I'll go a bit further... Do we really need computers on four wheels? Can't we just have simple electric vehicles without all the high-tech? No distracting screens, no computer for other than just governing the electric engine, no fancy car locks, and so on.
I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle. Honestly, it seems to me that is absolutely unnecessary tech, ridiculous.
I'd like to have a vehicle like the ones 15 or 20 years ago but electric: analog indicators, physical buttons, etc. And a car that you can actually REPAIR by yourself without having to be an electronic engineer or something alike.
There was a post about someone that owned a Tesla car and managed to repair it (if I recall it correctly) for under 500 bucks when Tesla was trying to charge above 10000 USD.
All this high-tech also means that we're doomed and at the mercy of car companies for any kind of maintenance. It seems that we're heading to the same dead end as with mobile phone industry: zero control over them.
If that's the bright future that awaits us, I'll take public transport as much as I can.
> I'll go a bit further... Do we really need computers on four wheels? Can't we just have simple electric vehicles without all the high-tech? No distracting screens, no computer for other than just governing the electric engine, no fancy car locks, and so on.
I'd love to, the problem is it would get some pitifully low NCAP rating (because lack of active securities would bring the score down and I remember it is && deal, so car can have excellent crash safety yet still get low stars coz of lack of the electronic toys), and manufacturers want to sell as much gadgets as possible, because every few bucks of extra electronics is every few dozen bucks they can charge customer for.
The other problem I think is that the "fancy annoying electronics" are probably not that big part of the price of the car. Add chassis, battery, heating/cooling system for the car and all the mechanics and you already arrived at most of the car's production price.
Like, even if you add $500 of the compute (amounting to mid-high range GPU) and $500 on ruggedizing it for car work... extra $1000 worth in electronics isn't all that much of car price.
I for one am keeping my 8th gen Civic Type-R for as long as possible, got ABS, airbags, even some traction control but none of the annoyances of modern cars. All I want from new car is android auto...
Same I have an old Suzuki and I wouldn't get rid of it for anything.
On the other hand, I think the whole concept of cars is the actual problem, especially heavier cars. The tire dust alone is enough to think about weening ourselves off the project. Then there is strip mining the earth for cobalt and all the other nasty shit in the devices, it's pretty bad.
Where I live e-bikes are really taking off, to me e-bikes and public transport seem like the ultimate way to go. It even looks futuristic. A little bit of exercise and movement, combined with fully autonomous, small electric trains would be the best of all worlds.
By "public transport" you mean shared ebikes? I don't think this can be a mainstream public transport solution if we want to move forward. Ebikes are unsafe, for starters. I expect a lot worse security issues than what's being reported with Teslas...
The question is not "doesn't the alternative have the same problem in kind"? It's "does the alternative have the same problem to the same degree?" Certainly, bikes have tires too, but bikes weigh a tiny fraction of an automobile, have half the number of tires, and generate a tiny fraction of the dust, per unit distance. We can't let perfect be the enemy of significantly better.
> I don't think this can be a mainstream public transport solution if we want to move forward.
The cities of Copenhagen and Amsterdam beg to differ. Bicycles are first-class citizens there in terms of transport.
Really, you need stats to realize that an automobile is safer than bikes?
Bike have half the number of tires but remember that they carry 1/5 the number of people. For one person, fine, but families? Good luck selling it... They're also problematic when it rains or snows. Or when the sun is hot.
It's going to be significantly less tire dust, they weigh a 100th the weight.
Ebikes won't be mainstream in a typical American city though, the distances between home, goods and services and work are usually too great and cars are basically baked into the culture. Better mass transit and bikes for those living in denser cities, is likely America's only good option.
I don't think e-bikes are unsafe though, their lack of safety is dominantly because of cars, and infrastructure not being set up for cycling.
If you use an ebike, wait until you go down by yourself and tell me what you think again. No cars needed. On a cyclist lane. Just you and your bike. If you use it for everyday commute, it's a matter of time. When it happens, it will be no fun.
I have been in one commuting accident, plenty of non-commuting accidents though (mountain biking etc.), but you can also fall down stairs while walking or slip up in the rain. We can't be shrinkwrapped everywhere we go. I just picked up my bike, said bummer that hurt, and kept going.
Compare that painful inconvenience to a car accident and it's just silly to call an e-bike dangerous.
I have been in 4 car accidents, and am lucky to be here. You step out from a totalled car, and see the carnage, distress and mess that everyone is now subject to. Traffic has to be redirected, cops show up to take down details of those still alive, EMTs try to find the ways you've been contorted, firemen have to disable the vehicle and clear any fuel and fire risk, the tow trucks scrape the husks of twisted metal off the street so people can use the road again. It's a whole ordeal, and regularly fatal.
Although there are exceptions, usually bike accidents are only fatal when a car was involved. Cars are not safe and never have been, we just accept the risk for the convenience.
I just fell a few weeks ago. Some ripped jeans and road rash but I'm ok. No doctor visit required. Low-speed accidents are far less injurious than the sort of high-speed ones you can get into with automobiles, and by far less fatal.
According to WSDOT, there were 2 bicycle-related fatalities in Washington state in all of 2023, vs. 218 automobile-related fatalities. So a 100x difference. The data is there if you care to look for it.
If you care, you'd extrapolate the 2 fatalities to how many would be if bikes were adopted in mass as a means of transport in the Washington state (comparably to cars).
The number of bike trips will not increase by 100x only, certainly by orders of magnitude more than that.
Now multiply the 2 fatalities considering 10K, 100K or even more bike trips.
Ebikes can reach and sustain higher velocities much more easily than normal bikes as well. If they were to be adopted in mass, I'd expect crash severity to worsen in general and fatality rates/trip to go up.
OK, let's take a look at traffic fatalities in Denmark (where bicycles are the primary means of transport in most cities). 25 bicycle fatalities, compared to 64 auto fatalities. It's a much closer margin, but bicycles still win out. The statistics are similar in The Netherlands, where bicycles are equally popular.
You can measure mixed risk like this in hours exposed, since the outcome of a car and bike trip in Denmark is the same (you get to work or whatever). That will also be fairer to cars, since I suspect there are more deaths per KM for cars.
I ride my bike just shy of 40kms per commute, the same amount I would drive.
Well, yeah, in my current on, but if it is new car with integrated tablet style infotainment you might not have place to put it and would have to look for something specifically made to fit it.
And might have A/C controls built into infotainment...
> Can't we just have simple electric vehicles without all the high-tech?
No, because ~nobody would buy them.
> I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle.
Because 99% of people want it. Not everyone wants everything, buy each group of people wants some features and the end result is that you have to stuff your car full of tech to be competitive in the modern car market.
And this isn't an EV thing. The tech is going into all the ICE vehicles too. Tesla is the exception, they put huge screens into cars well before everyone else and they happen to be an EV company. But normal manufacturers are mostly putting similar tech in their ICEs and EVs.
This reads like pre-Covid auto industry logic. And the car market right now is so bizarre right now that if any of what you wrote still applies it's by sheer chance.
There aren't even any base-level trims available from most of the big manufacturers to offer to the "99% of people." Less than two months ago I was looking to see if I could find a manual Nissan Versa 2023 for my uncle. It's basically the paper-cup-and-string-phone tech equivalent for a car. It wasn't available within 300 miles of me, and pre-orders were above MSRP.
If an Eastern European country could export 5,000,000 two-stroke wooden cars to the U.S. right now they would probably dominate the auto industry in less than a month.
So you don't want remote locking, a reversing camera, automatic brakeforce distribution, antilock braking, airbags, or system diagnostics? I do.
(Let alone the fancy stuff like electronic stability control, blind spot warning, autonomous emergency braking, autodipping headlights, lane keeping, dynamic cruise control, auto-parking, or attention monitoring? Those'd be nice too, probably.)
Things like heated steering wheels, and heated seats with rise and fall motors and motorised windows and mirrors, yeah, OK, I could do without those - but lots of people would disagree.
Not touch screens, which have been rejected by most of the market. Tech like adaptive cruise control, collision warnings & automatic breaking, reversing cameras, lane assist, automatic parking, blindspot detection, spotify playlists. I've got a 25 year fully manual tin can with an engine just perfect for puttering around the local area at the 50km/h speed limit. I'm looking for another car with modern safety features for regular distance driving, and most of that requires computers (and buttons!).
Would they? Or is it like the small phone segment, where the a very vocal group of hardcore enthusiasts, but when it comes to market size, it turns out theres just not really enough of us out there to sustain the segment.
Cars aren't phones, and maybe a $15k car would sell well in this economy, but with way higher margins on a slightly better car at $40k, why would any automaker willingly give up a big pile of profit?
Well there are no small phones… so we buy large phones, because we still need to buy a new phone occasionally; so marketing research goes: "see!!! LARGE PHONES!!!!!"
This is what you get when you have incompetents doing statistics.
At this point nobody on the planet can fit a phone in their hands, but they keep getting larger.
I’ll do one further: most of us shouldn’t have to drive cars at all every day, we’re just enabling dependency on the robber-barrons that create them - our entire country has been built to be reliant on the auto industry, it’s practically a hostage situation and most of us have stockholm syndrome
Not talking about suburban sprawl, just living next small city over.
But "tons of houses and not a shop or anything else in sight" is of course a problem on its own. Thankfully not really in my country, there is usually some local shops nearby everywhere
The flashy tech bells and whistles are there to compensate for the inherent problems with electric cars. They lag in range compared to gas cars, and get absolutely trounced when it comes to putting energy back in the car.
Concrete example: this week I had to drive some people between San Jose and Hollywood. Google maps says that's 5:40 hours over 340 miles.
I looked at renting a model 3 for the trip but it simply could not justify itself when compared to the minivan I ultimately rented with 500+ miles range. Not only was I not forced to stop in BFE for 20-40 minutes, I didn't have to stop at all. Arrived with plenty of gas to get to any station in LA I might want (cheapest).
And I wasn't even pressed for time, but if I'm slapping an extra half hour onto the trip I'd rather spend it (and actually did) on taking the more scenic US101 route for ~400 miles instead.
I only drive more than 150 mi in a day about two times a year.
The time saved up over the year of not having to go to a gas station every other week and just plugging in at home will dwarf the extra charging time on the very rare road trips (where I'd have to stop and let the kids have some fresh air anyway)
That’s a fun niche use case but most people just drive to work and school and back every weekday. Having to stop for 20-40 minutes on the odd occasion that you need to drive 340 miles in a day is worth never having to stop for gas for your daily commute.
It's funny how humans repeat the same patterns repeatedly in history: new technology development happens, optimist expect it to happen way faster than realistically possible, they make progress but the initial output is rocky as all new things are before they mature. Luddites/conservatives come in and point at the rocky start, the societal disruption before it normalizes, the early financial losers who bought into over optimistic projections, etc as the reasons why we shouldn't have bothered in the first place. Then it comes out, the tech matures, society adapts, new rules are made, lessons are recorded but rarely listened to, and everyone moves on to the next thing.
If Aptera manages to scale up production, it looks like they'll deliver that part at least. They're promising to make all the manuals and parts available to anyone.
Yes, it is necessary. People want it. I want to be able to connect my phone to the car. To be able to use a navigation app. I'm not going back to reading maps (also, I never started).
Its not good enough to just sell a product. You have to sell a life style, an ecosystem, subscriptions and upgrades. Selling a simple product was a pre-WEF phenomenon
Not really. It's a very manual task. Can only be scaled if you ship thousand units of the same model to a single factory. Compatibility has to be evaluated per model. Structural integrity has to be preserved, batteries are usually located at different spots than motors are.
Of course you can say "here are 4 pros - if you say anything bad you want the world to suffer from cars" but you know that this is not how we can get to a solution.
Environmental action is based on who’s paying the bills. It often doesn’t make sense.
Case in point:
At a time where Manhattan commercial real estate is about to implode and traffic is at a nadir, there’s a major push to kill driving in NYC to pay for overpriced mass transit. Instead of investing in electric vehicle infrastructure, we’re investing in destruction of lots of businesses (like nationally prominent hospitals).
> At a time where Manhattan commercial real estate is about to implode
Maybe it should implode? The prices for real estate are so high, you have to sell drugs on the side to pay rents. Many businesses just aren't viable becaus of it.
Growth in real estate is not real economic growth, it's more of tumour.
I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle. Honestly, it seems to me that is absolutely unnecessary tech, ridiculous.
I'd like to have a vehicle like the ones 15 or 20 years ago but electric: analog indicators, physical buttons, etc. And a car that you can actually REPAIR by yourself without having to be an electronic engineer or something alike.
There was a post about someone that owned a Tesla car and managed to repair it (if I recall it correctly) for under 500 bucks when Tesla was trying to charge above 10000 USD.
All this high-tech also means that we're doomed and at the mercy of car companies for any kind of maintenance. It seems that we're heading to the same dead end as with mobile phone industry: zero control over them.
If that's the bright future that awaits us, I'll take public transport as much as I can.