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Comment by potta_coffee | Hacker News Reader

Since when is power steering a "smart" feature? Power locks and windows are mechanical devices, solenoids powered by the car battery. The only computerized feature you listed is cruise control and we've had that for years and years. I don't think that this is an "either / or" proposition where we have either a car running off bloated software or a car limited to 1950's features. As far as I'm concerned, cars from the mid 1990's to mid 2000's are peak.

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This is missing the point - Person A wants their next car to have certain features, but person B also wants their next car to have certain features which person A doesn't want. Car companies aren't going to make 200 car variants with different features combinations, they're just going to group all the features people want into new cars and ship it to everyone. To stay competitive they just put out whatever it going to sell and 90%+ of people are fine with the increasing level of touchscreen controls, so they'll keep moving towards that since it also ends up reducing COGS and simplifies assembly of the dashboard, increasing margin. Person A can not buy the car if it doesn’t suit them.

I was going to say something like this, that products (like a lot of things) are a combination of multiple users' wants, but I'd say that the main problem here is that the implementations themselves are becoming more monolithic.

The extreme case (as you mention) is the moment you stick in a touch screen and a fair amount of intelligence. You might as well put a jillion features in there plus you save money on physical controls.

They used to be capable of building cars with numerous option packages in the 1960's and 1970's, it's pretty remarkable. The 1969 Camaro alone had probably a dozen different engines available from 3 families.

Automation drives down costs for standardized, mass produced items, but it may also remove the economies of scale that made it possible for more variety to exist due to decreased demand for those varieties.

> The only computerized feature you listed is cruise control

Cruise control doesn't have to have any electronics at all either, earlier cars had vacuum actuated cruise control.

Exactly. I remember when the cruise control vacuum actuated cable snapped on my Honda Civic. No more cruise control for me and I could hear the reason why!

But it’s really bad cruise control that ends up costing MPG, s as well.

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