that 1. removes an ICE off the road 2. saves on new mfr costs and 3. is a worthy hacker endeavour and/or 4. supports a local business
of course if you simply hate cars and want everyone to ride the train or bikes you'll find a million reasons to not do this. good luck with that.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Amazing tech. It usually warns me against collisions after I'm done avoiding them. 90% of the time it doesn't notice.
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?
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.
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.
(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.
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 problem is they charge $300 for a maps update.
For that $300 I can just pay for a third party maps app that has the same features.
If the argument for connecting phones to cars is navigation I don't feel it is the strongest one.
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...
And might have A/C controls built into infotainment...
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...
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.
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.
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 10,000x or even more bike trips...
Sources:
https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/transport/trafikulykke...
I find it very dubious to assume that cars drive the same amount of kilometers as bikes in the Netherlands...
I ride my bike just shy of 40kms per commute, the same amount I would drive.
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 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.
> Ebikes are unsafe, for starters.
Do you have any stats on that?
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.
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.
It takes me at least 3 minutes one way to get to a gas station, then another few minutes to fill up.
They aren't, as a matter of fact you buy yourself a whole lot of ICE interior opulence with the price you'd pay for a spartan EV.
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)
Say I have to go round trip to LA every 6 months. Adding up the 2 charging stops that's an hour:20 or so of downtime charging.
With a gas car, 5 minutes at a gas station every 2 weeks works out to only one hour every 6 months.
So your assertion, confidently presented, does not carry water.
Touchscreens on cars need to die out, preferably quickly.
I have so many things where I just want the old non-electric style back.
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.
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.