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Comment by the-chitmonger | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm preaching to the choir at HN, but I really wish there were more "dumb" EVs. Robert Downey Jr. recently hosted a giveaway for his vintage retrofitted electric cars (to clarify, he takes vintage cars and retrofits their engine to make them EVs), and I honestly wish I could just buy one outright.

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I love my Chevy Bolt EUV. Normal door handles inside and out. Manual open/close trunk. Normal window controls. Normal infotainment unit with carplay/AA. Buttons and knobs for volume, HVAC, and hazard lights. Normal stick controls for turn signals and wipers.

It’s a great, simple EV and my only knock against it is the slow max charging speed making it not ideal for multiple stop road trips.

What about navigation, bluetooth radio, wifi or other systems that leak signals everywhere?

Note that carplay/AA is already killed for the next model year of the bolt (2026) and you can probably also expect regressions in the number of physical interfaces from the first gen you own.

I have a 2017 Bolt EV, and I feel similarly. GM accidentally made an ideal EV for a reasonable price, and now they are correcting course by ruining future models.

I'm a huge Tesla fan, but the Bolt is amazing. I love renting them. I wish they could charge faster than 50kW; that would make them useful for road trips.

I feel the same way about e-bikes: expensive, proprietary parts and form factors everywhere. Oh, your battery is worn out? You need one that's custom molded to your downtube? That's too bad.

Thankfully they're easier to DIY than an EV car.

The battery case might be molded plastic but inside it’s probably just a wad of 18650s that can be replaced.

Can confirm.

Unless you find out it's potted, the BMS needs to be reprogrammed and there's a custom mesh or holder that doesn't work with some standard cells because of tolerances...

I've been expecting a ebike that could take the tool eco-system batteries: DeWalt 60v, Eco 58v, Milwaukee 18v. Probably would need to dock several of them with the exception of the Eco.

There's the Makita BBY 18V foldable bike.

I think that at least some of this comes about because it's still relatively early days for the form-factor. As the industry matures, as it becomes more cutthroat everything will become more comodified and therefore standardised.

Look at some of the cars of (say) the late-19thC where not even the steering wheel was standard. So, while e-bikes are probably not quite that early stage right now, they've not advanced terribly far from the plain vanilla bicycle yet.

There are thousands of e-bike manufacturers. Many use the so-called "dolphin" battery pack which is fairly standard and always removable. The dolphin doesn't look as sleek as an in-frame battery but it's replaceable and it will usually provide longer range.

https://bafangusadirect.com/products/52v-11-6-ah-dolphin-ebi...

Companies that specialise in this do exist, the one I'm most aware of is Electric Classic Cars in the UK (https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk), who started/specialise in rear-engine VWs, original Minis, and original Land Rover Defenders.

Obviously very tailored for a nostalgic UK market, but if there's not equivalent companies in the US and elsewhere I'd be surprised!

Retrofits for cars are around $50000 to make them barely street legal. You are looking at double the price for that retrofit and you might not get the range. You also have to buy a car (some retrofits on YouTube get around this by buying broken cars and restoring them) buying a broken car could be done if you don't have to do much work or if the engine is broken already.

You don't need to retrofit, you can just build a reasonably-featured car to begin with. I imagine most people just want a corolla with a battery (or cheaper).

Trouble with my ('95) Corolla is that it's the body that's showing its age. (Rust, and not the good kind.) The ICE is just fine and probably good for another 1/2-million km, but the whole thing has got to go soon.

Why let your vehicle rust?

You assume that it is a matter of choice?

"Let it rust"? If you live near the sea, cars rust and there's not a lot you can do about it. You can attend to visible rust timeously, but there are plenty of hollow spaces where it can fester for years, all unnoticable, before it pops out through the paintwork.

More realistically, a car manufacturer could make an EV that is basically a vintage car but made to modern standards. Obviously you can’t make the exact same car if you want to have things like crumple zones, but a lot of the changes to car designs have been for fuel efficiency and that’s not as important in an EV. And things like huge internal displays or automatic doors are just preference.

The "fuel efficiency" of an EV translates more or less directly into the cost of a major component.

You can sacrifice range of course.

The changes to ICE vehicle designs for fuel efficiency are needed even more and are made more drastic for EVs. EV designs have painful, often ugly, aerodynamic considerations that have to be made. They go so far as to let aerodynamics completely dictate wheel design.

Your 1967 Pontiac GTO sitting on Kragers isnt going to go very far on batteries.

Yeah, but due to range and slow charging vs. refilling, electric cars are mostly used for city/commuting, where speed isn't that high to make a difference in aerodynamics.

Well, at least crumple zones are much easier when you don't have a fat chunk of metal (engine and gearbox) competing for space.

There’s a quickly growing ev conversion industry. Lots of shops that will take your vintage ride and convert it. the amount of wrecked evs showing up in wrecking yards is resulting in a new era of hotrodding. check out www.openinverter.com

FYI for anyone trying to go to the above link, it is actually https://openinverter.org

I thought the same until you drive Tesla for few weeks and then think - why the heck you need to pull handle to open doors? This is so archaic.

Glad you wanna stay behind. Enjoy your horses.

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