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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Citroën Ami is about as low tech as you can get.

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.

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The Citroen Ami is technically not a passenger car, but a 'quadricycle'. That's why it gets away with less tech.

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.

> 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.

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.

For some reason new electric cars have to be expensive. A 2024 leaf with the 212mi-range battery starts at 36k, a Model 3 starts at 38k. I want cheap and minimal, like a honda fit without the infotainment garbage and manditory data collection.

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.

>Cruise control is low tech and negligible cost, especially on an electric vehicle.

Radar cruise control is not, and may be what the OP was thinking of.

Not necessarily radar, these days. My car (2023 Civic) does it entirely with the camera at the top of the windshield. Very well, too, in the daytime (it can get confused and brake spuriously in oncoming headlight glare at night).

Wouldn't it be fun if electric cars were the same way as PC's. Plug and play the parts you want, switch motor / battery.. choose a new chassis as you wish. And LED lights of course.

The only reason that exists for PCs is the same reason we even use the word “PC”: they’re all just legacy holdovers from manufacturers copying IBM.

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.

Also, server hardware. It isn't as it is only kept around for those stubborn gamer enthusiast. The enthusiast market more or less is an extra revenue stream for a lot of hardware that is developed for the server market first.

It is a bit more complex than that of course and generally speaking you are right.

Server hardware has abandoned a good bit of interchangeability too. While you can still usually count on socketed CPUs, socketed memory, and interchangeable storage, there's a lot of proprietary components used on servers beyond that. Motherboard and power supply form factors are often proprietary, and it is not uncommon for expansion cards to be proprietary or non-standard implementations.

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.

even supermicro, which used to be the goto for DIY servers, has been trending toward more proprietary (and more expensive) components.

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.

Yeah, ATX/EATX exist, and they probably will exist in non-zero production for another 50 or more years given the historical momentum.

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.

Also workstations. Why would i want an RTX 4090 for music production for example. Or a laptop which will be permanently attached to a bigger display a keyboard a mouse and a USB hub.

Traditional, expandable towers certainly still exist. I just bought three of them.

I didn't say they didn't exist, I said the market is shrinking. They used to be an ubiquitous form factor, they're now uncommon outside of the enthusiast market. Only 20% of PCs are desktops of any kind, and a good portion of those are now SFF or other designs.

They kind of are. But at manufacturer level. Everyone now has like 3-4 chassis options and they build cars on top of that.

Xiaomi's new SU7 is supposed to support a number of accessories like that:

https://www.tiktok.com/@hu_changwen/video/736154455749586460...

> same way as PC's. Plug and play the parts you want

That’s no longer true for the most consumer laptops.

And then get bluescreens while driving. Modularity will always come with some degree of flakiness, which is acceptable in PCs, but not in cars.

You mean like the magic reboot you do in Teslas because the infotainment shit crashes in them? I've seen infotainment systems crash in so many cars, and people have to call the dealer to get the fucking Konami code to reboot the system. Don't you dare unplug the battery to reset it either, because you'll likely fuck something up even worse.

This stability thing is just a weak excuse used by car companies.

I may be wrong, but I think infotainment does not have any access to vital parts of the car (engine, brakes, steering etc.) so has no way to mess it up and kill someone. Hence lower quality standards in it, as it's not safety-critical.

The vast majority of PCs sold today are not that way anymore.

Man I can dream! That sounds incredible.

Yes, if you want to go low-tech, Renault (and Dacia) is a good option.

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.

Dacia Spring is made in China though so it will get hit hard by the recent taxes.

> Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it!

And the reversing camera is necessary because modern cars have tiny submarine like windows.

They have terrible rear visibility because modern crash standards (and the laws of physics) require that. 80s cars had much better rear visibility, but the roofs would easily flatten and those cars were generally deathtraps for any kind of crash. Modern cars handle crashes much better with stronger roof pillars and a high "beltline" (the line between the metal parts of the doors and the windows) and side-impact protection beams in the doors, but that comes at the cost of visibility.

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.

And it's required by U.S. law.

...because cars have shit visibility. It's a solution to a problem that was created.

> Similarly, Kia Soul has a reversing camera… and that's about it! No radar, lane assist, carplay or anything like that.

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.

You can buy aftermarket AA/CarPlay decks for like $250 that are actually pretty decent. Imagine how much cheaper the automakers can build them for...

They technically do not have to “build” anything. All cars already have a screen, it is just a matter of programming the firmware to allow a phone to use it for CarPlay/Android Auto.

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.

Isnt the recerse camera a regulatory requirement for new cars in the US?

They get paid to put it in. Another revenue stream.

There is no licensing cost for Carplay, nor does Apple Pay car makers. It is purely a customer satisfaction feature. The implementation is technically pretty simple to setup on the scale of any mass-market vehicle. You can think of it as a web page with a video player on it connected via USB/Wifi.

Erm, have you ever seen a German car? Pick any Audi, Mercedes, BMW and god forbid a Porsche and you'll have an options catalogue of epic proportions.

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.

It can be done, but at a high cost. None of those cars you listed are inexpensive by any means.

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.

https://electrek.co/2021/05/04/citroen-ami-small-electric-ca...

> 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.

The downside of Zoe is Renault. For its tech price should be much less.

Do you mean Citroen Ami?

Thanks. Corrected.

And yet, in the late '80s or early '90s, the future was supposed to be made-to-order cars that were delivered to your door. If anything, we've regressed from the level of customization that was available decades ago.

Dacia Spring is also a good choice.

There are new EU rules that apply to new cars. All of them have to have some safety related features including automatic braking, rear view cameras and equipment to check your alcohol level. The latter does not do anything yet but it has to be there as prepation for the future

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