Hacker News Reader

Almost all of the other things you want to get rid of are legal requirements in some regions. Auto start-stop is generally to meet emissions targets. European safety regulations have made all of the following required on all new vehicles sold since mid 2024: AEB detecting cars/pedestrians/cyclists, intelligent speed assist, lane departure assist, reversing camera or sensors, drowsiness warning and a few others. For any car or platform that will at some point end up on the European market you can thus expect manufacturers to make all of these standard.

There's a cost attached to them, but it was decided that that cost is worth the significant benefits in road safety for both the people in the vehicle and the people around the vehicle.

The costs were always there, just externalized in the form of needless vulnerable road user injuries and deaths. Society pays a huge price for old, unsafe, polluting vehicles.

> [..] emissions regulations [..]

Emission regulations have reduced the cost of cars, if you count the health and environmental cost that manufacturers and drivers simply externalized onto the pulic.

Yes, it became more expensive for the polluter, but rightfully so.

> But what about other expensive, complicated, things I want a choice to get rid of, major things I don't want to pay for, like .. auto stop-start, or the ability for the car to slam on the brakes by itself, or the ability for the car to decide to steer itself if it thinks I've strayed from the middle of the lane. Heck, I don't want a rear camera or blind spot monitoring, I'll check my blind spots myself. They're even working on mandating some sort of monitoring in the next few years to "detect" whether you might be drunk. What are the costs of all those sorts of things? All the sensors? All the computers? All the design/coding? The costs for maintaining all of it? The cost of the extra complexity? No mention of any of that?

Depends. The rearview camera thing? Probably not that expensive at this point; development costs have been amortized. Sensors probably are a bit more expensive.

The thing that chaps my ass about it is that there's so little commonality among parts between models and makers. We're 40+ years into the microprocessor revolution and ECMs are still mostly bespoke designs that have closed code running on them. Why? One way to deal with the design/coding costs would be to simply spread it across more automotive manufacturers, because at the end of the day, most of them are trying to achieve the same goals with regards to the function of the component. It's like looking at the different lug nut patterns between automakers... there's only so many ways to mount a wheel on a hub and you could reduce the tooling cost to make those wheels if you shared it with someone else.

> (Also don't get me started on the extra cost and complexity and loss of maintainability that emissions regulations have added to cars. They used to be dead simple and maintainable.)

It's nice to have breathable air, no?

You didn’t talk about the biggest cost saver: not buying oversized SUVs. Cars got expensive because everyone was buying giant SUVs and smaller sedans and hatchbacks which usually covered 20-30k market, became less popular and therefore profitable to sell.

Safety/emissions features are a much different animal than giant 15-inch touchscreens, seat warmers, persistent mobile data uplinks, and 25 buttons on the steering wheel.

Most of the things you listed are both a good idea and legally required.

Automatic braking systems are only a good idea if they are 100% reliable, and everyone here will attest that no technology is ever 100% reliable. I'll reserve my judgement about whether it's a good idea until the first class-action lawsuits for spurious braking have been settled.

You dying and/or killing and maiming others also has costs though. You present it as a one sided thing.

The keyboard you typed your message had a cost, yet apparently that was worthwhile so that all of us could contemplate your points.