Ask HN: What will be the future differentiator in electric vehicles?

Software, charging networks, brands, and design.

Economically, important competitive factors will be: Access to resources required to build batteries (e.g. mining rights), battery manufacturing capacity, location of manufacturing plants (as regulation on energy footprint is sensitive to the energy mix used in manufacturing and shipping). In terms of business success, making the right decisions on these strategic factors will likely matter just as much as designing appealing products and implementing them well.

Geopolitics will matter: People and their governments will find further regulation appealing also because it can be a tool to drive local employment in manufacturing and related business. If a car manufactured in China, or using batteries manufactured in China, has an inherently worse CO2 footprint for a European consumer (because of the coal-heavy energy mix in China and the energy footprint of shipping to Europe) and this is penalized by regulations, you get factories in Europe as a result. This build-out will take some decades to settle, and there may yet be new tech surprises along the way that change the game.

As for car tech itself becoming a commodity - this has been the case for a long time already, even with ICE technology. Automotive supply chains are famously broad, long and overlapping between OEMs. Bob Lutz (GM, BMW, Chrysler, ...) said in 2015 "There are no bad cars anymore, only bad designs".

There's still tech competition for sure, and it's fun to follow - the Mercedes EQS will outdo the Model S in most respects and raise the bar of what's possible with an EV, heating things up a bit at the top end. Progress continues, egged on by regulations if nothing else, and by consumers seeking the best value for their money. But if you don't sweat the details, the good-enough options are plentiful.

I think a significant factor will be offering good ICE car trade ins. At some point the second hand market for ICE vehicles is going to tank. Maybe there will be government schemes/subsidies for giving up ICE vehicles, but otherwise it could be a factor.

Well, you're describing how things are today but not necessarily how they could be.

I agree with the OP's sentiment that cars are mostly not needed. We've just been hoodwinked into building in car-friendly ways instead of people-friendly ways, and so we have these spread-out, fragile, suburban areas that depend entirely on cheap oil to function (if not the gas itself, the manufacturing, maintenance, and support of cars and car infrastructure).

Instead of building too dense (skyscrapers - opposite end of the problem spectrum) or not dense enough (suburbs) we could have built mixed-use walkable neighborhoods and towns and really reduced the need to spend money on cars. But hey, Ford, GM, and Chrysler had great lobbyists back in the day, and the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets meant that getting tanks and troops from one place to another necessitated the construction of extensive highway and freeway infrastructure. Win-win for a segment of the population with specific beliefs. Now we're so used to it that we find it hard to imagine living without it.

It infuriates me whenever I talk to people and they're like "wow Europe is so walkable! You can just go to the cafe down the street." or somewhere like Mackinac Island (aside from the horse poo) where people go to vacation - it's like yea we could just build like that everywhere if we wanted to. But we're dumb and we don't think and construction and automotive jobs need subsidies to keep the economy growing.

If someone can get full self driving and patents it, they’ll have the market. Software is where we are seeing most innovation right now. Self parking, 3D surround cameras, accident avoidance, auto lane change, etc.

I think you’re correct that there will be less appeal from a technical performance perspective to buy an individual brand. All EVs have fast enough acceleration (some dangerously so.) So competition there is not going to continue. The new monstrous Hummer from GM has 0-60 times that rival super cars from a few years back.

There’s still some room for competition on handling, but eventually the skateboards will all have very similar suspensions.

So I believe we’re left with aesthetics, material choices, secondary features, and brand appeal. Are your vegan leather air conditioned seats hand stitched? Are your steerable headlights auto dimming with infrared vision?