[778hbff]

> if there were an electric car for under $10K

Somebody should make a concept car that is electric but without any electronics (apart from battery and the motors, obviously). Apart from the battery, what's expensive in a modern electric car is that you are essentially sitting in a giant smartphone with 4 wheels.

Why is that necessary? Electric motors provide the unique opportunity to create vastly simpler (and thus cheaper) cars than ICE versions. This could over-compensate for the battery costs. But seems car manufacturers fill it with more electronics. I'm sure there are market opportunities for cars that just bring you safely from A to B without having some semi-self-driving-but-not-really Twitter client on board that opens the doors with an app on your mobile. I'm fine using a key, thank you very much.

[vel0city]

> Why is that necessary? Electric motors provide the unique opportunity to create vastly simpler (and thus cheaper) cars than ICE versions.

The majority of the market (dollars-wise, at least) doesn't want a vastly simpler car though. They like having heated leather seats, heated steering wheels, comfortable interiors with good AC and heat, and a decent stereo.

Also, its not like you're realistically going to cut the price in half taking out the stereo. The actual car thing is the vast majority of the price.

[778hbff]

Heated seating doesn't need to turn my car into a smartphone. A reasonably simple stereo neither. Bascially what you could have in a car in the 70s.

It would be interesting to know how much cost it would cut to leave out the hundreds of sensors and CAN bus stuff and phone-home interactive NFC magic. Less dev costs, less certification, less maintenance, less licensing.

[vel0city]

A brand new with markup replacement of the head unit/smart stuff guts of an ICE car I had was ~$1,500 including labor. That core essentially ran Android with a lot of custom skinning and applications, so essentially a cheap Android tablet slightly hardened to handle the heat of a car parked in the sun. What does a set of 19" wheels cost? A set of tires to put on those wheels? The full brake assemblies? The ABS system? We're easily now past a multiple of that cost of the smart stuff guts/head unit and we' don't actually even have a way to spin those wheels or change their direction much less seats or seatbelts or airbags or, you know, a frame.

The screen and radios are usually pretty darn cheap BOM-wise. You really think a computer with less compute capacity as a cheap modern cell phone makes up a significant portion of the cost of a new car?

[778hbff]

You seem to be completely ignoring the rest of the iceberg that this glorified screen rests on.

And no, not every car needs to have top-end leather heated fake-racing shaped seats. Some people just want to get from A to B and not everybody has a SWE salary/compensation like the slightly-detached-from-normal-people's-reality crowd here at HN.

Of course when I discuss this with a tech crowd I need to expect a tech-focused attitude. See it as a challenge .. I mean, some people write compilers that output only move instructions (still Turing complete) or build websites entirely running on solar power. Minimizing electronics in an electric car could just be another creativity-inducing restriction. Just saying "it can't be done" does not sound like real Hacker spirit to me..

[vel0city]

> You seem to be completely ignoring the rest of the iceberg that this glorified screen rests on.

Yeah the stuff it rests on such as the frame, the suspension, the wheels... That's the vast majority of the cost of a car. What sensors are you thinking about that add supposedly many many thousands of dollars to the cost of a car? Backup sensors aftermarket, at retail, can be had for $20. Mobileye sells aftermarket ADAS kits for <$1k installed, at retail. What do you think an automaker moving a million of those a year pays per unit?

Tear out a all of those computers and sensors from a $35k car and....now you're at a $33k with a lot of the comfort options removed.

Which part of the iceberg do you imagine makes up the majority of this cost? Which seems to be the most expensive part: the Android tablet, the $200 worth of sensors, or the couple thousand pounds of metal called the frame?

Could you ship a car without many computers on it? Sure, maybe. You'd have a hard time meeting emissions requirements without some kind of EFI though, so instantly there's a computer there. Same goes with needing to have some kind of EGR system to once again meet emissions and fuel economy standards. Then, you're going to have a hard time having a purely mechanical ABS, which without you'll get incredibly poor safety scores. These days a backup camera is required in the US, so you'll need some kind of display and a camera.

Like, sure, one could make a car without many computers in it. It wouldn't be radically cheaper than cars with computers in it, it will probably perform worse and have fewer comfort features. The only real selling point would be "hey, its a basic car!"

You probably wouldn't sell nearly as many units as the big auto makers, as I really doubt it would be as popular (for example, why isn't the Mirage the most popular car in the US?). This means your per unit manufacturing costs would be higher. In the end I imagine such a vehicle would actually cost more in the market than less as some of the big costs like safety testing would amortize over a much smaller fleet of vehicles.

Even the Aptera, an incredibly stripped down car, is estimating ~$25k base.

Lets take the Mirage for an example. ~$16kUSD for the extreme base tier. Tear out the computers, the motor, the transmission, we're probably at like $11k. Now add in a 45kWh battery pack at ~$151/kWh so ~$7k, and we're at ~$18k. Add a drive unit/charging system for another few grand, and we're at ~21k. Starting price for the Bolt, $27k, and that comes with all those fancy "make the car a smartphone" features. And if we price it with the Bolt's battery size (60kWh) it gets even closer.

[778hbff]

> You'd have a hard time meeting emissions requirements

Not sure what emissions you are thinking about from an electric car that needs regulation circuits. You know, the thing I'm talking about. (And that I'm still claiming could end up vastly simpler than ICE cars if we only tried).

But in any case, in absence of a good faith basis to a discussion, it doesn't seem worthwhile for either of us to continue it.