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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> We’re not going to see a low-tech EV for a long time.

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.

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> By "we" I'm guessing you mean the tariff protected domestic north american and european 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.

No drama.

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.

Exactly this whole discussion hinges on the idea that modern vehicle interfaces are somehow "fancy". Touchscreens, ARM boards running Linux, CMOS camera sensors, and drive-by-wire (heck Tesla is even adopting Ethernet) are totally commoditized. They were fancy 30 years ago, but today they are the boring cheap option.

It's pure nostalgia.

The nostalgia is understandably for fully user transparent, user controlled, "home" repairable cars .. which is understandable and a goal I'd like to see in EV's.

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.

>Cars of yore have car manuals

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.

If you go back to before 2001 with Google and BitTorrent, sure. Things did get easier with those. Full manufacturer service manuals getting leaked to the pirate bay for popular cars, not just the Haynes/Chilton manuals, though those were certainly there too.

> 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.

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.

The last of the V8 Interceptors... a piece of history?

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