China that barely qualify as a car (e.g. Wuling Hongguang) and cost as low as 20,000 RMB (~US$3,000).
I would not want to buy those, though. The current EV boom is forced by planned economy with huge subsidies, which always attracts "wrong crowd" in China. There are hundreds of brands right now, but once the subsidies dry up, 99% of them will shut down, leaving unsupported hastily slapped together cars to rot.
Which would you prefer - a brand new basic car with the minimum legal features (so you get a backup camera, tire pressure monitoring, airbags ...). Or a 5 year old car with features like air conditioning, radio, infotainment, heated seats and so on? The reality is people who are cheap buy used cars anyway as for the same price as a bare bones new car they can get all the luxury features as well. People who care about their image demand all the luxury features and will not be seen in a car more than 3 years old.
If we changed something (either legal, planned obsolesce, ???) so that cars only last 3 years, there would be a large market for bare bones cars as people who are cheap would buy them. (and many people who today buy new cars would be forced to buy a much cheaper car since their car no longer as more than scrap value). However the economics of cars mean anyone who would buy a bare bones car buys used.
In time the used market will be filled with these cars that bare bones fans don't want. That will push down the price of recent used cars which means trade-in value lowers and new car fans can afford less which increases the barebones demand in new cars.
I used to work in luxury automotive infotainment. The general feeling is that luxury customers want luxury level systems. EVs are still considered by the industry to be upper-level vehicles. Which is to say they still believe they’re catering to with more money.
We’re not going to see a low-tech EV for a long time. In my opinion, we’re not ever going to see one. And respectfully to you and all the other folks here who feel like you, I don’t think you represent the average driver in this regard.
China spins out a lot of variations on a theme, there's bound to be limited run versions with little more than the absolute bare essentials to have a functional EV - the asian phone market is an indicator of the kind of range that is just not seen in the western markets.
> By "we" I'm guessing you mean the tariff protected domestic north american and european markets.
Yes, I apologize for the western-centric approach there, though I would extend that position to the UAE and Saudi-Arabia.
The NA OEMs are not interested in bringing very low-cost vehicles to market. And the low-cost OEMs from Europe haven’t really been able to reach the American market. aside from a very outlier products.
Odd aside, these days "low tech" (minimal effort, low cost) cars are going to have screens and control by wire interfaces for many things - it's 2024 and touch screens are a throw away disposable item compared to physical controls, tension cables, routing looms for every physical switch and interface light bulb, etc.
In a sense the ideal notion of a "low tech car" is now a hand crafted artisan object.
Exactly this whole discussion hinges on the idea that modern vehicle interfaces are somehow "fancy". Touchscreens, ARM boards running Linux, CMOS camera sensors, and drive-by-wire (heck Tesla is even adopting Ethernet) are totally commoditized. They were fancy 30 years ago, but today they are the boring cheap option.
The nostalgia is understandably for fully user transparent, user controlled, "home" repairable cars .. which is understandable and a goal I'd like to see in EV's.
Open source code, no phone home or hidden backdoors, optionally no wireless or external connectivity other than by on board physical port, etc.
Cars of yore have car manuals, manifolds and heads can be replaced with official parts or scrap yard parts or third party vendor alternatives, etc.
I use EV's for work related applications, I'm still holding off a personal EV until I can find something in Australia that fits my list. Until then I do most local area travel via walking, electric scooter, or homebuilt EV trike with basket for shopping - there's a Land Cruiser for the rural trips and hauling loads but that's more a once per week driver.
No, most cars of yore only had manuals available to dealership technicians, and no one else. Genuine manufacturer-made manuals were difficult or impossible to find.
Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.
If you go back to before 2001 with Google and BitTorrent, sure. Things did get easier with those. Full manufacturer service manuals getting leaked to the pirate bay for popular cars,
not just the Haynes/Chilton manuals, though those were certainly there too.
> No, most cars of yore only had manuals available to dealership technicians, and no one else. Genuine manufacturer-made manuals were difficult or impossible to find.
> Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.
They did the job and it was hardly difficult to access dealership manuals .. which were more often than not close to the Haynes manuals.
There's a healthy trade in manuals and photocopies of such. The nearest city had an entire shop soley devoted to car manuals back in the 1980s .. it might still be there or not (given the torrents of manual PDFs kicking about today).
I currently live in a town with a large motor museum (rocket cars and steamers and all sorts) and a wealth of machines from 100+ years of agriculture .. plenty of sheds with shops; old tractors, the last holden V8's, even one iteration of the sheep shearing robot we built (in the 1980s).
It's not that difficult to maintain old cars, the parts can be hard to scrounge at times, failing that it can be a wait on a machinist to fab a replacement, but overall there's less mystery than with more recent vehicles.
As usual with these kinds of things, European standards bodies to the rescue [1]:
>Euro NCAP – Europe’s leading automotive safety industry body – has stated that from 2026 new guidance will be introduced over physical buttons and touchscreens.
>Euro NCAP’s rules are not mandatory for manufacturers to follow, but the threat of losing points will likely impact the decisions of many of the leading brands in the years ahead.
Although I would prefer a hard ban of touchscreen-only car controls in EU countries, which would obviously have more of an impact.
- dumb phones, or completely open-source smart phones.
- dumb EVs, or completely open-source EVs.
I think the profit for open source stuff is not guaranteed, so funding a company is hard. People who fund companies want lock-in, patents, product monopoly. They don't want something that can be copied and productized by another company that had no R&D costs and then undercut in price.
that said, it is definitely something society wants.
>dumb phones, or completely open-source smart phones.
What use are dumb phones (i.e., feature phones)? They're only good for actually talking to people, and the only people I know who regularly use their phones for talking are my elderly relatives (in their 80s). Everyone younger than that uses their phones for: texting, games, web, various apps such as banking, etc. Actual talking is fairly rare, and usually only with some business (e.g. calling the doctor's office to schedule an appointment because they don't have a website reservation system, and even these places are dying out or moving online slowly).
That doesn’t fit my experience. Anything that involves typing out paragraphs of text almost immediately revert to a quick phone call where you can get the idea across in seconds instead of lots of minutes. These are people in their mid and early 30s.
In my experience, when this happens, we just use the voice or video-calling function of whatever chat app we're using texting through. We don't use phone numbers. I've never actually even called my girlfriend, for instance; I only have her phone number in my contacts list for emergencies, but when I've talked with her, it's been through our chat app (LINE), since we can use video there.
It's not semantics at all. Voice conversations on Messenger or WhatsApp are completely different and unlike voice conversations over a regular phone number. The latter you can do with a flip-phone; the former, you cannot.
This post says "Just let me drive. I don't need fancy screens."
An analogy with a phone might be to just talk to people.
There are plenty more reasons for a dumb phone. Limited distraction for self/kids. Long battery time. privacy. sovereignty would align with open source, not necessarily dumb phone (you control the software)
>depends on what your goals are.
>An analogy with a phone might be to just talk to people.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that I don't think very many people these days actually want such a thing. Outside of HN (which seems to have a lot of very anti-tech people curiously), all the people I know, of all age ranges, simply don't actually use phones much for voice calling. When they do, it's usually just for talking to businesses as I said before, not for family and friends. Instead, people are using phones for so many other non-voice-calling things which simply won't work on a dumbphone.
I feel like this is one of those things where people are appealing to nostalgia, but no one actually puts their money where their mouth is. Also, last I heard, dumbphones (flipphones) really are still available in many markets for people who want them, but almost no one does except perhaps for some elderly people. So I think this is really just people whining about the "good ol' days" while forgetting they weren't that good.
Because there are some early adopters left with more money than sense.
And the subsidies are fading but aren't gone for good.
And because everyone's copying Tesla's unusable interface for some unknown reason. I doubt Musk would recognize a rotating physical a/c control if it fell off a Falcon and hit him on the head.
As crappy and annoying Tesla's UI can be, just keep in mind Tesla's software capability is 10x better than any other auto company (or more correctly their OEMs) were capable of.
I'm certainly not going to defend minimalism-to-the-extreme design that gave us the ribbon in macbooks, removed the stalk/buttons in cars, or other movements that pretend that palpable controls using one of our fundamental senses (touch) are superfluous.
They're from the same "material design" hipster insanity that removed shadowing and numerous other visual cues from UI design that we still suffer today.
Because data collection is a very profitable market for car manufacturers to enter. Most cars these days can make it to 200,000 miles and people buy them less often.
I wish there was a website that had a guide for how to disable the 4g chip for every car model.
Someone want to setup a wiki for this? Seems like a good place for things like replacing the head unit correctly or other "make it my own" instructions.
I also wonder this. Electric cars tend to be larger heavy luxury vehicles, the opposite of what we need more of. Where are the small efficient commuter vehicles?
You have larger margins on larger luxury vehicles. Manufacturers are getting their R&D money back by selling these cars first before they trickle down to lower cost (and lower margin) econoboxes.
The tech is still immature and can't compete with similarly priced vehicles except at the top end of the market. Tesla is the only seems to be getting the scale required to push the price down.
Fancy screens are essentially low-tech now though, they've been commodified, Apple and Google will hook up car companies with that and it's not gonna cost them much. Bespoke buttons with soft touch is what is exotic.
I wonder if people know exactly how much they're psying for each little gizmo that rolls down their windows, adds a PIN to their door, etc. I bet you could cut about 25% of the price off by removing goofy crap you don't need.
> I bet you could cut about 25% of the price off by removing goofy crap you don't need.
Most of those things are low cost, high margin extras. Removing them wouldn't really decrease the cost of the car for the manufacturer. A lot of the time, if you don't pay for the extra's, they are included in the car anyway because it's not worth the effort of customizing the build. They are just disabled in software.
This is something that people without a manufacturing background often don't appreciate. Modern production lines are so efficient that it's frequently more cost effective to build all units of a product with the same hardware but disable some features in software.
I first came across this 20+ years ago working for an office equipment manufacturer. We had to add code for the service people to enable a feature in the machine that was already present (and pretty expensive to build), but not turned on until the customer paid for it. I remember at the time asking if it wouldn't piss customers off to know that they were paying for something that was already installed, but it didn't seem to faze the Marketing people in the least. Then again, the buyer was someone in a corporate office who would probably never actually see the machine anyway.
Yeah, this kind of thing will really piss off individual consumers, but corporate buyers have an entirely different mindset. Corporate customers frequently lease stuff anyway, rather than buying it, because of the way that this affects taxation.
Because they wouldn't sell nor meet regulatory requirements in countries like the US. I myself dream of low-tech car, but then again, I do like CarPlay, adaptive AWD, radar, and lane assist a whole bunch.
(I assume you're asking about the US, because there are low-tech options in many other countries.)
If you want a low-tech car, your best bet is to buy an early 2000s model of something that is well-regarded and can continue to be maintained long term (eg. Toyota). There are a lot of Internet resources that cherry-pick these desirable models and years for you.
This is exact same topic I was wondering.
Frame + electric motor + battery + gamepad + cpu.
From my research, it's boils down to:
1. Car is still a wealth marker. Not enough people think about it just as a means of transpiration. If they do they mostly use public transport or uber/escooters.
2. Car frame - you need to meet security standards, it cost a lot
3. Battery - current technology is expensive
4. Car lobby - especially in Europe, there are large tariffs to bring EV cars from Asia.
I totally agree, I really want a Caterham 7 with 4 electric hub motors and the battery where the engine used to go. It seems like it should be actually pretty cheap to build.
I do think the reason we havn't seen this class yet is that EV's are yuppie cars. They are sold at a premium for people who think this is the thing that will solve CC. When really taking busses, even petrol ones would probably do more.
The biggest hurdle is cost. The batteries cost a lot and so they throw in a bunch of tech and other premium features to make the cost appealing to the larger market.
The next biggest issue is regulation. Depending on jurisdiction, it's likely that things from backup cameras to autobraking and more are required or will be shortly. Even drowsy driver and drunk driver protections are already in laws/regs for future adoption.
I’d love a car like a Framework laptop but for EVs. I’d love to strip out the junk I don’t need and fix/change things myself for much cheaper than a mechanic.
Intension: low cost car repairs, longer service life
Reality: Fast N Furious guys realize the ECU is tunable, break all the parameters, remove the muffler, and make their engine explode within 20,000 miles in the noisiest way possible.
Yes, it really is as simple as that. Legality aside, making such a car a reality is at the very least 1B€ in development cost (you have to do a new electronics architecture and probably a new platform variant). You will never make a profit on such a car. The customer base is tiny and expects low prices, but low prices can only be achieved with high volumes.
>What's illegal about a low-tech (aka "dumb") electric car?
That it can't meet regulatory safety standards. E.g. drowsiness detection or crash detection to call emergency services mean that any car can not be "low tech" in any meaningful sense. So the best thing you can possibly get is a high tech car, where user facing technologies have been removed. Needlessly to say, the market for that is miniscule.
> I'd love something small that I can get around in the winter with!
Try a coat.
If you look around you discover that cycling cities tend to be places with harsh winters. While cycling dies off in winter, there are some die-hards go year round and they will report what you need if you ask them.
Regulatory capture made it illegal to not add "safety features" that Detroit has the patents on/other types of manufacturing exclusivity (for example certified glass). Then the tariffs that prevent any meaningful foreign competition.
The rest is all the automakers run by the same consultanting firm and they don't really compete all that hard with eachother anymore.
Not enough production yet to target those cheap customers. Today most companies would like to utilize all their production to make most money ie the most expensive. As demand gets saturated and they start looking for new customers they will get there.
One of the main reasons: the margins on the high tech stuff is much better than all the low tech stuff, and amortizing the software of the high tech stuff across their entire line is much easier than just on the high end stuff alone.
I'm determined to never buy a new car again. My 2016 Honda Civic will be the last car I ever drive, if I can help it. I own it, no car payment, its reliable, it works, it's not electric, efficient, no self driving features, no phone home, no Elon Musk, just an unsexy regular car and I couldn't be happier. Pure bliss.
Because OEMs want you to be their puppet. So they need to remain in control on the "cars" the sell, to resell driving data to insurances, video to various third party (including porn ones) just to cite recent "scandals", and they need to justify the absurd price of new macro-bugs on wheels.
Unfortunately most citizens do not even understand the tech so they do not even know that the crappy car-app is actually connected to the OEM servers like the car, they do not even know the car collect gazillion of data and so on. So the OEM can do pretty whatever they want, the percentage of people who understand is so little that nobody hear them.
If the OP is in the US, Chinese cars are unavailable since they don't meet US standards. Additionally, there is a level of protectionism that will try to prevent them from being introduced in the US.
There are also 100% tariffs on Chinese cars in the US. so doubling the price. Chinese EV manufacturers will likely set up final assembly plants in Mexico and ship them 90% finished, and then they will be able to circumvent that tariff. That's how Chinese steel manufacturers get into the US market.
The Pagani Utopia is fairly new (launched September 2022) and is completely bereft of screens and gizmos. A complete work of art costing a mere $2.5 million
The really difficult and expensive part is manufacturing decent cars, at scale. The profit margins on that part generally suck - so Capitalism says "hahaha...NO".
The pretty-easy-and-cheap part is adding glitzy screens to cars. Doing that gets most people all excited...and willing to shell out far more money.
In an extremely well-run socialist country, there'd probably be good, low-tech electric cars.
The car industry has an unusual profit curve. They have huge, huge fixed costs. It's not just the factory, it's the testing, compliance, marketing, etc.
However, the price you pay for a car is substantially more than the marginal cost of producing it.
So that industry is a famine-or-feast industry. Either they are losing money in mind-boggling quantities, or they are making money in mind-boggling quantities. There is not a lot of in between.
Unfortunately, the connection to the question the original poster asked is that they basically can't risk not selling a car because it doesn't have some hot feature that most of the market wants, so you won't see a screen-free car made today. Putting $100 of hardware in to seal the deal is a no-brainer in their profit model. (Though they will trim every penny on it, as they do everything else; it may seem like a contradiction but if you think about it enough it'll make sense. Consider the term "bullet-point feature" in our industry.) Until the market as a whole screams for it, it won't exist.
>So that industry is a famine-or-feast industry. Either they are losing money in mind-boggling quantities, or they are making money in mind-boggling quantities. There is not a lot of in between.
Search profit margins for Toyota/Ford/Volkswagen/Mercedes/BMW/Honda/etc
All are in the 5% to 10% range, which is objectively a middle of the road profit margin.
Mind boggling is what tech/oil/pharma/finance does, at 20%, 30%, even 40%+ profit margins. Which is why they are at the top of market cap rankings.
Because marketing departments like to have lots of features to advertise. There's a lot of money in selling people things they don't need or even want.
I hate touch screens too. And I hate when my car yells at me. My view is, until they release a car where self-driving actually works, there's no basis for my car telling me—30 years of driving in the city, zero accidents—how to drive.
But, there's a bound to how low tech a car can be, especially for companies who are looking ahead to increasingly prescriptive safety regulations in the future. Cars sold in the U.S. need a lot of sensors, computers, and mechanisms to take control of the vehicle away from you when it thinks it's necessary. It's just the law. The idea of a simple box with four wheels and some number of motors is pretty much not a viable option, legally speaking.
because we live in "capitalism"? eg. companies are "in it" for the money / the profit!?
* if i sell you a car, i want to sell you the most expensive car you are willing to buy, because that increases my profit.
cars are products, which you buy once every xx years, not every week, not 2 or 3 at once etc. so as a company i have to "make out of this single sale" as much as possible in terms of money.
i call this the "SUV effect": make everything just a little bit "bigger" with every iteration of the product to justify a price-hike ... accompanied by ads, which tell you, why you need this & that additional feature ... repeat!! ;))
We need standards so that mid-sized companies can make parts that meet standards and other mid-sized companies can assemble those parts into cars.
The battery bus should be 2 wires (+ and -) and automotive-grade Cat 6. The voltage on the 2 wires should vary between 200 V DC and 400 V DC as the batteries are charged and drained. Any kind of battery can be connected in parallel. You can connect NiCad, NiMH, Li-Ion, LiPo, and AGM batteries all in parallel provided you put the right number of cells in each battery module to get the correct voltage. You can not put 2 different chemistries of batteries in series. So everything on the battery bus should be connected in parallel. The Cat 6 should run a variant of CANbus tunneled through Ethernet. If a battery can not handle the voltage on the battery bus (for example because the bus is at 200 V, and the battery is charged to 400 V) then the battery should disconnect. This is easily accomplished with small DC motors driving screws, just like low-battery cut-offs do.
Battery bays should be standard sizes. 18" x 30" x 6" would be good. That can fit under seats, under a truck's bed, and under a trunk or frunk. They can even fit under floorboards.
Motors should be housed in modular, sealed units with gearboxes and motor controllers. There should be spaces to install motors on every axle or even on every wheel. The gearing inside the motor units should give an output that is about the speed we expect from a car tire going down the road.
All batteries and motors should connect to the some parallel battery bus. If you want more range, add another battery. If you want AWD, add another motor or two.
All drive components should be connected by CANbus. Replacing your accelerator pedal should be as easy as a few screws and an electrical connector.
Brakes and steering still need mechanical linkages to comply with safety laws, for now.
A standard battery bus would enable other cool things:
1. Any car could have a generator to make it a 2-stage hybrid.
2. RVs could use the same batteries and generators as electric cars.
3. Off-grid applications and grid-tie applications could use the same batteries as electric cars. This makes it even easier to tie car batteries into the power grid.
4. Because battery busses and battery bays are standard, a medium-sized company can build capacitor banks that drop in.
5. Power transfers between 2 batteries on the bus can work, coordinated by CANbus-over-Ethernet. If you are driving down a mountain, you can regeneratively brake into your capacitor bank, then slowly charge your batteries from that bank.
6. Grid-scale battery deployments can use the same batteries as cars. The marginal cost of making another 1 million batteries is a lot less if you already made 2 million of them.
7. Battery chargers that plug into wall power, power inverters, air compressors, and other devices can also be slotted into standard battery bays and interface into standard battery buses. This gives a lot more flexibility to a work truck than the built-in air compressor some brands like to include. Imagine a 2-stage diesel-electric medium-duty truck (that's the size of a UPS truck or a big Amazon delivery truck) that has a hydraulic compressor in a battery bay so it can lift or lower the truck and a lift gate on the rear end.
8. You could buy a cheap electric car with a single Li-Ion battery and a single motor on the front axle. Later, you could add 2 more batteries to almost triple the range and another motor on the rear axle. Not all motors have to deliver the same horsepower, so your little 85 horse-power commuter car could become a 300 horse-power AWD machine. More upgrades could turn it into a 700 horse-power muscle car. This would be the biggest selling point. Buying a stripped-down electric car would be an aspirational purchase. The buyer's goal would be to one day upgrade it to a long-range supercar. Cars could grow with buyers. A kid's first car could be upgrade to AWD when they realize it slides on snow and ice. After a wreck totals the car, the motors and batteries could be moved to a newer model.
9. Concerns over recycling batteries and motors go away if most cars use the same interfaces to the batteries and motors. Old electric cars can be parted out like old Chevys. There is never a reason for an old Chevy small-block V8 to go to waste; millions of cars can use them. Ditto standard electric batteries and motors.
SAE and IEEE should coordinate to establish standards, then we should be able to swap out drive train parts as easily as we swap out wheels and tires on our cars today.
I wonder if the free market will adopt such standards, or if it will take regulations to push big auto makers into standardizing battery buses, packs, and motors.
Toyota has been producing and selling ultra compact BEV car for examples COMS and C+pod for some times now [1][2].
However there are not that popular outside Japan, and inside Japan many are being used for food and home delivery.
Not only they're small and lightweight for urban commuting, the fact that for countries with frequent raining and hot climates they're much better proposition compared to the more accident prone motorcycles and EV bikes.
For normal and sub-compact EV car, BYD Seagull is a game changer and without country and state protections, they will sell by truck loads of them, and at less than USD10K selling price in China now it's a steal [4].
I think Seagull is the main reason US, Europe and many countries around the world suddenly have the new tariffs for EV cars. Most of the tariffs were announced just several months Seagull was announced to the world, and they're not a coincident. When EV cars are dirt cheap to buy, operate and maintain you can say good bye to the local car manufacturers (even the EV ones) if there's no protection. Apparently and obviously the much touted free trades policy only works when it's for you but not against you, c'est la vie [5][6].
EV conversions of older models probably fills this tiny niche quite well.
I had assumed the overly loud voices complaining about this "issue" were just the latest iteration of intelligent people inventing convoluted reasons to go along with their political tribe's insane policy preferences.
Like if you're a Republican on HN you can't just openly deny climate change exists any more (though a few still try), you want plausible deniability that your intense love for nuclear power isn't just an excuse to spread outdated lies about renewables.
Similarly you can loudly announce that you'll never buy an EV, and then when people put you in the "coal rolling idiot" bucket you can surprise them by revealing that it's actually a ridiculously niche concern about too much tech that you've invented to go along with your political peers in their hatred of EVs. And people reading then move you into a subtly different subsection of the anti-EV crank bucket in their mind.
While political identity certainly plays some role, a BEV is still a major purchase and people will take other factors into account. Is it really inconceivable that someone would want a car like the ones they're used to, except with a different power source?
Every time I look at electric cars there's always some insane choice, e.g. the brake lights don't turn on when regenerative braking is active, even though your car is rapidly decelerating. The touch screens are also a safety concern - you can't change the music or skip ahead on a podcast without taking your eyes off the road for a meaningful amount of time. The fact that you're paying well over the median price for a new car makes it even less appealing.
FWIW I don't own a car and I'm not in a hurry to get one.
If you want something more car-shaped, the Renault Zoe has very few tech feature.
Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it! No radar, lane assist, carplay or anything like that.
Cstomers only want 3 things. A comfortable ride, a safe journey, and $thing. The problem is, everyone's one more thing is different. I want DAB radio, you want cruise control, she wants lane assist, he wants automatic parking.
Creating a dozen different SKUs for all those things is complicated. Getting regulatory approval for every variation is expensive.
So most manufacturers sell only a few variations of their models.