Comment by Fiveplus
1 day ago
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.
Modules need to be programmed for your vehicle specs and country because there are different laws and functions.
For example rear taillights are different in Europe vs the US.
Another is that higher trims of my car have a rear climate zone which has a different fan and actuators for air flow that the module needs to know exist.
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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.
> The solution to city air pollution is a different vehicle with a different drive train: an EV.
Priority list should basically be:
0. Bicycles 1. Metro 2. Buses 3. EVs
(not counting emergency and service vehicles)
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EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and will for the next 10-20 years unless one is OK with a tiny battery. And heavy weight means more pollution from wheels that produce particles that ends up in lungs. Note brakes also pollutes with asbestos but EVs typically have regenerative braking so I think brakes pollutes roughly the same in a heavier EV as in ICE car.
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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
And if people would make one that wasn't an iPad on wheels I'd be in line to buy.
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For the price of that C15 (adjusted for inflation it seems) you may be able to buy a battery for an EV. Maybe.
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.
ESC (electronic stability control) didn't become common until about 2010 to 2015. It makes a really big difference for safety -- EU estimates are that it's saved more than 15,000 lives. Let's backport that one too. :)
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In reality many 90s cars are phenomenal rust buckets due to issues in the adoption of water-based paints, cars which actually still have tangible amounts of steel in their panels are basically golden samples.
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?
Not a motorhead but IIRC a combustion with too little oxygen produces soot (pollution) and one with too much oxygen produces NOx pollution, with a sweet spot in the middle. The exhaust oxygen sensor allows the ECU to adjust the air/fuel mix to hit the minimum pollution spot, instead of estimating it.
There might also be a catalyst temperature sensor or something.
It's not a "whole bunch" of sensors, it's a few sensors and it's not some inscrutable magic, it's somethijg someone could replicate in open-source if they had equipment and time. We really need to get away from the mindset that proprietary stuff contains inscrutable magic. It's often worse quality than the open thing. However, it does have the right connections to be allowed to be put in a car that drives on the road.
>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.
Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it.
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Were they sold with an option to have have no OEM infotainment? Just speakers and a phone mount?
I don't think it has any OEM infotainment. I think there is some kind of software in there but I've never looked at it. It's not intrusive.
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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