Why can't we have something like a 1980s small Toyota truck with a Tesla motor drivetrain and no onboard computers other than simple microcontrollers for the various systems (charging, etc.), no streaming wifi / GPS data collection, and no need for software updates because everything was properly designed to work with the hardware before the vehicle was sold?
Such a setup would likely be cheaper to manufacture as well. The only way to get anything like that now is to pay a custom mechanic to put a Tesla motor into an old vehicle, which is kind of ridiculous.
It has become illegal to make and sell cars with the electronics feature set of 1980.
E.g. every new car now will have to have reversing camera, event data recorder, drowsiness and distraction detection, lane-keeping assist and advanced emergency braking.
I'm not sure if it's practical to do that with "no onboard computers other than simple microcontrollers" - of course there are some microcontrollers that rival the computers I grew up with, but the complexity of the involved software is inherent in the required functionality.
And since you have to pack the car with all these sensors, cameras and compute power anyway for safety reasons, all the privacy-invasive features don't require much if any extra hardware cost.
>It has become illegal to make and sell cars with the electronics feature set of 1980.
Where are you that this holds true? That it's illegal to not include those things?
I very recently bought a brand new car (within 2022) and while it does have a reverse camera, it does not have drowsiness/distraction detection, nor lane-assist, or any advanced braking tech (outside of ABS), etc.
DDAW ‘means a system that assesses the driver’s alertness through vehicle systems analysis and warns the driver if needed’
So the primary purpose of the system is to alert the driver when they are drowsy.
Data not accessible, or available to 3rd party. Only held long enough for
assessing drowsiness and during activation/deactivation cycle
They are mandating that data is only held for as long as it takes to activate the alarm (?). But I can see such data being a very very juicy target for insurers and police: wouldn't it be quite useful to pin the cause of an expensive accident on driver drowsiness? It's not likely we will have such protections in the US.
I really don't like this. Why is it useful if your car beeps at you when you doze off? You're either going to recognize that you're falling asleep, and pull off the road to rest, or recognize that you're falling asleep and decide to power through. If you're the type to pull over, you're not really going to be helped by a machine telling you you're tired; if not, you're probably going to drive anyway, because you have to be somewhere.
I guess under the best possible case, your car makes it annoying for you to drive drowsy, which might deter that behavior a bit. But in the worst case, every car accident will be financially catastrophic for all parties, because the insurance company will deny any claim -- arguing that you were impaired. You'll have little recourse, because you were probably "very alert" instead of "extremely alert" according to this system.
> You're either going to recognize that you're falling asleep, and pull off the road to rest, or recognize that you're falling asleep and decide to power through
You can totally start falling asleep without noticing, because the drowsiness messes with your critical thinking. The beeping will startle you and make you snap out of it for a bit.
" It's not likely we will have such protections in the US."
It is generally safe in the US to assume consumer protections don't exist until an incident forces an industry change, or a regulatory event materializes.
The US generally does not care about consumers at all, except in terms of keeping or upping the rate of consumption.
I like how this was down-voted, even when the evidence is staggeringly in its favor. We consistently wait for hazard to materialize before we implement post-event safeguards, instead of putting up health parameters and expect commercial entities to meet them consistently.
We laugh at the regulatory frameworks of places like Europe and Japan, yet they consistently get fewer food recalls, or stories about pink-goo as a food source, let alone the disparity in what they will allow in their food supply.
We nearly had a civil uprising about mandating seat belts. Elsewhere? Some griping and little else. Etc.
In particular, California pushes a lot of proactive vehicle safety measures. There are many states which wouldn't require these measures, but California is a big enough market that many manufactures simply implement them nationally.
"stories about pink-goo as a food source"
This is a non-story. The EU didn't ban pink goo (aka LFTB), they simply require that citric acid is used for sterilization rather than ammonia gas.
Furthermore - there's nothing at all wrong with eating all parts of an animal, as long as it's safe. What country do you know of that doesn't eat tripe?
It is fairly true (yeah, it's more complicated than a simple flat comparison, but in general, yes the EU and elsewhere does a better job and takes a more proactive approach). Also, nice throwaway account.
California is not the US (and frankly much of the US balks at California attempts to push things from gas mileage standards to any environmental quality standard to privacy, etc), and since the tail end of the Reagan years the US has largely given up its affirmative regulatory concerns to the EU. We're great at providing space for for-profit middlemen, but categorically mediocre or worse on preventative concerns.
The irony of you saying I'm cherry picking, then doing it yourself looking for an out isn't lost on me. Given you picked the one area where the US started it's agency as an actual consumer-safety oriented one (a rarity), and a centralized one, is a good topic to look at:
"The FDA historically developed as a consumer protection agency, whereas the regulations from the European Commission arose out of a need to harmonize inter-state commercial interests while preserving national “autonomy.” Thus, whereas the FDA has the advantages of centralization and common rules, the European Union regulates medical drug and device approvals through a network of centralized and decentralized agencies throughout its member states." - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452302X1...
Congrats, you cherry picked the outlier. And I'd argue based on the fact that we actually allow endless Pharma advertising and doctor lobbying, and the EU generally forbids it, that we still come up short comparatively.
> I really don't like this. Why is it useful if your car beeps at you when you doze off? You're either going to recognize that you're falling asleep, and pull off the road to rest, or recognize that you're falling asleep and decide to power through.
I fell asleep once while driving without recognizing that I was falling asleep. I only know I fell asleep while driving because that is the only plausible explanation for waking up while driving.
>In the EU, drowsiness/distraction detection becomes mandatory this year.
Fascinating, thanks. I was unaware. Do you know if there is any sort of standard that they follow? Or do manufacturers decide for themselves on what counts as drowsy/distracted behavior?
I am unaware of the specifics, but the law says " Since DDAW systems assess the physical state of the driver through indirect means, it is not possible to fully test those systems through a set of defined tests or with a programmable machine, which reproduces human behaviour.
..
The vehicle manufacturer carries out validation tests with human participants, either in a simulated environment or in a test vehicle, and present to the approval authorities"
So it sounds like they left it vague enough for manufactures to do their own thing.
So many replies to this without a single person mentioning that cars are extremely dangerous and kill lots of people every year. However, over the past 40 years cars have gotten much safer and kill far fewer people. A lot of these safety improvements are structural, but also a lot of them are due to the fancy onboard computers which are doing traction control and blind spot monitoring and deciding which airbags to deploy and emergency braking and on and on.
When a person driving a automobile runs through a crosswalk and hits and kills an innocent child crossing the street with their bike, an accident that could and should have been avoided by automatic emergency braking, a great cost has been inflicting on society as a whole so a person could save $500 on their car.
The price of each individual car needs to be calibrated with the price to society of all the bad things cars do. And this isn't a hypothetical situation where cars might kills tens of thousands of drivers and thousands of pedestrians every year --- they already do. Mandating safer cars, even if this will increase manufacturing costs and bring up all these new data privacy issues, has a huge positive impact on the rest of the people that happen to share the world with those cars.
This is a pretty good point I hadn't considered, although I do wonder why there are so many poor drivers. Staring at their cell phone GPS or built-in media centers probably has a lot to do with the distraction component. That's also an argument for more completely automated transport means.
Personally I'm all for banning cars from city centers and tearing down the suburbia commuter model, and just using cars and trucks for long-distance travel and/or hauling needs, but that's probably not very likely anytime soon.
A 1980s small toyota pickup would do very poorly in modern crash tests.
We have added way more airbags and much stronger roof pillars and side reinforcement which dramatically improves safety in a crash but also steals interior space, making vehicles inch larger to keep the same interior room.
Also if you want a battery electric vehicle with good range, you need a big battery. That's easier to fit into a larger vehicle (ie Tesla Model X) than a small vehicle, and the extra energy usage of the larger vehicle doesn't scale as fast as the larger battery capacity that can fit within.
I think the US could use something like Japan's Kei-car classification. Vehicles that are meant to use around town <= 45mph without going on the highway or needing to handle a 75mph rollover crash. This could be incentivized by cities with parking costs for larger vehicles. But it's difficult to sell when you might still get T-boned at 45mph by a 6,000lb Chevy Tahoe.
Edit: Another big reason for the tech and data connection on EVs is navigation. If you want to travel outside of your home charging radius, you're going to want to know what charging stations are along your route, what speeds they deliver, and what their current availability is.
A lot of Tesla's secret sauce is the "Just type your destination into the nav screen" where the car figures out your energy usage and charging stops to get wherever you want to go.
> Why can't we have something like a 1980s small Toyota truck with
"Software eats the world".
Consider something like fueling (I know this isn't in your Tesla drive train, but it's apples to apples). Your 1980s Toyota truck had a carburettor, a physical linkage direct to the gas pedal, and pretty simple exhaust. Very simple air intake.
The carbs were fiddly and expensive to build, but didn't really wear out or need much service (unless you let gas rot in them). They were also very inefficient across most of their range, as there is only so much you can do with a throttle body and venturi.
Compare "same" light duty truck now. Fuel injection with a control system: "smart" ECU, a far more complex exhaust - and sensors all along the way. The burn is far more efficient and controlled, partially because the exhaust has to be so much cleaner.
There is a lot of software in there. For the most part the only way anyone (e.g. NASA) knows how to make software anywhere close to as bulletproof ans that mechanical carb and linkage is to absolutely pour effort into it from design through to final test. Assume a 5x-10x cost on the software development, and pass that on the consumers.
If you assume the same lack of safety functionality as the 1980s truck, you can cut a chunk of that out, but I don't see that happening.
> no need for software updates because everything was properly designed to work with the hardware before the vehicle was sold.
I think there's your answer. That's hard to do, and software mistakes cost a lot of $$$ and time to fix. You have to go into a dealership/service area to get any updates.
Also, the vast majority of Tesla's customers are attracted to the idea that their car will continuously update itself and get better over time.
> I think there's your answer. That's hard to do, and software mistakes cost a lot of $$$ and time to fix. You have to go into a dealership/service area to get any updates.
Do current BEVs require frequent updates to maintain off-the-lot functionality and drive-worthiness? Like in practice, if I bought a BMW BEV and ripped out any internet connectivity / only drove around in a faraday cage, would it break after 3mo (or 3yr) unless I took it into the dealership for a software update?
>Also, the vast majority of Tesla's customers are attracted to the idea that their car will continuously update itself and get better over time.
Yes, I think this is a selling point too. However it need not be a requirement for all BEVs. If switching to this model is prohibitive then it shouldn't be a roadblock.
I didn't update my Tesla for about a year and half.
It eventually complained with a custom message that I would completely lose cell access in the car (which powers navigation, etc) if I didn't run the v11 update.
I reluctantly updated because I know, and by that point they had fixed most of the UX issues that I had complaints about. The UI team at Tesla at least seems to listen to feedback from customers, which is more to say for bugs in any infotainment system that I've ever had in any other car I've owned.
Once AT&T 3G shuts down, chances are it won't be able to connect to the network due to how it logs on. While the AT&T site[0] says "will decommission our 3G networks on February 22, 2022", but it's actually been pretty slow with 3G still lingering in many places and others getting it turned off around the time they're working on 5G deployments utilizing the now-free spectrum[1,2]. They probably could've fixed this by updating V10 with only the modem changes but they want people on V11 more.
Connected navigation is a pretty big feature for EVs, ie trip navigation that plans your charging stops based on up-to-date list of charger locations and their current availability.
So you can get by without this using your phone nav etc. but you'll likely be missing some key info like how many chargers are in-use vs available, and triggering the car to precondition the battery for fast charging before arrival.
> Also, the vast majority of Tesla's customers are attracted to the idea that their car will continuously update itself and get better over time.
For how long though? I have since long realized that for me autoupdates is a anti-feuture that just makes it possible for the cooperations to mess with me.
We have the story of the Tesla owner that got his battery software limited due to a workshop messup two owners earlier.
My car had no sentry mode aka security cam feature (it blinks lights and records a few mins of video locally to my external ssd if something is happening near it) when it came out, but thanks to the update it now does. Same for being able to access live camera feed from my car remotely on my phone, if i want to check on it. Oh, and another update later made it so that I can review the recorded security footage on the car screen directly (only when the car is parked), without having to unplug the SSD and reviewing videos on my laptop/phone.
Those features above was never mentioned or promised when I was buying the car, because they simply didn't exist or weren't even planned at the time. Other updates improved the UI/UX in some major ways. All in all, I have no complaints about that experience at all.
Also, none of those are auto-updates. Tesla will notify you if the update is available, but it won't be downloading them usung the built-in cell connection, only using wifi connection.
> it blinks lights and records a few mins of video locally to my external ssd if something is happening near it
Interesting. Yesterday I showed my 2yo a parked Tesla and it blinked when we got a meter away and I didn't understand what it did. Notably, CCTV of public spaces is illegal where I live without authority approval.
I am not opposed to updates, just auto-updates that can't be turned off by the user. Also there need to be a way to revert to an older version if a new one you manually approve messes things up.
I suspect it's the same reason why Microsoft just doesn't sell a version of Windows without telemetry for a flat rate: there is just too much money on the table for tracking and selling your private data over the lifetime of the vehicle (or computer).
For any consumer electronics/software product, if you can make $X just selling the standalone product, you can generally make $X + $Y selling the same product and collecting data or presenting some advertising. I don't see how this math changes without legislation. People don't have the expertise or time to evaluate the risk of each vendor's privacy policies and the negative consequences of this kind of data collection are rarely immediate enough to cause a negative consumer reaction.
Right. The easier computers get to use, the lower the skill level of the average user. If Windows 95 had spied on the user like Windows 11 does an angry mob would've descended on Redmond with torches and pitchforks.
"Smart" TVs seem to fall into the same category. Manufacturers realized they can make much more money and hit a (much) lower price point by packaging telemetry and using/selling the data. Nowadays "dumb" TVs either aren't available or come at a premium.
> I suspect it's the same reason why Microsoft just doesn't sell a version of Windows without telemetry for a flat rate: there is just too much money on the table for tracking and selling your private data over the lifetime of the vehicle (or computer).
Do Windows Enterprise and Windows Server machines include telemetry? I would assume "no", in which case there you go.
I think stuff like emergency breaking is going to be mandatory (or already is) on new cars in EU.
But there's stuff like : https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/new/e-up.html which basically has a phone holder where the dash would usually be. Maybe other budget manufacturers will bring out something like this.
I would prefer to have the phone taking over the navigation/entertainment system the way Android Auto and Apple's CarPlay do. In this car, unfortunately, the entertainment system screen is tiny and most likely unsuitable for this.
If you build a car with a non-standard slot for an entertainment system, the least you can do is to make it smarter.
Yes, I don't know what kind of masochist prefers to navigate using an infotainment screen aimed at their back seat instead of a phone pointed directly at the driver.
My 2010 BMW has a cell phone holder in the center armrest. It was designed for the phones of the time. So when the iPhone 5 came out it became impossible to use because BMW never anticipated a phone being that large.
The built-in infotainment system is still lightyears beyond anything on a cell phone. On a road trip if the car gets to 1/8 of a tank of gas it will offer to set a destination to the nearest gas station. This requires one button press to accept. If there’s a navigation destination it will insert a stop to get gas.
> Such a setup would likely be cheaper to manufacture as well.
This is false only because costs tend to go down with scale - if you have an entire line making ten $10k BOM (bill of materials) cars in one shift it's going to be a loss-leader compared to a line making 300 cars a shift with a $12k BOM even if both cars sell at the same MSRP.
If even a small fraction of the people saying they want this actually put their money where your mouth was there would be a decent conversion industry by now (there is, but it's so small it's basically nonexistent and it's all one off builds).
Also, rose colored glasses are a thing. When was the last time you (the average dolt reading this, not you personally) rode in a vehicle from the 80s let alone slogged out a commute in one? The venn diagram of "people for whom it is fashionable to want an 80s Toyota pickup" and "people who would commute in any 80s vehicle" is two circles. Sure you can "fix" the driving experience by upgrading stuff but unless you produce them at scale the cost of doing each of these upgrades will be much greater per unit and the total price will quickly eclipse that of just buying new vehicles.
It would be really neat for some company to produce kits to replace ICE's with electric motors and battery packs for modern-ish cars like a Corolla/Civic/Fiesta. No need for fancy LCD screens, auto-driving, etc. just replace ICE with EV parts and get 100+mi range and you'd replace most commuter/2nd car use cases.
I envision it to be like PC parts. It would be awesome for standards to develop for EV's like there are for ICE. I'm sure its much more complicated and deals with high voltage so likely to need some education to not fry yourself.
When I posed this to an engineer friend working in the automotive space his comment was that weight distribution and handling / safety (and liability) would be huge issues in retrofitting ICE cars en masse.
The fact is, you'll never be able to recreate a truck from the 1980s because crash safety measures are much, much stricter than they used to be so the form factor of that era is not going to return.
The dirty secret is that infotainment additions have an outsized impact on consumer demand (better, fancier infotainment is a huge plus) for the cost paid. Due to all the new things needed to comply with current regulations, you'll have little uptake on the super low end model with no infotainment or fancy features if the price difference to the fancy screen version is commiserate with the price paid by the manufacturer. Also, as already mentioned in other posts, it may be at cost-parity due to the higher demand of the fancier trim model.
>Such a setup would likely be cheaper to manufacture as well.
It would only be cheaper to manufacture at scale; and that assumes that market wants a "1980s small Toyota truck with a Tesla motor". I imagine a car like that wouldn't sell very well; so it would either be incredibly expensive to either build in small batches or to make up for the unsold inventory
The Toyota Hi-Lux, which used to be their compact truck, is the second best selling truck in the world. Older versions are somewhat legendary for their indestructibility - https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/The_Indestructible_Hilux
Of course they are different. The compact version lasted until ‘97 and is still one of the best selling trucks of all time. The Ford Maverick fits into the compact, inexpensive pickup slot and is doing very well. I’m not saying it would have to be Hilux branded but fill the gap for a compact, economical, bombproof pickup.
Your original comment was that it wouldn’t sell well. Ford Maverick sales indicate that would not be the case.
>no onboard computers other than simple microcontrollers for the various systems (charging, etc.), no streaming wifi / GPS data collection, and no need for software updates
You are talking about a vehicle with no onboard SATNAV, no Carplay/Android Auto, no telematic roadside assistance. The Ford Maverick has all these things. My claim isn't that small trucks don't sell, my claim is that a car that doesn't even support Bluetooth audio wouldn't sell.
Such a setup would likely be cheaper to manufacture as well. The only way to get anything like that now is to pay a custom mechanic to put a Tesla motor into an old vehicle, which is kind of ridiculous.