[PlatoIsADisease]

Real buttons are more expensive than electronic. Not sure if you care, but people make that mistake more generally.

Game engines are probably trivially cheap to produce in 2026. You forget that Toyota sells 10M cars per year. In 3 years thats 30M cars. What does it cost each buyer for the game engine? 30 cents?

[dsr_]

I can buy a 104 key mechanical keyboard for under $75 retail. That's 104 switches, 104 labelled button caps, a circuit board, controller and USB interface, with reliability likely much better than any other moving part found on an automobile.

[PlatoIsADisease]

That is very factually wrong. The reliability will be worse. That $75 keyboard is going to be used be hundreds of thousands of people, not millions. There is no safety involved. No one is testing to see how sunscreen and 50 other liquids interact with it. Dump a sugary drink on your car buttons, they will still work. Do that on your keyboard and it wont.

[conductr]

This only makes sense if touchscreens are reliable. They are not. You should look at the fault rates. Cheaper isn't better. In any case, we had cheap and good analogue before so let's not pretend like it's not possible. It might have been more expensive than a keyboard, but it wasn't dramatically different or we would have never had it. They just found a way to 1) reduce cost by going digital and 2) charging a premium for going digital as it was perceived as an upgrade by a majority of the market. They sold it to us, it's what they're good at. It doesn't mean it was a good idea.

[mikeryan]

Unity has a whole template and asset library for creating car displays.

https://unity.com/blog/industry/automotive-hmi-template-take...

[nineteen999]

And Unreal goes a whole lot further than that:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/automotive

[criddell]

> Real buttons are more expensive than electronic.

It might add up to a lot of money for the manufacturer who is cranking out thousands or millions of vehicles, but to the consumer buying one car it isn't a meaningful difference.

[PlatoIsADisease]

This is 10 year old outdated, but 10 years ago 1 button was ~1.00. Probably closer to $1.20 or $1.30. But sometimes buttons had 2 buttons on them, Those would go for $2.10-$2.30.

Then you had wiring each button wire I believe was $1. This wasnt 1 wire, but a few wires, power, ground, signal. Each button had them. This wasnt my job, so I didn't follow this price too much, but I asked the question at the time. I think going into the ECU, there is also a cost associated with it.

Anyway, you could assume 10 years ago, each button was $2. A car has 40-70 buttons? So its probably like $100 a car. Maybe $150 or $200 in today's money.

Also buttons and wires break, causing warranty problems.

At the time these vehicles were selling for under $20k at the bottom, and $40k at the top. So 1% of costs were buttons.

This doesn't even include the cost of hiring ~20 engineers to handle the buttons. ~6 people to check appearance and do testing... It doesn't include the assembly costs on the line. That 1% was just the cost of button + wire.

[danudey]

> Also buttons and wires break, causing warranty problems.

It's a good thing that doesn't happen to giant 15" integrated touchscreens. Imagine how much of a problem that would be!

[Dylan16807]

> This doesn't even include the cost of hiring ~20 engineers to handle the buttons. ~6 people to check appearance and do testing... It doesn't include the assembly costs on the line. That 1% was just the cost of button + wire.

That doesn't make sense. $1 uninstalled might make sense for a fancy custom-molded button, even if it's too much for a generic button. (I'd rather have some generic buttons with labels than use a touchscreen, by the way.) But there's no way a few feet of signal wire and the proportional share of power wires get anywhere near $1 uninstalled.

Also I can find entire car stereo units with 15 buttons on them for $15? That kind of integrated button is cheap, has been common in cars for a long time, and can control things indirectly like a touch screen button if that's cheaper than direct wiring.

[PlatoIsADisease]

You are underestimating the quality you are getting with a car. The light colors match perfectly with science and experts. Its wild how much effort goes into it.

Your after market has not been tested to react with sunscreen.

[Dylan16807]

But the whole argument was that it's too expensive. If impeccable color matching is too expensive then give me the cheapest button that won't break. Needing the touchscreen to adjust the A/C is more ugly than the worst looking button.

But also that kind of button doesn't need dedicated wires.

[PlatoIsADisease]

If only people bought a rag tag of aftermarket tier vehicles?

But for some reason people buy new nice vehicles and don't buy crappy new vehicles...

[ErroneousBosh]

> Anyway, you could assume 10 years ago, each button was $2. A car has 40-70 buttons? So its probably like $100 a car. Maybe $150 or $200 in today's money.

I have a late 90s Range Rover. It has about 12 buttons on the dashboard, most of which I never have to bother with (they do things that turn on and off the fog lamps, which I don't need to use, or adjust the air suspension, which I rarely need to use). I turn the lights off and on, and I switch the heating from "normal" to "BLAST EVERYTHING ON, FRONT AND REAR DEMIST ON, SEAT HEATERS ON, EVERYTHING ON, EVERYTHING ON, EVERYTHING UP FULL, WE'RE AN AIR FRYER NOW" mode.

What do you actually need an LCD for in a car?

[criddell]

> What do you actually need an LCD for in a car?

Backup camera. They are required by law.

[nottorp]

It doesn't have to be a LCD. Why not a CRT :)

[ErroneousBosh]

I don't use that. It's silly and distracting.

[fwip]

From looking at some new car options lately, it seems like you're lucky if you can get floor mats for $200. This doesn't take away from your point - I suppose I'm just griping.

[wasmainiac]

I don’t care. I want a simple car with simple parts that I can fix. Not this spaceship that we get now days. The 12v battery on my partners car had to be replaced, apparently it had to be “paired” in the shop and was not user serviceable wtf!?

[moring]

The "pairing" probably makes sense if you deep-dive into the technical details. My guess is that the battery has software on it to improve performance, total life, whatever.

The real problem is that the whole is not designed to be user-servicable.