Comment by KronisLV
1 day ago
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff). Like take the C15 and add 2-4 decades of manufacturing and safety improvements, while keeping it simple and utilitarian.
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.
1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.
2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.
The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
> The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight
Decent catalytic converters require an array of sensors, ECU, and ability to fine control the engine inputs to work - without them most large cities would become smog ridden hells.
There's no reason technology has to be user-hostile. You can still have an ECU and screens and everything. When it breaks the screen can be used to tell you exactly which sensor input is out of range. There's no reason parts need to be serialized and learning a new part can only be done once.
You can build a modern vehicle that's still repairable.
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The solution to city air pollution is a different vehicle with a different drive train: an EV. The C15 is a workhorse for farmers and craftsmen not for shopping trips and driving the family to visit granny on the other side of town.
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For gasoline engines, electronic fuel injection is far better than a carburetor, it isn't just the emissions systems.
Sure, it's harder to work on. The trade off there is that you don't have to work on it.
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Engine control alone can be self-contained. The Ford EEC IV of the 1980s had its program permanently etched into the Intel 8061 CPU, and was designed to last 30 years. It did. I finally sold off my 40 year old Ford Bronco, which was still running on the original engine and CPU.
If you have an electric vehicle you need none of that
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This is why late 90s cars are objectively the greatest ever built. You had ECUs, cats, ABS, disc brakes, airbags, power steering, and conventional automatic transmissions. Everything that makes a modern car safe and reliable, but none of the high tech digital BS that has infused things nowadays.
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What do the sensors do? There's not much you can change in the catalytic converter so I assume it's just reading temperature? So I assume it's changing the fuel/air combustion ratio according to the cat's temperature?
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>the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music.
Legally mandated backup cameras make your idea DOA.
In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
Wondering why transmissions are insanely complicated and unreliable now? Manufacturers were forced to eek out an extra couple MPG due to continually tightening environmental regulations. Something has to give.
> In fact, nearly everything terrible about cars in the last decade can be traced to regulations in some way.
I think the reason we even need backup cameras now is that visibility is so poor on modern vehicles. I think that in turn is due to increasing the height of the bottom of the windows for better airbags. I’m sure it’s great in a crash, but visibility is also a safety concern.
Not all of it is regulations though, but lot of common complaints.
>Legally mandated backup cameras make your idea DOA.
Cheap cars without fancy entertainment systems put the backup camera screen in the rear-view mirror. You can get these kits for like $20 on aliexpress.
My understanding is that ABS in cars has surprisingly little effect on fatalities. It is a huge lifesaver when deployed to motorcycles, and a benefit to reducing non-fatal crashes, but not much for fatals in cars.
(I agree it's a well-solved problem and the reduction in non-fatal crashes makes it worthwhile from a convenience standpoint alone.)
> Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
Dacia does that. The base sandero comes with speakers and Bluetooth. The rest is up to you, there is no screen no radio.
I am happy with Car Play as a decent middle ground. It’s nice to have a large screen, and everything is still done on the phone and not on a shite computer whose components were cost-cut to an inch of their lives.
We already had basically the solution you suggested with airplay/car play - USB charger with audio out that just is a display. when a phone isn't plugged in it shows super basic radio features like station and song name for AM and FM.
Had it and now most manufacturers are abandoning that for some proprietary crap that's much worse and requires a subscription for navigation and music streaming.
You should look into the slate truck! This is exactly what they are trying to do
https://www.slate.auto
Maybe Framework could get into the car business.
Please allow me to introduce you to the second gen Toyota Yaris
Incidentally, you're describing my 2020 Subaru Impreza. Under $20k for my dealer demo.
I do wish it supported a later version of Android Auto so that I could run that via Bluetooth. (It does have regular Bluetooth but that's just audio.)
Wireless Android Auto or Carplay generally use BT to setup but WiFi to send the bulk of the graphical data over.
That said, there are adapters to make an existing Android Auto Wireless if you want it. I think some are sold on Amazon too so you could probably try and maybe return. I don't have any experience with them since I'm very happy with my car's built in wired Android Auto and the reliability of cabling but it is something you can try.
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Were they sold with an option to have have no OEM infotainment? Just speakers and a phone mount?
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I have a theory that these environmental regulations at least to some degree defeat themselves. They make engines more complicated, so more fragile and harder for an amateur (edit: or any professional who isn't their own brand repair shops) to service. They encourage smaller-block engines with turbos and compressors which makes the engine more short-lived. They produce stuff like throttle-hang and gear selection recommendations optimized for driving economy, not engine longevity (or driving experience, for that matter).
On the whole, they seem to be contributing to this movement of taking power away from the end consumer and making your product more and more like a subscription (this goes further than the car industry, of course). I do realize that it's important to cut down on pollution! And maybe this kind of stuff has been studied... although I imagine it would be very hard to do accurately.
Imagine if a car manufacturer would provide service guides, easily-accessible part diagrams and competitively priced spare parts. Imagine if they optimized for longevity and if the handbook that came with the car had more technical details than it had warnings about how doing any kind of maintenance yourself will result in a) your death and b) a voided warranty. That would be pretty nice.
Did I hear right that some new vehicles are claiming 20,000km service intervals?
I know I’ve seen 15,000 service intervals.
This is the minimum to maintain the warranty for the first 3 / 5 / 7 seven years whatever.
If you change the oil at every 5000k and never turn off a cold engine - all petrol engines have fuel wash down at ignition cut, but much worse when the engine is come - you should expect 500,000+ plus kilometres out of an engine barring any metallurgical problems or manufacturing defects.
Petrol makes a poor lubricant for engines, and fucks engine oil. The less of it in engine oil the better.
Modern engines and fully synthetic oils are way better than the their counterparts from my youth, but 15,000+ kilometres service intervals are less about what engines need and more about what the folks over in marketing need.
Edit: I did see a second hand commercial diesel van recently that had met all service requirements for the warranty period, x number of years or 90,000 kilometres.
This meant it had logged exactly two oil changes since new, and the third had just been done at 90,000.
90,000k on two oil changes. Wild.
How about an option just to have one of those old Ford radios with the huge buttons you can push with gloves on? And maybe an aux-in?
So long as it also plays cassettes.
My first car had the mechanical radio buttons and cassette player, I think you even had to turn the cassette over when one side ended.
I can unlock my doors with my phone and monitor the cars location with my phone with cloud connectivity.
This isn't required and was offered as a 5 year free plan with optional paid extensions after
How is this bad?
Now the car company has a live feed of your location and the ability to unlock your car at will. That's probably fine unless they get hacked, at which point it abruptly becomes less fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919133
> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).
Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.
The stripped down base models don't sell well.
Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.
The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.
It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
I wonder how much of that is due to dealers, who want to upsell. Do they even keep the base model in stock, or does it have to be special ordered (or today, we can give you a "discount" on the fancy model that still has a higher profit margin for us).
I'm just speculating; the same reasoning wouldn't apply to the iPhone mini. But car dealers have a lot of incentive to skew the results. It takes a fair bit of willpower to say "I am buying this specific car I want and will go elsewhere if I can't have it."
Just as an anecdote - When I was buying my last car I went in and asked for just the base model with nothing added onto it, ie not even the "eXtra Special" designations, and the dealership said they probably won't have any for a long time and if I'd like to pay 50% more for one with some features added on.
I declined and kept looking at the inventory of the 4-5 dealerships nearest to me. For six months they never had a single base model.
I started looking at another maker and they seemed to have base models that just wouldn't sell, stuck on lots for that same time period.
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Anecdotally: I helped someone look for a cheap car recently and the base models are everywhere on my local lots. YMMV and I'm sure someone will respond that their area doesn't have any, but in my recent experience it wasn't hard to find a base model at all.
It's driven by consumer demand: If you can pay $30/month on your 5-year loan and get heated seats and a nicer navigation system, that's $1/day for 5 years and then you own it. It's easy to talk yourself into stepping up to something nicer that you're going to use every day.
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Agreed - check out for example a Toyota rav4 le. This is the base model with effectively zero modern “subscription-esque” fancy features. It’s got a touchscreen and power windows, but otherwise it’s all the reliability/etc of Toyota and that’s it. About half the price of what most rav4s are listed at and $20k+ cheaper than a 4Runner.
It has a Data Communication Module - it spies on you. If you try to remove that, you lose audio in the front right speaker.
Oh no, across the line Toyota still tries to sell you a subscription service that's required for things like remote start.
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In the United States (USD, MSRP):
* 2026 Toyota RAV4 LE (base trim) - $31,900
* 2026 Toyota RAV4 Limited (top trim) - $43,300
* 2026 Toyota 4Runner SR5 (base trim) - $41,570
And yet I personally know more people who own iPhone minis (myself included) now in 2026 than that own pixel phones of any model. I think the data is distorted by the fact that most people who want things like that also don’t typically buy new (especially with cars). I did buy my iPhone 13 mini from Apple directly, but I bought it after the 14 line had already been released.
HN commenters and their friends are an extremely biased sample set.
The sales numbers don’t lie about the global demand though.
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Econo shitboxes also have very stiff competition from used low-end cars. The economics of them are often rather dubious.
Not easy I would say.
Safety improvement means larger crumple zones, reinforcement, etc... Which mean a bigger and heavier vehicle if you want to keep the same capacity. That in turn means a more powerful engine, brakes, wheels and tyres, etc... further increasing the size and weight of the vehicle. This is an exponential factor.
Fuel economy and environmental stuff (which are linked) come with tighter engine control for better combustion and cleaner exhaust. It means tighter tolerances so simple tools may be less appropriate, and electronics.
And there are comfort elements that are hard to pass nowadays: A/C, power steering, door lock and windows. Mandatory safety equipment like airbags and ABS. Even simple cars like what Dacia makes are still bigger, heavier and more complex than older cars like the C15, they don't really have a choice.
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.
The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
Modularity would be great too. Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types. Meanwhile, all this has been overtaken by the need to get away from fossil fuels as soon as we practically can. Oil should not be valued based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground but based on the cost of creating a liter of it from raw materials (CO2, lots of energy).
> Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types.
There aren't 100 different types of engines. At any given time each auto manufacturer only has a couple different engines in production. Different models can get different variations for performance or use targets, but auto manufacturers are very good at standardizing within their company.
Look at the list of Honda engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honda_engines
Notice how they're grouped by series? All of the engines in each series share a common platform with minor changes from year to year. In many cases you can swap parts between engines within the same series. An engine series lasts 10-15 years. Some times the parts even carry over to the next series.
Swapping between brands is a pipe dream, though. Forcing everyone to fit their engineering into a bounding box that has to be agreed upon by all auto manufacturers around the world would only lead to either unnecessarily large vehicles with wasted space (to leave room for future engineering needs) or unnecessarily complicated engineering to fit everything into the pre-defined allowable engine envelope. All to accommodate engine swaps between manufacturers which is never necessary for consumer cars.
We can do just that in lots of other industries.
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> Modularity would be great too.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't pad the car companies' margins. What's best for th consumer is generally worse for the company.
Cars are highly modular. Parts are shared across as many models as possible. Engine series are designed to last 10-15 years.
The car makers increase their margins by keeping their cars modular.
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Such a thing exists. It's called a Dacia Duster. Well, certainly for utility and to a lesser extent economy.
Fiat Panda 4x4 too.
I had a Panda from the early 2010s and that was my exact thought reading this thread: sounds like a fiat panda. Surprised to see this downvoted. Did they change so much?
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Citroen Berlingo is basically that.
Well, it requires a different way of thinking but that's exactly how cars will be built if you'd use them via a subscription (fuel included).
Companies would make less money because consumers just buy a product and keep it for generations if the product quality is THAT good.
When companies make less money, there's less jobs. When there's less jobs people have less money to spend on things like Rent.
You would get the toyota hilux champ which is not purchasable in rich countries.
By now, we would have reached a quality standard of vehicles that are regularly passed down across several generations before they stop being useful.
You can quickly see what a mortal sin this would be against our Lord and Savior, Capitalism.
But whatever you want Toyota has a 10k truck and a jimmy is 15k, if you need a car a vitz can be had for 12k
This comment shines a spotlight on my issues with the US auto market. None of these vehicles are sold in the US, for a variety of reasons - both economic and regulatory. I hate knowing that the vehicles I want to buy both exist and are affordable, but I just can’t have them. Meanwhile, the cars sold in my market are all egregiously enormous, have giant screens inside, etc.
This is the very definition of a “first world problem,” but it sure is frustrating.
One of the many reasons I choose not to live in “the west”.
Yeah, but how do poor VCs make money then?
Definitely not with a car sold for relatively cheap that has a engine who refuses to die...
You think VCs fund the world's largest auto makers?