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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadMost 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
Which is why the question is valid for EVs. There's about to be a revolutionary drop in the core cost of a car: batteries, motor, brakes. That's it!
Yep, that's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union with the Lada... ... depending on your definition of a "good car".
Maybe it's just where I'm living?
I thought it was because they increased the efficiency requirements for standard wheelbase vehicles.
Intended effect: manufacturers make more efficient vehicles.
Actual effect: manufacturers make gigantic, less efficient, more expensive vehicles.
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.
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.
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.
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 agree screens won't exist at any price in 10 years. Hope youre lasts.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I don't think I'm alone in this.
I would definitely pay an extra $1,000 for a version with actual buttons... and a smaller screen.
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
Still much more expensive than the equivalent cars with a combustion engine though.
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.
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.
It is a bit more complex than that of course and generally speaking you are right.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.tiktok.com/@hu_changwen/video/736154455749586460...
This stability thing is just a weak excuse used by car companies.
That’s no longer true for the most consumer laptops.
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.
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.
And the reversing camera is necessary because modern cars have tiny submarine like windows.
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.
The Renault Zoe has been discontinued, replaced by the Renault 5 e, which has ADAS and lots of other electric features.
Starting with model year 2023, the Kia Soul also has all the tech required by law: https://thebrakereport.com/kia-enhances-adas-for-2023-soul It also has Car Play now.
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.
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.
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.
Radar cruise control is not, and may be what the OP was thinking of.
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.
Anything is optionable.
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.
> Citroën’s Ami, a small $6,000 electric “car,” is apparently coming to the US as part of new electric car subscription service.
No thank you.
It still has a big screen though.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcimoto
Maybe it will live on if someone buys the IP.
The tech components of cars makes up a small fraction of the cost, but represents significant value.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They sell you battery packs for $20,000 around every 8-10 years.
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/...
Twizy and Ami are not regular passenger vehicles. I am sure there are less requirements for them.
Edit: Correction, it's the most popular electric car un Europe.
> by the end of 2020, the Zoe ranked as the all-time best selling plug-in car in Europe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Zoe#Sales_and_markets
Which is a rather recent development and certainly a protectionist move and will hinder adaptation massively.
You need the full suite for lane controls, attention monitoring, emergency brake systems, etc...
It is simply impossible to now release low tech cars and it is a political decision by the EU that is highly questionable.
https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/publications/eu-road-safety-towar...
Per Poi Dog Pondering:
Well the ancient Egyptians and the other Africans
The Mayans, the Incas, and all the Polynesians
All around the world, a long long time ago
People would walk wherever they had to go
Despite many years of hand-wringing about environmental impacts of air travel, almost nothing has been done to address this.
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/661d3b95ac3da...
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.
> People would walk wherever they had to go
Or had their slaves carry them in a litter
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.
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.
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.
Definitely not in the US.