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.
https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/StV/Roadtraffic/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
[1]: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/driving-tech/is-the-beginni... (5th Mar 2024)
- dumb TVs, or open-source TVs.
- 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.
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.
I wish there was a website that had a guide for how to disable the 4g chip for every car model.
(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.
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 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 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.
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.
The rest is all the automakers run by the same consultanting firm and they don't really compete all that hard with eachother anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
Still much more expensive than the equivalent cars with a combustion engine though.
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/japans...
It still has a big screen though.
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.
The tech components of cars makes up a small fraction of the cost, but represents significant value.
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.
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.
indirect:
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!! ;))
just my 0.02€
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.
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].
[1] Toyota C+pod:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod
[2] Toyota COMS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_COMS
[3] BYD Seagull:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull
[4] Why a small China-made EV has global auto execs and politicians on edge:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/22/byd-seagull-ev-puts-global-a...
[5] How will new EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles work?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/12/how...
[6] Biden hits Chinese electric cars and solar cells with higher tariffs:
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.
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.