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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

Yup. You can see it everywhere. Everything is fancier and nicer than it used to be. Just check out a 20 year old car to see how basic they used to be. I got in a new pickup truck yesterday and there were two switches for each heated seat. The back and the bottom could be controlled separately.

This is much too fancy for my tastes, but that's how the economy is evolving.

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Convenience is the root of all evil.

It's why this planet is on the "highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator".

I reached the same conclusion ("climate hell") with a slightly different thought process in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35026113

Luxury and convenience need energy. Most of the energy still comes from carbon. Ergo...

Not just immediate sales, but a long term revenue stream. Toyota will make $0 off selling me replacement heated seat switches because I don't have them. Their only hope of a revenue stream is to carefully engineer the valve cover gasket to start leaking at 50K miles or similar.

Oh please. Go back a few decades and that car at 50K miles was probably ready for the junkyard, especially in areas with snow and salt. Arguing that modern cars are engineered to be unreliable is simply contrary to reality.

The pendulum is swinging back a bit, and old cars would generally make it to 100k, and some old models had no problem far exceeding that. Modern cars are all currently wrestling with carbon buildup on their valves due to gasoline direct injection, which is really not great for long term reliability. I have a friend who's relatively recently-made Hyundai (2015-2016?) barely crawled to 100k. The complexity of modern cars hasn't made them terrible from a reliability standpoint, however we are definitely seeing some backsliding on progress.

I do have to say that I had to buy a new vehicle last summer to replace a 13-year old one and the sheer number of sensors, motors, and other features--at least some of which seem rather gratuitous--gave me some pause. And this was a very middle-of-the-road Honda. Certainly a lot of modern vehicles are very reliable although I wonder if they could be even more reliable if, e.g. the side mirrors didn't tilt down every time you backed up.

Do you think these cars get crushed or are bought by someone who drives them until they are really dead?

I hate to be that guy but the whole automotive market has been like that for as long as there has been an automotive market. One person’s unreliable old car they bought new is someone else’s daily driver that they get their cousin to keep on the road for beers.

This really depends on the failure. In the specific case of gasoline direct injection, a motor which has had poor carbon buildup might need to be totally rebuilt. And given the complexity of the motors, it's not like rebuilding an old flathead Ford engine. I'm definitely not saying that old cars are good and new cars are bad. But some of the problems of modern cars make long-term usage costlier and more difficult in some cases. To be clear, cars today are much more reliable than decades ago. I'm just making a small case that this reliability has been sliding backwards in some instances. Some modern cars are less reliable than the same model 10 years ago, and even when the car is not a total wash there are more things that break, and the cost and complexity of repair is higher.

It’s all a matter of trade offs.

Direct injection allows them to do some magical things inside the combustion chamber for efficiency/performance gains with the trade off that the valves are ‘dry’ so will need some maintenance down the line. Maybe you save more on fuel than the cost of having to pop off the head(s) down the line, maybe you don’t. Same with the multitude of sensors, knowing what exactly the engine is doing lets them control it more optimally.

Though I do agree that they add too many unnecessary things like Heated Seats as a Service (looking at you BMW).

"Modern" ICE car engine tech is now 20-30 years old.

Even in the 1980s a 100K mile walk normal min lifespan

With one exception, it's never been the powertrain that has caused me to get a new vehicle--it's mostly been corrosion and issues related to corrosion that have led me to retire cars. It is a lot better than it used to be but cars still rust out and/or have things like fluid leaks related to rust that cause other problems.

I am pretty scared to see what happens to cars from the last 10 years as they age. The amount of computers im them is unbelievably high. Most of the chips will have been end of lifed, and whats to keep the car manufacturer making parts? Historically there was a lot of room for third parties tonmake repplacement parts, but it feels unapproachable.

Hopefully these thousands of microcontrollers all kust keep running for many decades & this is a non-issue.

When I bought a new vehicle last summer, I actually was persuaded to buy an extended warranty in part by the argument that there are so many computers in the car. I also got offered a (seemingly--I know I know) good deal.

The basic car is basically dying.

Most new cars are either SUVs or mini-SUVs, with a lot of green washing, and we’re all forgetting about sustainability and carbon footprint…

You really think that 20 years ago people were driving sedans because they were trying to be environmentally friendly? It's far more likely that they never cared about it in the first place.

I'm not going to be thrilled when I have to pay monthly for those switches to do anything, though.

And here I just want an electric car with manual roll-up windows.

For the first time in history you could have 800 VDC automatic windows and you’re just abandoning the opportunity?

We skipped the analog part of electric cars and went straight to digital. As pretty as the touchscreens are, I want buttons and knobs.

Every car has a screen now because California mandated back up cameras in new cars. It's bad business not to turn that thing into a touch screen and move controls to it.

Is the addition of a touch element to an LCD really that much cheaper than plastic buttons and knobs?

The thing is that if you're going to put a video screen of any size (not sure what the actual backup camera requirements are), you're going to use it as a navigation system--probably with Apple Play or Google Play--which is probably going to be a non-negotiable requirement for a lot of people at that point so it's going to be a touch screen anyway. And that means a lot of buttons are going to just be additional cost at that point.

I agree manufacturers don't have to dispense with most buttons because they can. My Honda Passport actually strikes a pretty good balance. It would also be nice to have better voice control but that's been a hard problem with voice assistants generally.

This was exactly my point. I didn't mean to sound like I was happy with it but the lack of buttons is directly related to the presence of touch screens which is a result of the requirement to have the back up camera. I don't think the CA regulators would take back that requirement but you can definitely file this under "unintended consequences".

In my last vehicle, I definitely chose one that had more buttons/dials than some of my other choices and it was a surprisingly high priority.

I'm not sure that the rules don't still allow the backup camera to display on the rearview mirror. (Don't see anything definitive on this.) In any case, most consumers really want an in-dash nav display (and other infotainment) at this point.

But the backup camera requirement may have nudged things along a bit.

> But the backup camera requirement may have nudged things along a bit.

It _definitely_ had a major effect on the low end vehicles. It raised the floor more than it changed the ceiling.

The navigation system on some cars are so atrocious. Impressively slow and inputting addresses can be a huge pain. I feel like a Raspberry Pi would have an order of magnitude better performance on many cars I have seen.

I haven't bought a car recently so I don't know what the landscape looks like, but I would think that even offering the possibility of a customization to have a more analog dashboard would be profitable. Even if you stick it behind a $1k upcharge I think you would see a surprising number of people opt for it. Doesn't need to replace the digital touchscreen in all cases necessarily, just be a secondary control mechanism.

Of course I'm sure we would run into situations where the analog buttons are an interface to the digital control system, so if the digital part is slow, some people might try to navigate using analog buttons too quickly. The digital interface hides that detail by design, if the menu isn't yet loaded, neither are the buttons you can click.

Car Play (and I assume Google Play) is a real game-changer. I understand Tesla's system is pretty good but any manufacturer system I tried to use in a rental car was awful.

I think most people are OK with a backup camera as it's a purely visual aid (an output), but putting actual controls of any sort (an input) on a touch screen in a vehicle is a terrible idea.

They need backup cameras because they have lost all the glass so they can pass the crash tests against the other 2,000-lb landwhales who also can't see them.

My number "2,000 lbs" was way off. That's the weight of a Fiat Panda. For another data point, the Hummer H2 is 6,000 lbs. Maybe I was thinking of kilogram figures? Anyway, you get my point.

Maybe not literally -- I'd take power windows and AC, that's it -- but I agree with your point.

Really, what dumbfuck decided that, because they're both "electronics", an electric car needs to be an iPad on wheels? Or that this concept is linked in some way with ADAS systems?

I listen to VW execs talking about how "EVs are software". Are they? Says who?

It's a fucking battery, a motor, a big-ass Buck/boost converter, and, in Tesla's case -- this element of complexity is legitimately good -- a heat pump. To exaggerate only slightly, I see no reason why any low-voltage ICs more complicated than an LM555 should be needed.

Chip shortage? We need high-performance MOSFETS, yeah, but the controller could come from a technology node circa 1979.

And then the insides are all "luxury". Everything comes with leather seats (which crack) and fancy interiors. No!! There is nothing wrong with the inside of a Camry. Give me that.

I thought Tesla started with a Lotus. Talk about bare-bones. What the hell happened?

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