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Comment by lastofthemojito | Hacker News Reader

The way the EV market has been going so far has reminded me of the NoSQL hype of the early 2000s. It suddenly became important to have "web-scale" datastores and a lot of new hotness didn't use SQL, so folks started associating NoSQL with scalability, regardless of whether some SQL databases could scale, or some non-SQL databases couldn't.

Fast-forward to the present day where I've recently overheard someone say they "want an electric car so it can drive itself". Tesla has made self-driving (for some definition of self-driving") and over-the-air updates and giant tablet entertainment screens synonymous with EVs, to the point where it seems like every major manufacturer is including those features on every new EV they launch. I'd also like to see essentially an anti-Tesla EV - a simple, good car that happens to be electric, without it being a "smartphone on wheels". Make the entertainment system a double-DIN stereo and I'll know I've found the right car :)

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What you're looking for is basically the Prius Prime. Sure it's not fully electric, but it gets 40 mile electric range (which for a lot of people is enough for the day to day), gets legit 70 mpg at 40-55 mph, and around 50mpg at 70mph. No fancy tech, but it drives.

The Prius Prime is definitely a "smartphone on wheels" by any measure. In fact, a lot of people appear to covet the lowest end model because it at least has some knobs for the AC. The upper models force the driver to use an enormous touchscreen with shitty responsiveness and shitty UI/UX.

And at least in the U.S. it has had a 25 mile electric range for the past decade or so. Only the 2023 model claims to have a 40 mile electric-only range, and that hasn't been released yet.

What would be great is if Walmart released some kind of electric vehicle analog to their old Sceptre tv models. Steering wheel, pedals, battery, and of course a flash drive reader that autoplays any mp3s it finds. (Premium version could add a cigarette lighter.)

I don't want to touch vehicles with full touch screens with a 10 feet long pole. Touch screens on cars just cheaper, look fancier but unusable at all.

Agree. My Model 3 is a usability disaster. Even having hard keys around the edge would be way better, like my avionics.

MFD buttons would actually be pretty amazing.

I have a set from Thrustmaster for my combined driving and flight sim rig, it works really well for mfd input. (F16 mainly).

A set of blank buttons eg at the bottom of the display that could be mapped to in display functions would have been very useful.

(I've gotten used to how it is now - and actually really like it after a year - but not going to say it couldn't have been done better. It would look less minimalistic, however.)

Playing games can hardly have any consequences, but driving does. All those buttons/knobs are designed to minimize the chance you have to look for something. Virtual keys somehow alleviate a little bit as there are reduced physical keys but still, you will probably have to press multiple buttons to do one single task.

Wehn driving, you don't want to move your sight away from the road. Thus, muscle memory is super important. But touch screen simply rendered all that useless.

The rav4 prime has 40 miles on its battery so I wouldn't be too surprised they get the prime out with 40 miles soon.

Doubt it… look at the number of first gen Volts still on the road.

I have a 2015 Volt with 98k miles. Still drives great and charges to full capacity. Chevy dramatically over built the first gen, it was the second gen where they were forced to actually limit their design based on lame goals like "making a profit"

I have a '17 second gen that I'll be selling within the next 3 years. 60k miles on it right now. Gotta sell it before it has a $20k boat anchor on board. Unless something happens and I get the battery replaced under warranty for some reason, then I'll continue using it.

Lifetime 172 mpg over 60,000 miles!

That's kind of misleading. My electric only car gets infinite mpg over 65,000 miles. It's 8 years old.

How is it misleading? It seems to be a standard measurement for vehicles that can move via both gas engines and electric motors.

It gets around 42 mpg when running purely on the gas engine. Based on the distance I have traveled and the amount that I have used the gas engine, it works out to 172 miles per actual gallon used.

MPGe is what you would refer to for your fully electric car.

That's right, the moment Toyota actually jumps on the full EVs, I hope they preserve that direction - those would be amazing cars.

There's one fancy thing from Prius I don't think anyone else does though - the heads up display, which looks amazing and I would really like to have. (It's still optional, so you don't lose the usual dashboard)

I actually really wish Toyota kept pushing their plug in hybrids. The Rav4 Prime get 40 miles on its battery and 40 mpg as a small suv is impressive plus 600 miles worth of gas in it. My neighbor pretty much uses most of the battery during his commute, charges it and uses the battery coming back. He can take it on long road trips without any stops too.

There was a moment in 2017 when I was sure the GM Volt would usher in an age of series hybrids with larger and larger batteries. Then Tesla released the M3 and GM released the Bolt and the Volt was subsequently discontinued.

There must be some solid reason as to why mid-capacity batteries in a hybrid don't make economic sense for car companies.

Batteries getting cheaper and required emissions equipment getting more expensive and complex have made PHEVs a tough market. For most small and mid sized cars and crossovers the cost of equipping a full ICE drivetrain along with a reasonably sized battery and electric motor drivetrain pencils out to about the same price they can make a full battery electric car for, especially when pure BEVs tend to have higher government incentives compared to PHEVs (varies by location).

Packaging is also a big downside. Fitting a 10-20 kW battery and a full combustion drivetrain takes a lot of space, so BEVs with packaging advantages over even pure ICE cars priced around the same number suddenly look a lot more attractive to the potential buyers who overlap a lot between PHEVs and BEVs.

With clever engineering a PHEV doesn't really need a "whole drivetrain". You can use the fact that you have a motor and a big battery to solve a ton of problems that ICE engines typically have.

To make an ICE efficient, you want to give it a big transmission with a lot of gears so it stays in peak efficiency RP, undersize it, and put a big turbocharger on. This produces a relatively heavy drivetrain that has lag when you put your foot down.

When you have an electric engine and battery, you can take the same small engine, but instead of a transmission, you just steal energy and put it in the battery when you don't need power and give it back instantly when you put your foot down. This removes almost all the weight and complexity of the transmission, keeps your engine at peak RPM, and gives you the responsiveness of an EV.

But the engineering cost to do all that is very expensive and unique, two things car makers hate and avoid at all cost. There is a reason the long discontinued Volt is still the best PHEV around and only BMW i3 has ever had your proposed layout. No one else has been willing to spend the money required to really optimize a PHEV and i3 could use more power getting up hills than the engine could generate, so your battery % could drop with the engine running. The OEMs want a 'good enough' PHEV to qualify for subsidies with minimal spend and allocate all the real resources to BEVs since they see the end of combustion.

Plus it's not just the mechanicals. You still need a gas tank, exhaust, catalytic converter and all the other ancillaries that come with combustion. That all adds to the bill of materials, engineering and assembly complexity, and packaging constraints.

> The OEMs want a 'good enough' PHEV to qualify for subsidies with minimal spend and allocate all the real resources to BEVs since they see the end of combustion.

I think a lot of this comes from seeing PHEV as "worse EV" rather than "better ICE". Car manufacturers see their business as building ICEs and EVs as a weird distraction that you have to throw money into as basically a PR expense (although this has started to change in the last couple years). The engineering cost here is expensive but not especially unique since it could pretty easily apply to the entire ICE fleet. The fact that the Prius has existed for 25 years, but most cars sold today don't have regenerative braking is kind of crazy. It's not like OEMs haven't put a ton of engineering into ICEs, they just haven't considered hybrids as "real engineering".

Except no cars do that. That's called a serial hybrid, which never shipped, unless you count oddballs like the BMW i3, with the optional "range extender".

GM Volt is a series hybrid. Arguably the best hybrid ever made.

The Prius prime already gets about half way there.

I read a review of a prototype BMW mini. The turbine (fixed RPM) + batteries seemed like a great combination. Plenty of HP for highway cruising, plenty of battery+AWD for great acceleration. Turbines are efficient, crazy small for the HP, and have few moving parts. The downsize is having a fixed RPM, which would normally make them unacceptable for a car.

Sadly it never made it to market.

Mostly that two full drivetrains are expensive, heavy, and labor intensive to install. You end up with the worst of both worlds.

BTW, the volt was advertised/promoted as a serial hybrid, which was a really interesting idea ... right up till it shipped and it wasn't.

The reason is because hybrid drive trains don't make sense, as evs get cheaper. I suppose there is less demand. I was hoping for a car with 100 miles ev range and 250 more miles gas range. Then you get a lot of weight from two drive trains and the batteries.

If you've got 40 miles of range when it's new and you're doing a full cycle of the battery twice a day, won't the battery basically be dead weight within 3 years or so?

that's not how car batteries work. phone batteries suck because they are incredibly space and weight constrained and they're too small to effectively include thermal management. Toyota warrentees their hybrid vehicle batteries for 10 years/150k miles for 30% range degredation. after that, since it's a relatively small battery some looking around suggests that the cost of an out of warrentee replacement is roughly $4000, and needing the replacement is relatively rare over the life of the vehicle

Not only is Toyota's warranty on Prius batteries quite good, a good chunk of the battery issues with older Priuses come down to corroded terminals. A dealership will happily throw a new battery in there for a few grand, but a good indie hybrid mechanic knows to try the cheap and easy fix of cleaning the terminals before replacing the battery (and will recommend reconditioned battery packs for a serious $$ savings)

Only if a "full cycle" is aggressively draining the battery. More likely, that 40 miles is a safe amount of discharge for the pack.

Been driving our Rav4 PHEV for 2 years soon. My wife drains the battery once a day on her way to work. We still get 65+ km (40 miles) in winter and over 80km (50 miles) in summer, driving mostly in the city.

Heads up displays are common for most carmakers (maybe apart from cheapest ones like Dacia or chinese brands), but they are always a premium equipment for (big) extra charge.

Our bmw 5 series from 2014 has it. It is amazing tech, easily the best improvement for me in car driving in past 2 decades. Constant visual contact with road and surroundings, while being aware of my current speed to the level of single kmh, speed limit, car navigation, switching songs/volume with knob on steering wheel, perfectly readable in all conditions and never obtrusive. I just dont look inside the car anymore. The problem is when I drive car without it, it feels severely lacking and ancient (like driving long stretches on highways and a lot of speed radars without cruise control).

Yeah, I meant it for normal tier cars. There's a lot of high end stuff available if you pay $$$$$, but not for an average driver.

Well I paid for it 20% of the price of new, 6 years old with 90k km on it. Even if I had to invest another 20k into it on repairs (which I wouldn't and I won't), its so much better value than new ones. After 1.5 years and 20k km, seems like aircon died (getting it fixed soon) but that's it.

I'd never buy a new car, price/value compared to used ones is ridiculously bad, not grokking who does that unless its like 1-5% of their annual salary. Even then its just throwing tons of money away. Electric cars seem to me much worse in this, hopefully this changes over time.

So no ultra expensive cars, you can have it for the price of really basic new cars (if I ignore maintenance but this can be managed by not using official repair shops, which is good idea anyway since they just love swapping whole expensive blocs instead of fixing actual problems). On top of massively better crash security, comfort, proper fun driving etc.

Because on average you'll pay the same in repairs or replacement compared to a more recent car. You got lucky, and that's ok. But the prices aren't completely made up. Your BMW costs a lot less, because the expected average time it will survive is low. Anecdote != data and all that.

On the other hand, having an ex-demo car from a dealer meant no silly markup and when the transmission fell apart after 4 years, I got it replaced for free instead of paying thousands to an independent shop. There are pros and cons.

(And yes, completely new cars have silly markup, but used ones with low mileage don't)

Corvettes had huds 20 years ago. I have never understood why it isn't mainstream.

The Toyotas BZ4BX would like to differ. After it recovers from the recent recall, that is.

Give them another generation or two, and they might reach the point you're describing. But they ain't there yet.

I'd really like to meet the marketing genius who decided to name the car "BZ4BX". Really rolls off the tongue, that one.

It's actually slightly easier, bZ4X.

The name does actually have a meaning: bZ(Beyond Zero emissions) 4 (based on Rav4) X (Crossover)

That said, I wish they had just called it the Rav4 Electric. I believe mass adoption comes from car companies integrating the electric models into what (non-cutting edge) consumers already trust (Chevy is the only one really embracing this idea)

Considering this model was announced before they asked Toyoda to step down for failing in EV adoption, I suspect it was named to not sully the reputation of an established model.

> Rav4 Electric

REV4.

  - it's a Rav4
  - it's an EV
  - it revs
  - it's a revolution

> That said, I wish they had just called it the Rav4 Electric. I believe mass adoption comes from car companies integrating the electric models into what (non-cutting edge) consumers already trust (Chevy is the only one really embracing this idea)

There are some more. Peugeot has electric models with the same naming as their ICE models but an "e" on front (e-208, e-2008, etc.) Hyundai has the Ioniq in EV and non-EV versions. And there was also a Volkswagen eGolf, although I think that one has been abandoned to be replaced by models with electric-specific naming.

It's actually BZ4x. Beezey Forks.

Toyota press people don't like people calling it the Beezey Forks. But much like the XBone, once you hear the name, it sticks.

I would pronounce that “busybox.” I wonder if it uses BusyBox.

The sister Subaru Solterra is slightly better, but not much.

Certainly at least the Skoda Enyaq offers a heads up display. I suspect that means that all the VW group cars do.

It was an option on the VW ID.3 I bought, so yes, all VAG EVs presumably.

The new Prius looks like they've got what Tesla is about, as laid out in this comment chain down to here. It's aesthetics, ease of use, frictionless experience, etc.

The iPhone moment was often referred to as the smartphone revolution, but 15 years later, the experience it offers are not fundamentally different from advanced flip phones it replaced, just better. Technical aspects of an iPhone, such as touchscreen user interface, non-replaceable battery, jailbreakable OS, were not fundamental in disrupting the market.

A number of existing EVs or plug-in hybrids would easily meet your needs. Toyota RAV4 prime for instance.

Tesla is far and away more of a smartphone on wheels than any other car.

I like to describe it as an iPad strapped to four cordless drills.

That'd be a Rivian; Tesla has two /s

> Tesla has made self-driving (for some definition of self-driving")

I'd be okay with this if they weren't f'ing it up.

Put Lidar in there and just get it right. Stop w/ this non-sense.

> Put Lidar in there and just get it right. Stop w/ this non-sense.

This is a popular refrain among people who are not studying Tesla’s progress particularly closely, and/or are unfamiliar with the utility LIDAR actually provides. Tesla FSD still has some way to go before it is ready to be a properly autonomous robotaxi — but where it's failing are not areas where adding LIDAR would help.

Tesla's vision stack is already sufficiently capable of mapping the three-dimensional environment with sufficient precision.

Tesla FSD needs better planning strategies when faced with unusual obstructions like novel construction zone diversions. Adding LIDAR wouldn't help there. Tesla FSD desperately needs more road sign reading skills. LIDAR can't read road signs. Tesla FSD will eventually need to recognise law enforcement officers and respond to hand gestures. LIDAR cannot translate hand gestures into actionable driving instructions, and certainly can't assess the plausibility that the person is a LEO.

Is this the same vision stack that was pulling up ahead of stop signs in some places because the signs were bigger than it expected?

If it can't make sense of something as simple as that, why would I trust it with hazards?

https://www.thedrive.com/news/teslas-can-be-tricked-into-sto...

Lidar's are excellent at verifying that the 3d model map is correct. E.g. a perpendicular semitruck with trailer on the road.

For item recognition the resolution gets low quick though with range.

> Lidar's are excellent at verifying that the 3d model map is correct.

IIRC Tesla does use LIDAR in their test vehicles to measure the ground truth of their 3D model maps. They just don't do that with every single car on the road.

Examples:

https://twitter.com/gbrulte/status/1395356317410287617

https://electrek.co/2020/06/29/tesla-spotted-testing-prototy...

Wouldn't LIDAR be useful to help it not occasionally drive into objects?

Waymo talks about using LIDAR on their gesture recognition system: https://blog.waymo.com/2022/02/utilizing-key-point-and-pose-...

Certainly that is the current Tesla PR spin that their vision stack is good enough to not need it, but it is hard to see why LIDAR wouldn't be useful for defense in depth against the situations like people tricking Teslas into painted tunnels like Wile E. Coyote. Especially when we all know the reality is that LIDAR is extremely patent protected and expensive to buy because of that and Tesla dropping LIDAR was pure cost cutting.

(Self-driving seems to me to be somewhere you absolutely want as much defense in depth and redundant sensors as possible.)

I'd like to see someone exposing a Tesla to a intricately produced Wile E. Coyote tunnel. I would predict that it would stop, because the vision stack leans heavily on motion vectors to map out drivable space. And even if it didn't, the tunnel could only be painted to have the correct perspective at one point along the road. Moving closer would result in the model seeing the road get narrower, causing the car to slow down (narrower roads necessitate slower speed) until it gets within a few car lengths — at which point the painted road would appear so narrow as to be literally undriveable.

If Tesla hasn't already tested this in simulation, I'd be astounded.

Also if a false tunnel good enough to fool FSD beta, I'd suspect it'd also be good enough to fool a decent proportion of human drivers too.

Certainly there is some hyperbole there, but not by much: https://screenrant.com/stop-tesla-autopilot-fsd-self-driving...

Aside from whatever Tesla is doing, LIDAR has some fundamental technical deficiencies such that it is unlikely to ever be a viable long term solution. I find the arguments against LIDAR compelling with the context of having worked with this data.

LIDAR is absolutely the technically superior approach compared to photogrammetry + ML but is cost-prohibitive (in Tesla's view)

Personally, I'll never trust their self-driving product for anything more than lane-keeping unless they incorporate LIDAR

LIDAR would certainly solve the problem of crashes, which is indeed a serious issue.

But I don't see how you could drive with it. It couldn't identify lane markings or exits or traffic lights or cones. And if you can do that well, you should be able to avoid hitting things.

Clearly Tesla hasn't solved that and maybe never will. But adding LIDAR wouldn't really solve the problem.

It's not LIDAR alone it's a combo. The problem of course is that Tesla/Elon is being stubborn and unwilling to put the "expensive" lidar claiming that pictures is enough to work on.

Maybe it is, but not today.

Volvo seems to be getting it right hardware-wise with it's forthcoming EX90 (electric XC90). 250 meter range LIDAR (kept clear from ice, snow and dirt by it's own heat emisssions and nozzles at the end of the windshield wipers - you can tell it's not designed in California), 5 radars, 8 cameras and 16 ultrasonic sensors.

That's amazing. Mercedes has the first certified level 3. Only a few states, but the rest will come. Tesla is falling behind due to its hubris.

I also think they haven’t figured out how to do the sensor fusion with the compute available.

their real problem is frame to frame consistency, due to lack of a world model.

this is what Elon talked with Lex a year (or two?) ago. (they mentioned it as how to know you are in a school zone, and remember you are in a school zone, etc)

Sounds like they're working on the world model at least in places. With the removal of the parking sensors, they've started remembering obstructions that are now out of the cameras' vision.

I see LIDAR self driving vehicles all over the place around Phoenix and Tempe. My Tesla’s autopilot can’t reliably stay on the correct side of the road going through intersections.

can you be more specific what those deficiencies are?

The one that few people think about is that use of LIDAR interferes with other LIDAR. LIDAR works mostly because almost no one is using LIDAR. By contrast, passive optical scales infinitely even if it is more difficult and there is an existence proof that it is possible. Automotive companies view LIDAR as a dead-end even though it works well (in some environments) now.

LIDAR has some issues in rain and snow, and can't read road markings or signs (or make out colours). And it's pretty expensive currently. A combination of LIDAR and cameras is likely what'll end up working best, they complement each other nicely.

Just to nitpick/paint a less absolute picture: Having worked at a couple companies using lidar, you can make out stuff like road markings based on relative brightness (especially if retroreflective paint is used), in ideal conditions, but that's of course not everywhere.

I agree a combo seems like the way forward.

Humans don't have Lidar. They can still drive just fine. Solving self-driving is OBVIOUSLY not about Lidar.

Cameras are nowhere near the capability of our eyes especially in low light.

Computers are nowhere near the capability of our brains in terms of image processing, object identification, path anticipation etc.

Until these things improve, self driving cars need to compensate for this gap with more data inputs to be reliable.

Camera are better in low light than our eyes Computers are faster than our brain Software (Neural Net) are not at the level of our brain, in particular they do not fine tune constantly to the current conditions and problems. But they are getting there. Just looking at the visualisation in FSD you can see how accurate the system is at recognizing all the cars, their position, theirs speeds, etc. Human only only track a few objects and only when they catch our attention. Furthermore theirs system has 8 cameras, no distraction, sleepiness, etc.

I saw this visualisation recently in a taxi. It was constantly changing its mind about things. One second a scooter would appear as a garbage bin, the second it would disappear and then show up as a scooter again. Pedestrians would only be displayed while they moved. I was surprised how inaccurate it was.

And cameras are really bad at noise levels at low light and don't nearly have the dynamic range levels needed for good night vision.

Depend on version of fsd. They used to go through a normalization process that tried to make the video similar in differents conditions. This has been ripped off and now the signal go strait to NN. I heard (and saw video) where the camera detected animal in the dark that were impossible to see to the naked eyes.

It’s possible their system is not that good, but eventually cameras will outperform the human eyes in every way if that’s not already the case.

Our perception is not that good, but our brain filter it out and make us believe that we see the full picture were if fact we see only what catch our attention.

Just wait for better cameras? Big pixels solve the noice level problems and multiple cameras solve the problem of dynamic range. People also can not measure distance to static things if seing capability is limited to only one eye (riding bicycle is possible with one eye but driving a car is not).

I'd say what you're looking for exists but not in the US. Brits have electric city cars that I'd want to buy, but can't.

You can just turn off or disable the internet connection from the car (take out the circuit breaker for the modem). It turns out the things on even my 8 year old tesla were really useful. I liked streaming music for free, voice recognition, maps with up to date traffic. But the car would still work great without an internet connection. Some people are driven crazy by not enough touch screen buttons, it's never bothered me.

But you can just turn off all internet connections and go on your way.

>Fast-forward to the present day where I've recently overheard someone say they "want an electric car so it can drive itself". Tesla has made self-driving (for some definition of self-driving") and over-the-air updates and giant tablet entertainment screens synonymous with EVs

There are even people in this very comment section that think that way ;)

The Dacia Spring is like that - except for the "good" part, no idea if it's really good or not :)

I rented one for a couple days, that car definitely makes sense as it is.

> a simple, good car that happens to be electric, without it being a "smartphone on wheels".

Now, that's an EV I'd consider buying.

In my case I just want a early 2010s Fiat Panda, or any equivalent. Functional, cheap, little electronic bullshittery.

Isn't that really what a Nissan leaf is?

VW id2

my friend imported an EV from china which is what you are looking for. It is essentially a golf cart.

I believe there would be a huge market for a simple (but with safety equipment) golf cart style electric car.

My next car will definitely be an electric truck, but I agree, I want simplicity and probably wont get it.

What about the Nissan leaf?

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