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Please make a dumb car

techcrunch.com

21–30 of 671 posts

Re: Please make a dumb car

#21
post #11

Get a motorcycle and be one with your vehicle!

Modern sports bikes are marching towards the same future - self balancing bikes, fancy dashboards, electric bikes with no motor etc.

How can the bike not have a motor? Or like no motor in the engine sense.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#22
post #5

Same with TVs, please. I can't find a single OLED on the market that doesn't have Android or some shitty Samsung OS installed on it.

Agreed. I recommend Roku TVs - at least the UX is simple and it doesn't spy on you or show you ads.

Doesn’t the Roku software spy on you and don’t they track what you are watching?

Re: Please make a dumb car

#23
Power seats are not a pointless luxury. I’m pretty sure they are continuously adjustable which is much better than trying to pull on some lever and get the seat to pop into approximately the right place. To say nothing of mulitple drivers with memorized positions etc.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#24
I would kill for Ye Olde Manually Wound windows. Electric windows struggle in temperature extremes, and seem to break down far more often than my old hand-cranked windows ever did.

Also, I had more precise control with the hand-crank.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#25

I generally didn’t agree with the article. I have found that my Toyota Corolla Hybrid has about the right mix of smart and dumb (in terms of dials and knobs), and again in disagreement to the article .. I love my digital speedo! It’s high up on the dash and closer to the road, compared to my old space-wasting meters that were more difficult to read. And the concern about the GPS in our cars invading our privacy.. thi…

My country's market is dominated by second-hand Japanese imports, a lot of the integrated navigation / entertainment systems are entirely useless if you're not driving in Japan, or can't read Japanese.

When my 2005 Mazda MPV suffered a flat battery, the centre console screen which was the navigation / radio / clock / DVD player (yes, really) was bricked, and to this day displays a message in Japanese asking you to please insert the manufacturer's navigation data CD to continue using it.

Which no-one has access to, not even in Japan (my brother has been living there for about ten years, and is very helpful for obscure parts requests), so now my radio and clock don't work, because I don't have a CD with data needed for a 16 year old navigation system that, when working, was thoroughly convinced I was driving long distances on the bottom of Tokyo Bay and was desperate for me to turn right and get back on dry land.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you by chance know the models?

Their high end premium TVs have had it since 2019 https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-one-connect-box The One Connect Box has all the ports including power, HDMI, ethernet, USB etc. and the TV has just one proprietary port where you connect the One Connect Box.

So it's the regular smart TV just its smartness - any any useful ports you'd want from a TV - comes in two parts?

I'm not sure that's what the parent commenter was asking for.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#27
The author's list of demands describe my 2011 Renault Kangoo II, a model they only stopped producing in 2021, very well. Knobs, analog gauges, but also a factory-installed reverse parking sensor. It's down-market and inexpensive, It's a very simple car, and also very simple to work on, as a consequence. 15000-page service manual, as well. Utilitarian (ex-)fleet vehicles (mine was a Swiss Post delivery van) might still check these boxes for folks.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#28

I think a lot of the smart car features have to do with legislation. All new cars require a back up camera due to legislation. But a backup camera with a huge 8" screen is only useful for backing up. So the manufacturers try to use that screen real estate for infotainment when the car is moving forward.

Small LCD screens embedded behind double glass in the rear-view mirror are common in the aftermarket backup camera sets. Any sufficiently-motivated car manufacturer could design something similar to meet regs without moving their controls to a central screen.

Re: Please make a dumb car

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. It's only logical. After all, a customer who doesn't want to use the infotainment system can ignore it, but the customers who want one will reject your automobile offering out of hand if you don't include one.

Mechanical things break and require lot of design, testing and validation. A screen solves that problem more efficiently and eliminates 100’s of other parts and wires that go to other buttons.

Counterpoint: it locks all functionality behind a single point of failure, rendering all cabin controls useless simultaneously in the event of a failure of the screen or the upstream chain to the computer driving it (to say nothing of the distraction caused by a system you can't operate by feel with your eyes still on the road)

Re: Please make a dumb car

#30
Reading this made me happy I recently purchased a SUV with big, boring, rubberized knobs that I find myself adjusting without having to look while driving.

One addition to the smart tech a dumb car could benefit from - radar cruise control. Increasingly offered on new models and reduces cognitive workload of highway driving.

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