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Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

It's fine, those folks can just get angrier and angrier as the market makes their ICE cars more and more difficult and expensive to own.

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Also they’ll be dead soon enough and the world will just move on without them.

I'm still waiting for the EV that's a car instead of some kind of techbro reimagining of personal transportation with a 27" tv glued to the dash. So far the plug-in hybrid market is figuring that out first -- the Mazda CX90 is a real car. The VW ID3 gets close, but it still feels like someone tried to design a B-movie space ship.

There's a great market out there willing to buy B-movie space ships, but if EVs are going to be the default (and I think they are) they're going to have to get over the toys and start shipping cars.

Unfortunately, most ICE cars these days are buggy tablet-enhanced rolling privacy invasions, too. I think the trend is starting to abate but physical climate control buttons alone won't fix the less immediately obvious issues with tech bro car design

It’s fun driving a spaceship, though. :D I’m just glad we’re past the phase where apparently EVs had to look like science experiments. That’s one thing Tesla got right, they built a car that was electric, rather than building an electric vehicle.

Nissan is skipping the US for the 2026 model year due to tariff issues, but their Ariya is reasonably close to "a car, just electric". They designed it specifically to make transitioning from an ICE car less abrupt, including making the acceleration curve more gentle. Its cabin design leans minimal, but more in a luxury Japanese zen style than tech bro style.

The 2026 Leaf, which is based on the same platform, is pretty good in this regard too.

I like the "panoramic vision" screen across the base of the windshield on the BMW iX3. But wish they dropped the main screen. I only want the minimal one on the windshield, and a heads-up on the windshield. Big screens in cars are like CRT tube televisions. give me the future!

> the Mazda CX90 is a real car

A Mazda 3 has been my daily driver for the past decade and I really wanted to like the Mazda CX90 PHEV when I was buying a larger vehicle last year. It was pretty difficult to justify the CX90 PHEV, though. It gets 42 km of range on an 18 kWh battery (2.4 km/kWh). For comparison, the EV9 I ended up purchasing gets 450 km of range on a 100 kWh battery (4.5 km/kWh).

Don't get me wrong. The CX90 PHEV is still the most efficient CX90 by a wide margin. I had seriously considered buying one, but the efficiency was a deal-breaker. I don't love the giant touch screen on the EV9, but I can live with it. If I couldn't, I would have gone with the Ioniq 9 for more physical controls.

My Lightning is difficult to distinguish from an ICE F150 unless you know specifically what you're looking for. Especially the trims that do not have a larger-than-usual infotainment screen.

It didn't save the Lightning from being canceled, but at least they pumped out a hundred thousand of them or so before turning tail and giving the market to GM.

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