Ask HN: Why is nobody manufacturing low tech electric cars in 2024?
Just let me drive. I don't need fancy screens.
If you want something more car-shaped, the Renault Zoe has very few tech feature.
Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it! No radar, lane assist, carplay or anything like that.
Cstomers only want 3 things. A comfortable ride, a safe journey, and $thing. The problem is, everyone's one more thing is different. I want DAB radio, you want cruise control, she wants lane assist, he wants automatic parking.
Creating a dozen different SKUs for all those things is complicated. Getting regulatory approval for every variation is expensive.
So most manufacturers sell only a few variations of their models.
And really, the subset of the market that still follows these standards is small, and shrinking. The vast majority of PCs today are laptops with few, if any, swappable parts.
Pretty much the only segment where this still exists is the enthusiast subset of the gaming PC market.
It is a bit more complex than that of course and generally speaking you are right.
Things like ATX power supplies, ATX/mATX motherboards, tower cases, are pretty squarely for the PC gaming segment now. It's difficult to even find a "business" motherboard these days, where as 20 years ago, they were nearly all designed with this use-case first. There's ASRock Rack type stuff that targets some custom server-type use cases, but the big server manufacturers make their own proprietary stuff.
there are options out there for itx and matx server chassis, even ATX and EATX.
Silverstone in particular has some interesting options for rack mount workstations based around 360mm AIO water-cooling, ATX boards and PSUs, consumer GPUs, etc. though those are meant more for the half and quarter rack enclosures designed to be installed in a home or office environment.
But most of the market is Dell/Lenovo/HP/Supermicro (and in China, a couple other players).
Silverstone is an absolutely tiny business by comparison. Their US office is 1/6th of a shared warehouse space in an LA suburb, next to a laminate flooring retailer.
https://www.tiktok.com/@hu_changwen/video/736154455749586460...
This stability thing is just a weak excuse used by car companies.
That’s no longer true for the most consumer laptops.
Before recent legislative troubles (lol), France was also working on a law that would give consumer unions (think iFixit but with publicly available finance) the right to give "repairability indexes" on multiple products, including cars, that would have to be presented to the buyer, even second-hand buyers.
This is the correct answer. And on top of this, new cars also compete with used cars. The very few people who don’t want any $thing are often not picky buyers and are more likely to just buy a cheaper used car. They wouldn’t be a buyer even if automakers did build a car for them.
And the reversing camera is necessary because modern cars have tiny submarine like windows.
Luckily, modern technology solves this, and more, if you get the backup camera (now legally required in US) and the rear blind-spot-detection radar. Visibility with those is much better than it was in the old days, as long as you know how to use them. However, they do all come at a cost, especially the blind-spot radars.
The Renault Zoe has been discontinued, replaced by the Renault 5 e, which has ADAS and lots of other electric features.
Starting with model year 2023, the Kia Soul also has all the tech required by law: https://thebrakereport.com/kia-enhances-adas-for-2023-soul It also has Car Play now.
According to Kia’s website, the cheapest Soul you can buy has CarPlay/Android Auto. Standard feature on the “LX”, 8in touchscreen.
Does it even cost anything for an automaker to allow phones to use the screen for CarPlay/Android Auto? The cost savings must be so miniscule, and the convenience of being able to use your phone to navigate/listen to music and other audio is immense.
The only reason an automaker does not include the ability to use CarPlay/Android Auto is because they want to lock-in the customer to their UI and avoid becoming a commodity.
Every car has a radio. And DAB support has no real effect on cost and I don't think the radio chip is what OP has in mind for "low tech".
The rest of that has a very clear divide. Cruise control is low tech and negligible cost, especially on an electric vehicle. Lane assist and automatic parking are high tech and need pricey extra parts to implement.
And this logic doesn't explain why plenty of low tech non-electric cars exist.
Someone else already replied about how the examples you gave changed to add flashy high tech stuff.
Radar cruise control is not, and may be what the OP was thinking of.
Different SKUs is an absolute non-issue in the car industry when it comes to tech gizmos and other optional extras. You want different suspension? No biggie. Manual vs automatic? Sure. Different kind of entertainment system? Of course. Different (branded) speakers? Yup.
Anything is optionable.
By contrast, budget-friendly Japanese cars don't have options like this; you get maybe 3 option packages to choose from and that's it. Manufacturing is much simpler and gets better economies of scale when everyone gets the same thing.
> Citroën’s Ami, a small $6,000 electric “car,” is apparently coming to the US as part of new electric car subscription service.
No thank you.
Required safety systems include emergency breaking, emergency lane-keeping, intelligent speed assistance (car must use cameras or GPS to determine current speed limit), driver attention warning systems and many more.
That fancy screen is really not a cost factor. These days you can buy after-market screens with Car Play and Android auto support for 100 EURs or less. But all the safety systems needs lots of sensors, and also the ability to auto-brake and auto-steer in emergency situations.
https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/EN/Articles/StV/Roadtraffic/...
Twizy and Ami are not regular passenger vehicles. I am sure there are less requirements for them.
Edit: Correction, it's the most popular electric car un Europe.
> by the end of 2020, the Zoe ranked as the all-time best selling plug-in car in Europe
Which is a rather recent development and certainly a protectionist move and will hinder adaptation massively.
You need the full suite for lane controls, attention monitoring, emergency brake systems, etc...
It is simply impossible to now release low tech cars and it is a political decision by the EU that is highly questionable.
https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/publications/eu-road-safety-towar...
Per Poi Dog Pondering:
Well the ancient Egyptians and the other Africans
The Mayans, the Incas, and all the Polynesians
All around the world, a long long time ago
People would walk wherever they had to go
Despite many years of hand-wringing about environmental impacts of air travel, almost nothing has been done to address this.
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/661d3b95ac3da...
The problem is that even in reasonable sized towns not having a car is very limiting. The solution is much better public transport - more frequent is the big thing. That is the difference
On the other hand I did not have a car in London (which has very frequent public transport until quite late in the night), nor in Manchester (not as good, but OK) until I had a child. It was no problem. paying for the occasional taxi and hiring cars for trips when needed was a lot cheaper than running a car and more convenient too.
> People would walk wherever they had to go
Or had their slaves carry them in a litter
Wish this was true. I wanted to buy one for myself, but even the most expensive aftermarket CarPlay units are absolutely terrible. Laggy & unresponsive touch screens, underpowered internals, gaudy designs etc.
I wonder why it’s still such a challenge to make something that feels as good as a first gen iPad from 2010.
Cars have a unique set of operating requirements. During the course of a year, my car could be -40F or 160F inside, depending on if it’s winter or summer. Electronics that operate reliably in that temp range are expensive.
Basic ICE cars are essentially sold at cost, sometimes as loss leaders, because the manufacturers make a long-tail of money supplying parts and maintenance for the cars over their lifetime; for 10-20 years they now have a (variable) recurring revenue stream. So a lot of automakers' incentives are to get as large of a fleet as possible.
Electric cars inherently have much less of a maintenance burden because there are way fewer moving parts in a motor versus an engine. For example, there's no oil changes ever 3k miles or timing belts to replace ever 30k miles.
That means, for electric car companies, business model options are
a) introduce SaaS subscriptions for electronic features (a - la Tesla Autopilot premium, supercharger network subscriptions)
b) introduce unnecessary complexity to increase maintenance revenue (gullwing doors)
c) sell at a profit margin off the factory. Can have higher margins and higher total profit for luxury cars versus basic cars
And Tesla's recent push towards robotaxis of their existing fleet would be a totally killer disruption of the unit economics by generating recurring revenue off their fleet.
So all the incentives for electric cars point towards high tech luxury, not basic eco-cars. There may be an exception to the rule in some countries, and those may be related to government subsidies.
All the manufacturing are talking about is the need for the 'vehicle as a platform' to sell subscriptions, services and driver data. I've seen so many PowerPoints about this, it's nauseating.
A modern ICE outlasts the rest of the car. You might replace the alternator or water pump, but those are made by third parties not the OEM. You will replace the oil, but again, the OEM doesn't make that.
The dealers make a lot of money on after sales, but (except Tesla) those are independent third parties. The manufacture doesn't get much after sales.
OEM parts do sell for more than third party. And so there is money in OEM parts, but after 5 years most people are buying replacement parts from the third party (the OEM doesn't make those parts - they are buying from a third party and putting a markup on them). Sometimes people will buy OEM parts instead of a third party as OEM tends to give much higher quality vs random third party.
Not just that but fuel economy regulations, (like CAFE in the USA) mandated average fleet fuel economy that must be met for automakers to avoid fines. GM had to sell a bunch of Cavaliers to be able to sell a bunch of (profitable) Silverados and Suburbans. With hybrids and EVs these days, regulations no longer favor the small car.
They sell you battery packs for $20,000 around every 8-10 years.
Additionally, CarPlay/Android Auto is a hard requirement for me and many other consumers these days. I wouldn’t consider a car - gas or electric - without it. I opted for a Mercedes gas car in part because there was no overall good electric car with wireless CarPlay in my price range.
No need for all that custom UI tech in the car, just provide a documented API and open-source app you can run on your phone or even dedicate a tablet for it.
Proprietary screens and their supporting computers will be obsolete quickly, will break easily and be exorbitantly expensive to fix/replace, and of course there's a good chance they will also surveil everything you do, mostly for the benefit of the manufacturer.
Just say no to smart appliances, especially something as central as your personal transport.
And for sure, assuming a popular standard physical/radio interface is used now, it will still be supported, either through backwards-compatibility in the standard, or with gateway dongles etc, far into the future.
I have no confidence you'll be able to get a replacement screen or computer mainboard etc for any car you buy today, in 12 years, and almost certainly not in 20,30, etc.
i agree screens won't exist at any price in 10 years. Hope youre lasts.
There is no reason it cannot work for 10 years, but also no reason it has to. Computer companies have a bad habit for dropping support for stuff when it is a few years old.
So the question is, why do they keep re-designing the head unit as a monolithic brick, and make it non-replaceable? I can't say for sure why, but my guess is that they've since added their own team for "Smart this" and "subscription that", and removing those sources of revenue is far more expensive than rebuilding the head unit each year.
But that doesn't explain why automakers are moving the regular controls from physical buttons to the touchscreen. That's the part that I consider a serious problem.
If the added expense is so onerous to the automaker, then they can raise the price of the car to make up for it. I'd buy that, where I won't buy a car that has inferior controls. Why would I, when there is still a plethora of older cars available that better meet my needs?
But it doesn't matter how many are willing. All I'm saying is that this is a thing that matters a great deal to me. It's pretty close to a dealbreaker. Even if I'm the only one that feels that way, it's still how I feel.
The auto industry appears to not want to make cars that I'd actually want to buy. Fair enough.
But I do find it interesting that one of the things that I was always taught was a strength of our economic system is that it will produce a wide enough variety of goods that pretty much everyone will find a version of a product that they'd actually want. That it appears that it can't looks like a kind of failure to me.
heck, finding a sub-6" cellphone is next to impossible, outright impossible if you want high end features. and phones are way easier to create in different configurations than cars are.
I don't think I'm alone in this.
I would definitely pay an extra $1,000 for a version with actual buttons... and a smaller screen.
The big reason touchscreens are so favored is because they don't require that you finalize your user-interface design decisions so early in the design cycle. With physical buttons, you have to design molds etc. to have the parts ready for final assembly. What if you want to make a change? Whereas with a touchscreen UI, you can worry about UI details any time and just make changes in software, even after the car has been sold if necessary. So for the early design process, you just specify the size screen you want, and design the molds for the bezels etc.
Fast forward to 2020s and that's exactly what's going on. There is a lot of EV "cars" cars in China that barely qualify as a car (e.g. Wuling Hongguang) and cost as low as 20,000 RMB (~US$3,000).
I would not want to buy those, though. The current EV boom is forced by planned economy with huge subsidies, which always attracts "wrong crowd" in China. There are hundreds of brands right now, but once the subsidies dry up, 99% of them will shut down, leaving unsupported hastily slapped together cars to rot.
If we changed something (either legal, planned obsolesce, ???) so that cars only last 3 years, there would be a large market for bare bones cars as people who are cheap would buy them. (and many people who today buy new cars would be forced to buy a much cheaper car since their car no longer as more than scrap value). However the economics of cars mean anyone who would buy a bare bones car buys used.
We’re not going to see a low-tech EV for a long time. In my opinion, we’re not ever going to see one. And respectfully to you and all the other folks here who feel like you, I don’t think you represent the average driver in this regard.
Have a look at last years low end BYD domestic market EV offers, there's a crazy amount of choice in style, design, and no frills offerings.
By "we" I'm guessing you mean the tariff protected domestic north american and european markets.
The domestic BYD Seagull sells for under $10K USD on home soil and isn't being exported much ATM:
https://www.drive.com.au/news/2023-byd-seagull-unveiled-not-...
China spins out a lot of variations on a theme, there's bound to be limited run versions with little more than the absolute bare essentials to have a functional EV - the asian phone market is an indicator of the kind of range that is just not seen in the western markets.
Yes, I apologize for the western-centric approach there, though I would extend that position to the UAE and Saudi-Arabia.
The NA OEMs are not interested in bringing very low-cost vehicles to market. And the low-cost OEMs from Europe haven’t really been able to reach the American market. aside from a very outlier products.
Odd aside, these days "low tech" (minimal effort, low cost) cars are going to have screens and control by wire interfaces for many things - it's 2024 and touch screens are a throw away disposable item compared to physical controls, tension cables, routing looms for every physical switch and interface light bulb, etc.
In a sense the ideal notion of a "low tech car" is now a hand crafted artisan object.
It's pure nostalgia.
Open source code, no phone home or hidden backdoors, optionally no wireless or external connectivity other than by on board physical port, etc.
Cars of yore have car manuals, manifolds and heads can be replaced with official parts or scrap yard parts or third party vendor alternatives, etc.
I use EV's for work related applications, I'm still holding off a personal EV until I can find something in Australia that fits my list. Until then I do most local area travel via walking, electric scooter, or homebuilt EV trike with basket for shopping - there's a Land Cruiser for the rural trips and hauling loads but that's more a once per week driver.
No, most cars of yore only had manuals available to dealership technicians, and no one else. Genuine manufacturer-made manuals were difficult or impossible to find.
Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.
> Everyone else bought Haynes or Chilton "manuals" which were really done by reverse-engineering.
They did the job and it was hardly difficult to access dealership manuals .. which were more often than not close to the Haynes manuals.
There's a healthy trade in manuals and photocopies of such. The nearest city had an entire shop soley devoted to car manuals back in the 1980s .. it might still be there or not (given the torrents of manual PDFs kicking about today).
I currently live in a town with a large motor museum (rocket cars and steamers and all sorts) and a wealth of machines from 100+ years of agriculture .. plenty of sheds with shops; old tractors, the last holden V8's, even one iteration of the sheep shearing robot we built (in the 1980s).
It's not that difficult to maintain old cars, the parts can be hard to scrounge at times, failing that it can be a wait on a machinist to fab a replacement, but overall there's less mystery than with more recent vehicles.
>Euro NCAP – Europe’s leading automotive safety industry body – has stated that from 2026 new guidance will be introduced over physical buttons and touchscreens.
>Euro NCAP’s rules are not mandatory for manufacturers to follow, but the threat of losing points will likely impact the decisions of many of the leading brands in the years ahead.
Although I would prefer a hard ban of touchscreen-only car controls in EU countries, which would obviously have more of an impact.
[1]: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/driving-tech/is-the-beginni... (5th Mar 2024)
- dumb TVs, or open-source TVs.
- dumb phones, or completely open-source smart phones.
- dumb EVs, or completely open-source EVs.
I think the profit for open source stuff is not guaranteed, so funding a company is hard. People who fund companies want lock-in, patents, product monopoly. They don't want something that can be copied and productized by another company that had no R&D costs and then undercut in price.
that said, it is definitely something society wants.
What use are dumb phones (i.e., feature phones)? They're only good for actually talking to people, and the only people I know who regularly use their phones for talking are my elderly relatives (in their 80s). Everyone younger than that uses their phones for: texting, games, web, various apps such as banking, etc. Actual talking is fairly rare, and usually only with some business (e.g. calling the doctor's office to schedule an appointment because they don't have a website reservation system, and even these places are dying out or moving online slowly).
This post says "Just let me drive. I don't need fancy screens."
An analogy with a phone might be to just talk to people.
There are plenty more reasons for a dumb phone. Limited distraction for self/kids. Long battery time. privacy. sovereignty would align with open source, not necessarily dumb phone (you control the software)
Sure, I'm just pointing out that I don't think very many people these days actually want such a thing. Outside of HN (which seems to have a lot of very anti-tech people curiously), all the people I know, of all age ranges, simply don't actually use phones much for voice calling. When they do, it's usually just for talking to businesses as I said before, not for family and friends. Instead, people are using phones for so many other non-voice-calling things which simply won't work on a dumbphone.
I feel like this is one of those things where people are appealing to nostalgia, but no one actually puts their money where their mouth is. Also, last I heard, dumbphones (flipphones) really are still available in many markets for people who want them, but almost no one does except perhaps for some elderly people. So I think this is really just people whining about the "good ol' days" while forgetting they weren't that good.
And the subsidies are fading but aren't gone for good.
And because everyone's copying Tesla's unusable interface for some unknown reason. I doubt Musk would recognize a rotating physical a/c control if it fell off a Falcon and hit him on the head.
Or when you simply can't ... figure ... out ... the "smart" turn stalk?
They're from the same "material design" hipster insanity that removed shadowing and numerous other visual cues from UI design that we still suffer today.
I wish there was a website that had a guide for how to disable the 4g chip for every car model.
Maybe it's just where I'm living?
I thought it was because they increased the efficiency requirements for standard wheelbase vehicles.
Intended effect: manufacturers make more efficient vehicles.
Actual effect: manufacturers make gigantic, less efficient, more expensive vehicles.
Most of those things are low cost, high margin extras. Removing them wouldn't really decrease the cost of the car for the manufacturer. A lot of the time, if you don't pay for the extra's, they are included in the car anyway because it's not worth the effort of customizing the build. They are just disabled in software.
I first came across this 20+ years ago working for an office equipment manufacturer. We had to add code for the service people to enable a feature in the machine that was already present (and pretty expensive to build), but not turned on until the customer paid for it. I remember at the time asking if it wouldn't piss customers off to know that they were paying for something that was already installed, but it didn't seem to faze the Marketing people in the least. Then again, the buyer was someone in a corporate office who would probably never actually see the machine anyway.
(I assume you're asking about the US, because there are low-tech options in many other countries.)
If you want a low-tech car, your best bet is to buy an early 2000s model of something that is well-regarded and can continue to be maintained long term (eg. Toyota). There are a lot of Internet resources that cherry-pick these desirable models and years for you.
From my research, it's boils down to:
1. Car is still a wealth marker. Not enough people think about it just as a means of transpiration. If they do they mostly use public transport or uber/escooters.
2. Car frame - you need to meet security standards, it cost a lot
3. Battery - current technology is expensive
4. Car lobby - especially in Europe, there are large tariffs to bring EV cars from Asia.
Definitely not in the US.
I do think the reason we havn't seen this class yet is that EV's are yuppie cars. They are sold at a premium for people who think this is the thing that will solve CC. When really taking busses, even petrol ones would probably do more.
The next biggest issue is regulation. Depending on jurisdiction, it's likely that things from backup cameras to autobraking and more are required or will be shortly. Even drowsy driver and drunk driver protections are already in laws/regs for future adoption.
Reality: Fast N Furious guys realize the ECU is tunable, break all the parameters, remove the muffler, and make their engine explode within 20,000 miles in the noisiest way possible.
Yes, it really is as simple as that. Legality aside, making such a car a reality is at the very least 1B€ in development cost (you have to do a new electronics architecture and probably a new platform variant). You will never make a profit on such a car. The customer base is tiny and expects low prices, but low prices can only be achieved with high volumes.
That it can't meet regulatory safety standards. E.g. drowsiness detection or crash detection to call emergency services mean that any car can not be "low tech" in any meaningful sense. So the best thing you can possibly get is a high tech car, where user facing technologies have been removed. Needlessly to say, the market for that is miniscule.
Try a coat.
If you look around you discover that cycling cities tend to be places with harsh winters. While cycling dies off in winter, there are some die-hards go year round and they will report what you need if you ask them.
The rest is all the automakers run by the same consultanting firm and they don't really compete all that hard with eachother anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
Still much more expensive than the equivalent cars with a combustion engine though.
-William Adama, BSG
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/japans...
It still has a big screen though.
Unfortunately most citizens do not even understand the tech so they do not even know that the crappy car-app is actually connected to the OEM servers like the car, they do not even know the car collect gazillion of data and so on. So the OEM can do pretty whatever they want, the percentage of people who understand is so little that nobody hear them.
The tech components of cars makes up a small fraction of the cost, but represents significant value.
The pretty-easy-and-cheap part is adding glitzy screens to cars. Doing that gets most people all excited...and willing to shell out far more money.
In an extremely well-run socialist country, there'd probably be good, low-tech electric cars.
However, the price you pay for a car is substantially more than the marginal cost of producing it.
So that industry is a famine-or-feast industry. Either they are losing money in mind-boggling quantities, or they are making money in mind-boggling quantities. There is not a lot of in between.
Unfortunately, the connection to the question the original poster asked is that they basically can't risk not selling a car because it doesn't have some hot feature that most of the market wants, so you won't see a screen-free car made today. Putting $100 of hardware in to seal the deal is a no-brainer in their profit model. (Though they will trim every penny on it, as they do everything else; it may seem like a contradiction but if you think about it enough it'll make sense. Consider the term "bullet-point feature" in our industry.) Until the market as a whole screams for it, it won't exist.
Search profit margins for Toyota/Ford/Volkswagen/Mercedes/BMW/Honda/etc
All are in the 5% to 10% range, which is objectively a middle of the road profit margin.
Mind boggling is what tech/oil/pharma/finance does, at 20%, 30%, even 40%+ profit margins. Which is why they are at the top of market cap rankings.
Which is why the question is valid for EVs. There's about to be a revolutionary drop in the core cost of a car: batteries, motor, brakes. That's it!
Yep, that's exactly what happened in the Soviet Union with the Lada... ... depending on your definition of a "good car".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcimoto
Maybe it will live on if someone buys the IP.
But, there's a bound to how low tech a car can be, especially for companies who are looking ahead to increasingly prescriptive safety regulations in the future. Cars sold in the U.S. need a lot of sensors, computers, and mechanisms to take control of the vehicle away from you when it thinks it's necessary. It's just the law. The idea of a simple box with four wheels and some number of motors is pretty much not a viable option, legally speaking.
indirect:
because we live in "capitalism"? eg. companies are "in it" for the money / the profit!?
* if i sell you a car, i want to sell you the most expensive car you are willing to buy, because that increases my profit.
cars are products, which you buy once every xx years, not every week, not 2 or 3 at once etc. so as a company i have to "make out of this single sale" as much as possible in terms of money.
i call this the "SUV effect": make everything just a little bit "bigger" with every iteration of the product to justify a price-hike ... accompanied by ads, which tell you, why you need this & that additional feature ... repeat!! ;))
just my 0.02€
The battery bus should be 2 wires (+ and -) and automotive-grade Cat 6. The voltage on the 2 wires should vary between 200 V DC and 400 V DC as the batteries are charged and drained. Any kind of battery can be connected in parallel. You can connect NiCad, NiMH, Li-Ion, LiPo, and AGM batteries all in parallel provided you put the right number of cells in each battery module to get the correct voltage. You can not put 2 different chemistries of batteries in series. So everything on the battery bus should be connected in parallel. The Cat 6 should run a variant of CANbus tunneled through Ethernet. If a battery can not handle the voltage on the battery bus (for example because the bus is at 200 V, and the battery is charged to 400 V) then the battery should disconnect. This is easily accomplished with small DC motors driving screws, just like low-battery cut-offs do.
Battery bays should be standard sizes. 18" x 30" x 6" would be good. That can fit under seats, under a truck's bed, and under a trunk or frunk. They can even fit under floorboards.
Motors should be housed in modular, sealed units with gearboxes and motor controllers. There should be spaces to install motors on every axle or even on every wheel. The gearing inside the motor units should give an output that is about the speed we expect from a car tire going down the road.
All batteries and motors should connect to the some parallel battery bus. If you want more range, add another battery. If you want AWD, add another motor or two.
All drive components should be connected by CANbus. Replacing your accelerator pedal should be as easy as a few screws and an electrical connector.
Brakes and steering still need mechanical linkages to comply with safety laws, for now.
A standard battery bus would enable other cool things: 1. Any car could have a generator to make it a 2-stage hybrid. 2. RVs could use the same batteries and generators as electric cars. 3. Off-grid applications and grid-tie applications could use the same batteries as electric cars. This makes it even easier to tie car batteries into the power grid. 4. Because battery busses and battery bays are standard, a medium-sized company can build capacitor banks that drop in. 5. Power transfers between 2 batteries on the bus can work, coordinated by CANbus-over-Ethernet. If you are driving down a mountain, you can regeneratively brake into your capacitor bank, then slowly charge your batteries from that bank. 6. Grid-scale battery deployments can use the same batteries as cars. The marginal cost of making another 1 million batteries is a lot less if you already made 2 million of them. 7. Battery chargers that plug into wall power, power inverters, air compressors, and other devices can also be slotted into standard battery bays and interface into standard battery buses. This gives a lot more flexibility to a work truck than the built-in air compressor some brands like to include. Imagine a 2-stage diesel-electric medium-duty truck (that's the size of a UPS truck or a big Amazon delivery truck) that has a hydraulic compressor in a battery bay so it can lift or lower the truck and a lift gate on the rear end. 8. You could buy a cheap electric car with a single Li-Ion battery and a single motor on the front axle. Later, you could add 2 more batteries to almost triple the range and another motor on the rear axle. Not all motors have to deliver the same horsepower, so your little 85 horse-power commuter car could become a 300 horse-power AWD machine. More upgrades could turn it into a 700 horse-power muscle car. This would be the biggest selling point. Buying a stripped-down electric car would be an aspirational purchase. The buyer's goal would be to one day upgrade it to a long-range supercar. Cars could grow with buyers. A kid's first car could be upgrade to AWD when they realize it slides on snow and ice. After a wreck totals the car, the motors and batteries could be moved to a newer model. 9. Concerns over recycling batteries and motors go away if most cars use the same interfaces to the batteries and motors. Old electric cars can be parted out like old Chevys. There is never a reason for an old Chevy small-block V8 to go to waste; millions of cars can use them. Ditto standard electric batteries and motors.
SAE and IEEE should coordinate to establish standards, then we should be able to swap out drive train parts as easily as we swap out wheels and tires on our cars today.
I wonder if the free market will adopt such standards, or if it will take regulations to push big auto makers into standardizing battery buses, packs, and motors.
However there are not that popular outside Japan, and inside Japan many are being used for food and home delivery.
Not only they're small and lightweight for urban commuting, the fact that for countries with frequent raining and hot climates they're much better proposition compared to the more accident prone motorcycles and EV bikes.
For normal and sub-compact EV car, BYD Seagull is a game changer and without country and state protections, they will sell by truck loads of them, and at less than USD10K selling price in China now it's a steal [4].
I think Seagull is the main reason US, Europe and many countries around the world suddenly have the new tariffs for EV cars. Most of the tariffs were announced just several months Seagull was announced to the world, and they're not a coincident. When EV cars are dirt cheap to buy, operate and maintain you can say good bye to the local car manufacturers (even the EV ones) if there's no protection. Apparently and obviously the much touted free trades policy only works when it's for you but not against you, c'est la vie [5][6].
[1] Toyota C+pod:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_C%2Bpod
[2] Toyota COMS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_COMS
[3] BYD Seagull:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull
[4] Why a small China-made EV has global auto execs and politicians on edge:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/22/byd-seagull-ev-puts-global-a...
[5] How will new EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles work?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/12/how...
[6] Biden hits Chinese electric cars and solar cells with higher tariffs:
I had assumed the overly loud voices complaining about this "issue" were just the latest iteration of intelligent people inventing convoluted reasons to go along with their political tribe's insane policy preferences.
Like if you're a Republican on HN you can't just openly deny climate change exists any more (though a few still try), you want plausible deniability that your intense love for nuclear power isn't just an excuse to spread outdated lies about renewables.
Similarly you can loudly announce that you'll never buy an EV, and then when people put you in the "coal rolling idiot" bucket you can surprise them by revealing that it's actually a ridiculously niche concern about too much tech that you've invented to go along with your political peers in their hatred of EVs. And people reading then move you into a subtly different subsection of the anti-EV crank bucket in their mind.
Every time I look at electric cars there's always some insane choice, e.g. the brake lights don't turn on when regenerative braking is active, even though your car is rapidly decelerating. The touch screens are also a safety concern - you can't change the music or skip ahead on a podcast without taking your eyes off the road for a meaningful amount of time. The fact that you're paying well over the median price for a new car makes it even less appealing.
FWIW I don't own a car and I'm not in a hurry to get one.