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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

The big reason screens matter for electric cars is planning long range trips with stops at a battery charge location. Without the map/screen in-car you can’t integrate battery level with routing. Maybe you’re fine doing this manually, but range anxiety is the big reason consumers who can afford electric don’t buy electric, so it seems self defeating to remove features that help with that. The screens and stuff aren’t that much extra, often it helps save more on tooling/logistics for plastic buttons and dials.

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.

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> The big reason screens matter for electric cars is planning long range trips with stops at a battery charge location.

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.

Buttons are surprisingly expensive; not just the button itself but the wiring and the labor. Let's WAG at $20 per button. $20 * a few dozen buttons is real money.

No, buttons are not that expensive, that's silly. Cars have had buttons for ages, and they certainly weren't more expensive decades ago.

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.

Buttons are a lot more expensive than they used to be because they are require human labor for writing.

I assume you mistyped, and meant "wiring". I don't think so: usually, the buttons will be on assemblies with many buttons together (such as the A/C control panel on my 2015 car), with a PCB inside and probably a small microcontroller to talk on the CAN bus, so in the factory, the worker only needs to plug in one electrical connector. That's really no different than a touchscreen system, which also would presumably have a single connector for the whole assembly.

Yes, I understand that it's a cost-savings measure by the automakers, but that's not relevant to me as a car owner.

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?

Not many would be willing to pay $1000 more for more buttons.

If there was a model with buttons that was $1000 more than a model using a touchscreen to turn the wipers on and adjust the AC, I would absolutely pay the $1000.

I don't think I'm alone in this.

I drive a twenty year old Volvo, and I went to a dealer to buy a new one a few months ago. I didn't buy anything because basic functions are all behind crappy screen UIs instead of good old buttons.

I would definitely pay an extra $1,000 for a version with actual buttons... and a smaller screen.

Would you pay the extra $10k or $20k for the custom built interface, though? It’s only $1000 if the majority of buyers are willing to pay that (which they are not).

Maybe, maybe not. If you posed it to customers in that way, many would object. If you didn't, then a $1000 price increase wouldn't really be noticed.

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.

> 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.

The populations in developed nations are generally getting older, and people are living longer. Older people have bad eyesight for close-up things, so large-screen smartphones make a lot of sense.

Compared to how much auto makers inflated car prices the past few years?

The story for 2024 is the falling prices of EV's.

It's not $1000.

That's what your phone or tablet is for.

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.

I have no confidence that auto/carplay of today will work with whatever phone I have in 12 years. Car makers want to ship their cars and forget about them. They hate warranty work. Tesla does software updates but the others don't want to (they do but only when they must or if they can charge for them - the maps on my 12 year old car are way out of date because like most car buyers I won't pay to update them). I'm not even sure that phones in 12 years will have communications (usb, bluetooth, wifi) compatible with the infotainment system in today's new cars. I am sure I will not be using today's phone as 5g towers will be shutting down.

But if it's a documented API with open-source 'reference' app, everyone can make new versions, enhancements, etc.

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.

Where is carplay documented. Before you answer check the license to be sure you can use it.

i agree screens won't exist at any price in 10 years. Hope youre lasts.

I have a head unit from 2014 that has CarPlay. I have never updated it and it works fine with latest iOS. I don’t see why it can’t do the same for another ten years.

> I don’t see why it can’t do the same for another ten years.

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.

Thing is, we do have that "document API". CAN bus has been a thing for a long time (and is still in use even today), and has documented ways of communicating with everything modern Body Control Units and Engine Control Units do. For everything else, we have the ever valid DIN size standard. Both of these together make for an easy to upgrade system, including options to use Open Source head units. Just looking for a radio and nothing else? Go for it. Want all the fancy bells and whistles that Android Auto or Car Play provides? You got it. Even the steering wheel controls have a standard.

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.

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