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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

I yearn for a simple electric car which is not connected, and does not have a lot of touch screens or features. Can you imagine? A cheap electric car with a radio and crank windows, and basically nothing else? It would be a dream.

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I think the Citroen Ami might get close to what you want.

It’s amazingly small, underpowered, and cost efficient (for example, they don’t manufacture separate left and right doors for it, the passenger-side door just opens backwards).

https://www.citroen.com/en/Highlight/131/ami-100t-electric-m...

I really hope that _these_ are the kinds of cars that will get us to mass adoption and not Teslas.

The Citroën Ami is a no permit car, so it is a bit specific and probably won't be used by people who need a car to travel between cities.

The Renault Zoe is a "normal" car and fit the bill for a more "simple" electric car. They now have the Twingo Electric also which is the size of a usual twingo (roughly like a Citroën C1/Peugeot 107) and cheaper than the Zoe.

But it is connected. Thereby it can be remotely disabled. Which actually happened a few times. Because the battery is rented...

Just a search for "Renault remote disabled" should be sufficient to get you some headlines.

Cheers!

The price difference is huge. Ami is €6,000 (incl. VAT) while the Renault Zoe is £27,595 and the Twingo Electric is €20,690-€24,790

I mean, yes. But the price difference between a bike and the Ami is also huge.

It’s because they’re different things.

This is beautiful. To me, cars are appliances and I couldn't care less what they're like as long as they get me from point A to B safely and at minimal cost and time. I hope we get something like this in the US one day.

The number of people who will drive a clown car like that is pretty small.

Well no. This is a "no permit" car. It is a type of car that you can drive without a driving license in France (you just need to pass the written exam). These are always very small (due to their nature), and are actually quite popular, mostly in city. Either because they are used by people who lost their driving license but still need a car in the meantime, or they are used by people who live in the city and don't want to bother getting their driving license (which is much more expensive and time-consuming in France than in the U.S).

It's a quadricycle, not a "clown car", and with an excellent price / quality ratio.

45 kph, range of 70 km, at 6000 euros.

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/citroen-says-ami-ev-w...

It'd be a great commuter car. Cheap to buy, cheap to "gas" up, cheap to maintain. You're usually only commuting with yourself anyhow. If I still had a commute (and they sold these in the US) I'd definitely buy one.

It gets you from A to B, it keeps you dry and warm/cool, it's cheap and it's easy to park. It's basically everything you want from a car in a European city.

In the US, perhaps. In Europe you see quite a few cars that size.

Just buy an old Ford Electric. The range is pretty decent and you can sometimes find them for around $13k or less if you're lucky. (Perhaps rarer these days with used car prices going up)

The alternative route that I've looking into is to just do the mod myself on an old classic car. There are a few great ev conversion companies like evWest (https://evwest.com/catalog/) and Electric GT (https://electricgt.com/) that offer drop in crates and motors that you can mount. It's not "easy" by any stretch of the imagination but it's a great option to have if you have the time and skills to do so.

I looked into this a while ago— one of the barriers was finding suitable cars to use for the donor body. Ideally you want something with high mileage, so that the engine/transmission are basically worthless, but where the body is in good shape as far as rust, paint, etc. You also probably want RWD for ease of integration.

Finding an old car body is probably the least complex part of this though. There are thousands of decent bodies with junk motors in every state in the US. The barrier is batteries. Batteries are monumentally expensive, especially if you aren't buying them used from scrap vehicles.

I think it depends a lot what you're buying. If you want an 80kWh pack like a Tesla, then yeah, that's going to be $10k or whatever, but a lot of BEV conversion projects are looking more at an around-town car anyway, where a 50km range might be adequate, especially as a starting point while you get everything else working.

So yeah, if that's your target, then you can build a much smaller and cheaper pack out of prismatic cells, eg:

https://evsource.com/collections/calb-1/products/calb-100ah

So like, 20 of those is $2800 and would get you 6.4kWh (range of like 30-40km).

Renault Espace had (has?) a plastic body.

> if you have the time and skills to do so.

Or the cash?

Are there companies that will convert your favorite car to electric, or is that just too much of a liability minefield in the USA?

Certainly you can contact some of these companies to get quotes but it's so costly to convert classic vehicles that you might as well just go buy a recent electric car like a Bolt or Focus. It's mostly a cost thing. Also you need to consider the cost of the motor / type and especially (and this is the most important bit) the battery pack. If you're looking to install something like a Tesla battery pack you're probably looking at $10k at least for the pack alone. Could be wrong, but worth looking into local shops - there aren't many that have the expertise that I'm aware of outside evwest and electricgt. I'd be happy to hear of more

I will say that I've gotten a quote for an entire conversion kit that includes a Tesla Model S battery pack, motor, controllers, custom couplers for about $20k for my Jeep Wrangler. It's obviously not going to get good range since the Jeep is a giant box but all things considered I paid about 7500 for my old jeep to restore so $20k on top of that is basically a brand new Jeep (and quite a bit cheaper than brand new high end electric vehicles and hybrids). So, not completely out of the question

I'm sure it costs a fortune, but having a classic car that can still get around once all the gas pumps are gone would be a pretty cool thing even if it's only a rich-people thing:

https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a3...

Kind of makes sense though? Teslas start at 30k, and you’re not paying them for the fancy bodywork.

My last car cost less than $10,000. I think this may be beyond my means.

Relative to car prices, converting them is not that expensive when done on a budget. Converted mini-cooper at 4k all in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRnFzklXi4o&list=RDCMUCfV0_w...

I have two door 89 Honda Accord I plan to get running again next year. For a while I thought it would be fun to add electric motors to the back wheels. Give a little boost off the line or maybe experiment with adding a little push around corners.

After seeing the prices for electric motors I'm probably just going to get it running instead.

Agreed. Why do all electric cars also need software updates and tons of bells and whistles? Just because I want electric doesn't mean I also want a touchscreen console etc.

Because Tesla's initial target audience is not you and me, but people who buy the fanciest, latest iPhones every year.

If you're curious, I'd recommend reading Moore's "Crossing the Chasm". I'm entirely for electric cars, but I'm part of what Moore would call the "mainstream market". I don't want a car to be amazing and cutting edge. I want it to work unobtrusively and very reliably. That means that I'm going to be hard to persuade and will want to wait for evidence.

That makes me a terrible initial Tesla customer. For a new tech product, you want early adopters, as they will happily spend money on things that don't work very well. You want the kind of people who will, sight unseen, spend $500 on a flamethrower that isn't a flamethrower. [1]

So given Musk's brand and given the size and wealth of the user base you'd need to launch a new car company, it's pretty much inevitable that Tesla (and now its competitors) were going to mine the technophiles who are happy to pay a premium for sealed-box gee-whizzery.

The good news is that the electric car market will be getting more boring over time. There a lot more people in the more conservative market segments, so although we aren't as profitable per unit as the early adopters, plenty of companies will eventually be addressing our needs.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/10/17445838/boring-company-f...

I suspect you aren't part of "the mainstream market". The main stream buys Android phones full of pre-installed software, Windows laptops full of pre-installed software. They fill both with anything and everything and don't worry one wit about control or privacy or anything else. They buy TVs with built in OSes and ads.

Those like you (and me sometimes) who do worry about this stuff are not the mainstream market at all.

It doesn't work like that. People fall into different categories for different sorts of product. For some things I'm in the earliest of markets. For some things, I'm in the latest. For cars, I am definitely a mainstream purchaser.

Note also that Moore's model is specifically about adoption of technology. There are plenty of other dimensions to markets, especially ones where the technology is mature. I think you're talking about people who tend to optimize for initial low price, and are insensitive to other concerns. Which again, people vary on based on product and need. E.g., I have a Pixel 3A because it was good value without junkware and other corner-cutting. But my headphones are the <$20 semi-disposable kind.

I thought I wanted a Tesla until I saw the inane techbro language they use on the centre console. They need to rollout a language pack for people with a mental age north of 5 if they want to cross the chasm. It would piss me off mighty to be confronted with that every time I got into the car.

Interesting! Could you say more? I'd looked at some console images, but they didn't have much text.

Here is a pretty good example https://youtu.be/pXvIzWhEWvA?t=332

Wow, that's awful. Yet more proof I'm not in Tesla's target audience.

For the Chevy Bolt they've had a similar software update to reduce the risk of burning your house down, which seems better than the alternative of not having that update.

But they've also been agreeing to buy people's cars back if it's an issue, since selling someone a car with a particular range capacity and then reducing it afterward is obviously problematic.

The Bolt's battery reduction is supposed to be temporary while the final recall fix was worked out. I don't have one so I haven't been following the current news on whether that's been sorted.

In Tesla's case here it sounds worse, because this might be a permanent change where they just said "lol your car is permanently worse now, have fun."

> In Tesla's case here it sounds even worse, because this was a permanent change and they just said "lol your car is permanently worse now, deal with it."

Although in Tesla's case they have been updating the software to restore capacity and charging speeds in many of these cases.

The complete lack of communication is a real problem, though.

All we know is that it's a change to numbers on the screen. Did anyone actually demonstrate reduced range?

> Why do all electric cars also need software updates

Because charging and managing modern EV batteries for optimal range and lifetime is complicated? That's my understanding anyway. If this was easy to do without all the software, why would the manufacturers spend money on it?

And how often would they need to do software updates strictly for charging and managing batteries? I would think it is far less than the updates for the "tons of bells and whistles".

That's like asking why a simple one page website, loads 19 js libraries, and 12 fonts...

Tracking people and their cars is very profitable?

Elon's intent was to make electric cars sexy, you know, for the environment and all that. While we techpeople understand the cost and danger of superfluous tech, most people just go "wooo touch screen thing and iphone app for my car kewl"

Because the car industry has bamboozled people with the acronym "EV/AV".

They don't sell electric vehicles. Their boffins are working on "EV/AV".

Also electronics like that have come so far down in price that it adds very little to the overall manufacturing cost whilest making the car feel more premium.

Power windows are such a commodity now I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper to make a car with power windows rather than cranks.

Bcause they can be a tech company

I am long past over crank windows. Like decades over having to crank down a window.

That said, you could probably build this pretty easily - folks have been converting old vehicles into electric cars for, well, decades as well.

But what if your window cranking was charging your battery? :D

What if we skip the battery part, use crank as the power unit? Boom, bicycle! :D

They have these in Berlin now. Hermes et al are using them as last mile delivery vans. I see them every day and I love it.

https://hermesworld.com/int/about-us/responsibility/service-...

and newer: https://onomotion.com/en/

Crank windows are good because they're cheaper and lighter than electric windows. There's no heavy electric motor in each door. It's not that they're necessary, so much that saving money on frivolous features is nice!

They are not always frivolous. For example, I have a car which rolls down the windows about an inch when the door is opened, because the door does not have a frame that fully encases the window. So it's a glass preservation feature in that case, and the loss of the steel to fully encase the window probably saved weight over the window motors.

And TBH, electric motors aren't that heavy. You still need all the gearing and such with a hand crank.

Most of the stuff in this list (electric cars in the 20k range) probably fits your bill: https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/best-cars/99735/the-cheapest-e...

Though they probably do mostly have electric windows; that's more or less a standard feature these days.

Just to be clear, the Renault Twizy is not a car by any traditional definition.

If I have to describe it, it would be closer to a 4 wheeled electric-scooter.

Yeah, the Twizly is the outlier there. The rest would mostly fit the bill, though.

I feel you. But this way, the entire car industry would be bankrupt in a couple of years. There's a reason why nobody is offering a cheap, $10,000 dollar, battery-swappable, raw and simple, half-a-ton-light electric car.

> There's a reason why nobody is offering a cheap, $10,000 dollar, battery-swappable, raw and simple, half-a-ton-light electric car.

What is the reason? Don't automotive manufacturers offer cheap ICE cars? Why would a cheap EV bankrupt them but not cheap ICE cars?

Battery supply is the bottleneck currently. Even if they wanted to, the automakers cannot switch to even 20% production being electric. If they offer an attractive, affordable EV, they immediately render the rest of their fleet obsolete and 90% of their factories go idle. Price is used to modulate the demand.

There's the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV. I think it has electric windows, but not much else.

https://media.gm.com/media/cn/en/gm/news.detail.html/content...

That's interesting -- is it not connected? I frankly saw that it was a Chinese car, and simply assumed that it would be fully connected like a Chinese Android phone.

It is getting harder and harder to find consumer electronic products that don't regularly phone home to their manufacturers for marching orders. When I buy X, I expect X to function as it does for the life of the product. I don't want the manufacturer to suddenly decide to change the UI because one of their designers wants to put something in their portfolio. I don't want the manufacturer to suddenly decide to take away a feature because they just made a business agreement with some other company to do so. I don't want the manufacturer to collect usage analytics and use me in their A/B test experiments. I don't want to have to have an account on the manufacturer's cloud service. In fact, I don't want to have any kind of "relationship" with that company beyond the fact that I walked into a store and purchased a product with their name on it. I just want a product--I don't want the manufacturer to be an ongoing part of my life!

I have something close to this with my 2015 Nissan Leaf S. No internet connectivity at all. It's also extremely cheap. I paid ~$13k for it in 2018 with ~25k miles. The range is kind of bad compared to most other electric cars though.

Well, do I have the thing for YOU!

https://www.solarcarchallenge.org/challenge/photos.shtml

You near on describe the first cars, which were electric and was the combustion engine that took over thru it's ease of fuel delivery and mileage.

Nice read here that history https://mg.co.uk/behind-the-wheel/electric/the-history-of-el...

I literally just want a Peugeot 206 with an electric motor.

Every inch of the car is well understood. Cheap and reliable parts are available all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_206

Probably not what your looking for but this cheap Chinese thing springs to mind:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802

Dacia Spring electric at 8000Euros https://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/spring.html

Renault Zoe, hyundai ioniq, there are plenty of..

And even cheaper if you live in the city: Renault Twizy, Citroën ami, ...

There are people on youtube that fit used tesla engine/batteries to vintage cars

I’m with you on this. The ev convention scene provides just that!

With the horror of radio it would be more of a nightmare.

Some radio's not too bad. Ok, how about a radio with an aux jack?

Or slide windows like the old Land Rovers.

why bother w/ electric in that case?

Because burning fossil fuels when realistic alternatives exist is immoral.

What's wrong with a simple car powered by electricity rather than gasoline?

Tesla Roadster? But not cheap. Maybe an older Nissan Leaf.

Seriously, me too. I will keep furiously burning fossil fuels until said car is available, and reject all guilt. Any and all emissions produced in the meantime are the fault of the spyware-car industry.

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