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Comment by shrimpx | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy that "electric cars" == "buttons are replaced by touch screens". VW makes non-electric cars that have a lot more knobs, but in their electric offerings they have to flock with Tesla with an all-glass UI, for some reason. I wonder if it's driven by market research or mostly fear-based: "We might look outdated compared to Tesla, let's just do what they do."

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There are also some "physics" reasons for this - the source of electric current in an ICE car is usually a 1kWh lead-acid battery - obviously not always at 100% state of charge. Even if the designers wanted to put an awesome infotainment system into such car, the battery won't be able to power it for long before jeopardizing driving-related critical functionality. As an example - keeping Tesla's sentry mode on (screen on and cameras recording), drains about 250W - enough to completely kill a classic car battery in 4 hours

Electric cars, with their batteries in 30-100 kWh range, lift this constraint - so designers have a field day

AFAIK, even on Teslas, the infotainment system run on the low voltage circuit, powered by the same lead-acid battery used in ICE vehicles.

Maybe the latter plus they also want to have a ton of features, which gets hard to fit into a traditional button layout. But there's no reason an electric car has to be high tech either.

Yeah, the concept of "high-tech" has been conceptually bundled with the electric engine type. I for one hope those get disentangled because the limit for "high-tech" cars looks like a shitty idiocratic dystopia.

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