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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

...There's only a minimal gauge cluster. An app in the driver's smart phone, placed in a holder high in the center of the dashboard acts like the central display screen in other cars showing things like driving range...

Oh great. So without a working, compatible phone, the driver has no idea when the car is about to run out of battery?

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What percentage of people don't have a smart phone? What percentage of those people would be in the target market for a little electric car?

Almost everyone I know has a smartphone.

Literally nobody I know has a reliable connection between their phone and their car.

My USB connections (for Android Auto) to my car are very reliable, maybe one day a month I have an issue and have to unplug and replug, or more rarely reboot my phone, but I've never not gotten it to work before my commute.

Bluetooth has proven to be less reliable.

Who cares who owns a phone, it's silly to require one to use a basic function of the vehicle when you can have a couple LED lights do the same. What if I loose my phone? Or I drop it and the precious screen shatters? Lazy engineering.

And, presumably, this opens up the door for the manufacturer to force obselecense by not updating the car "app" to work with newer phone operating systems.

Yet another product I can't purchase because I'm unwilling to be tied to a software ecosystem that discourages ownership.

If you are rational about cost and downside risk of version compatibility, at worst, this puts about $50 at risk, which is the price of a cheap tablet or second hand phone. That's less than the cost of replacing a remote locking fob.

Sure-- $50 per "connected device" I want to keep working on my terms. There's also the cost of "care and feeding" labor for the then-dedicated mobile device. There's battery hygiene. There's certificates expiring and rigging the clocks to keep things working. There's firewalling and proxying the devices against the inevitable vulnerabilities making them unsafe to have even on my home network.

That's assuming it's even possible to keep things running, too. If the manufacturer needlessly brings a "cloud service" into the mix my "connected device" stops working when the plug is pulled on a service I can't self-host and can't pay to keep going.

For any one device it's probably no big deal. If my time is worthless it's no big deal. If my familiarity and comfort-with-routine with a particular device's workflow is worthless then it's no big deal.

When it's a multiple of devices in your life, when you place a high value on your time, and when you derive tremendous personal value out of muscle memory and personal routine then I think it adds up to a bill-of-goods.

The general nature of the market for "connected devices" is demoralizing and draining. I don't want to throw all my shit away every couple of years based on the aggregate of various manufacturers. I don't want to change my routine because some marketing plan dictates I no longer get to use something I've incorporated into my life.

It's massively frustrating that "the future" has arrived for so many things, except nobody will sell it to me on terms I can accept. I don't have enough time in my life to build the stuff myself. I'm a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a mainstream market so nobody will ever create what I want.

I can think of a decent number of "connected" devices I'd love to but, except they don't exist in a form that respects me. They exist in forms made to serve manufacturer's needs to sell me the same thing again in a few years, to build the lowest cost, most disposable devices for the maximization of profit with no regard for the environment, and to have the lowest long-term maintenance cost for software (by way of just throwing it all out and re-spinning every few years).

There is a range indicator integrated into the dashboard. https://imgur.com/96XOJ1g

It's only got a 40 mile range, you ought to be able to guesstimate pretty well how far you have left if your phone dies while you're out. You're not going to be going too far from familiar routes from home in this car.

This is an electric car with an USB charge slot. Your phone is not going to die before your car.

There are multiple causes of death for phones. My last one met its end when it slipped out of my hands and into a puddle of water. So it's entirely feasible that you could be out with your EV and end up with a dead phone and no gauges for your car. But that's probably not a serious problem.

> This is an electric car with an USB charge slot

Is that to charge the car?

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

You could misplace your phone, or drop it three feet and shatter the screen.

If these sell, this will be sorted out by 3rd parties in no time....

Decoupling the computer from the car is fantastic and I wish more cars (and TVs...) became more dumb: It's cheaper, better for the environment, more upgradable, more customizable, etc...

Until the car is too old and the app is either upgraded to be no longer compatible with the car or abandoned and becomes no longer compatible with modern phones.

Android APIs change a lot over time.

I've never heard of fuel gauges being particularly damaging to the environment.

Sure, let the car stereo connect to my phone so I can play my music if I want. But don't take away simple, basic, essential functionality and lock it in a phone app that I will have to trust/hope will continue to be supported for as long as I own the vehicle.

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