I'd really like to see a simple EV for a change. No screens, no AI, no Autopilot, just a 5-seat vehicle with a reasonable range (400+ km) and AC.
It does have an infotainment screen, but otherwise: no AI, no Autopilot, 5 seat vehicle, Air Conditioning, and a 416km range
I also have wanted an EV truck that's more old fashioned -- it's not like you need ASICs and GPUs to move charge between wheels and a battery. For getting something that's built to last and won't make decisions for you I would check out Bollinger -- I read somewhere they were keeping it as much of a self-service architecture as possible to appease customers who need to maintain the vehicle 'in the field'
From their website: "the Bollinger B1 might well be the last truck you’ll ever need to buy"
If that old-school minimalist aesthetic really appeals to you, more power to you... but it definitely doesn't seem to be meant for the majority of folks.
If you ask me, Bollinger is competing with Mercedes G wagons and Lamborghini LM002 in creating a status symbol, like the Tesla Roadster did -- at small volumes you have to pick an audience that will be happy to pay up.
As for simple to maintain... isn't that the appeal of EVs already? Unless you have to do maintenance on the battery or motor... but that isn't going to change any time soon. 400V isn't anything to mess around with.
It's pretty clear for more car buyers the market has spoken and folks want more infotainment/screens/AI/whatever, so it seems that type of vehicle is definitely going to become less and less common.
Mantainability is a plus. But the big feature would be not worrying about your car getting remotely bricked for some arbitrary reason, or losing some essential function because your OEM's servers are down.
If a company is capable of constantly monitoring your machine, and updating it OTA, I don't doubt that their liability with respect to whatever you do to your car increases significantly.
Depending on how you like to drive, and where you drive, not fighting the smart driver 'assist' features of vehicles could be a feature as well. I read a commenter on HN some time ago about GPS-assisted headlamps preventing them from providing much needed illumination to something (wrecked vehicle, iirc) off the side of the road.
Personally, I've played enough Assassin's Creed and GTA to know I wouldn't trust a smart system to predict my intent in a life/death scenario.
It's apparently an off-menu option, but you can request one without a SIM card, so effectively all the cell network stuff is disabled. Then, if you are worried about updates bricking something... just don't update it and never connect it to the WiFi? Seems like that gets you most of the way there.
Also, besides traffic navigation and streaming stuff, what do you actually miss by not connecting it to the internet?
By way of example, I once found myself stranded at 3am about 45 miles from anyone I could get help from with a cracked radiator, no radiator cap, a gimp alternator, and no cell reception. I was too poor to afford a tow, had work the next day, and was in no position to get the vehicle properly fixed in a timely manner.
The answer to the problem was a soda can, an oil rag, a backup battery, a few rolls of duct-tape, and periodic stops to replenish my watered-down coolant whenever the engine began to redline.
Doubtless there was a more elegant solution to my problem. But that's what I came up with, and that's what I used in spite of my check engine light's protests.
A smarter vehicle might well have noted how much damage I was doing to it, and refused to even start for me.
The problem itself probably wouldn't turn up in an EV. But knowing with confidence that I can jury rig my car with 'incompatible' but available parts, or limp it home without triggering a safety mechanism that can only be reset by an authorized mechanic has become important to me, even if my commutes are broadly limited to city limits anymore, and I can afford a mechanic now.
Similarly, it's important to know that your car can be worked on by unlicensed mechanics in a pinch. Part of that is being confident that you won't lose that option in an OTA update, and that your car won't actively look for open WiFi hotspots in order to check for that (smart TV's are rumored to do this, I would assume a car is at least that advanced).
There are also issues of trust to be had around cameras replacing mirrors without offering a good fallback to the driver.
The market has spoken, it doesn't really care about these things, so ultimately I don't think a dumb car'll be an option going forward. But those are what I believe to be reasons to want one.
Anything beyond that (e.g. motor or battery problems) aren't going to be fixed like that no matter what EV you buy. Also, those pretty much all can't be hot-serviced on the side of the road anyways on modern cars since everything is more compact, less accessible, etc.
You almost can't buy a car without at least a 6" screen for the infotainment outside of the cars trying extra hard to appeal to the budget market.
I feel strongly enough about it that I'd support a regulatory approach for eliminating touchscreens in cars.
Regardless of your preference on in-car UX, screens displaying most of the info are here to stay.
That's exactly my point. Your only options are "nice car with touchscreen" or "mediocre car without". There's no opportunity for the market to, you know, actually speak.
It's much like the current 4k TV market. Once upon a time, The Market™ spoke in favor of putting "smart" functionality in TVs, and so manufacturers added computers with greater and greater complexity and visual pizazz and apps and such.
Then, the Chromecast and Roku and Fire TV and such became popular, and - better yet - ended up being much easier to upgrade as technology marched on (you only have to replace a $35-or-so dongle or box instead of having to replace a whole multi-hundred-or-thousand-dollar TV). On top of that, the cable companies started to dip their toes in offering these "smart" features in their own set top boxes, as did Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony with their gaming consoles, and there were and still are zero TVs able to replace either category of device. So now you have a bunch of TVs with smart features that go entirely unused (or, worse, actually break, taking the TV with it) because other devices offer better versions of those features and can actually be upgraded without replacing the entire TV.
Unfortunately, since The Market™ has already spoken, there is now to my knowledge exactly one 4k TV manufacturer that offers consumer-grade TVs without smart features (Sceptre), and certainly not on store shelves (I had to buy mine on Amazon, with all the risk of damage and theft that entails, and the only Prime-eligible one was the 50"). Literally every other 4k TV - including any at a brick-and-mortar store, be it Best Buy or Fry's or Wal-Mart or what have you - has smart features that cannot be removed and that are either 1) already outperformed by $20-100 devices on those same exact shelves or 2) going to be outperformed within a year because technology marches on and no TV offers a way to upgrade the computational hardware.