Hacker News Reader

I think it's at least in part because you have to meet a whole lot of regulations to make a car street legal. You can start with a simple 3k vehicle, but by time you've made the changes needed to pass all the requirements it'll be over 10k.

It's worth noting that the majority of these regulations are at least nominally about safety.

View on HN

A lot of the regulations are also about emissions, so conveniently that goes away with electric cars. But then your problem is that the battery is expensive. For now.

Emissions regulations add little to the cost of any one car or model. There's no secret sauce to catalytic converters or computerized fuel injectors that everyone's powertrains all copy or share.

The cost of distinct models is mostly in crash survivability and related regulated safety systems.

So why not just reuse the known design that works. No one said this proposed $3k car had to look different?

This whole argument is bunk. Just settle on a design (perhaps borne out of your higher end model) let it trickle down your product line (unchanged) other than stripping useless gadgets, etc.

Why do people assume those in the market for a $3k car care that it have a brand new body style?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com