“Electric cars don’t have to be defined by smartphone aesthetics and touchscreens and proprietary software; they don’t have to present as impenetrable to the garage mechanic.”
@andrewmoseman.bsky.social makes the case for a dumber EV:
I should have said estimating. It’s much more scientific than a guess. But it still cost my insurance company half the side curtain air bags, a seat air bag and a seat cover to protect…my purse sitting on the empty passenger seat…
Back ~2005 I found some guys in the lobby of a Portland Or. movie theater promoting electric conversion of cars e.g. Corolla. With lead-acid batteries. Dumb as fuck. Good idea. Almost anyone could do it.
I took a business class at Waseda University in Tokyo and the VP of Mazda spoke about how one of their philosophies of design was to enable 80% of maintenance to be able to be done by a regular car owner with basic tools. 2004ish I think.
People aren't "too lazy," IMO. It's simply impossible to buy a car that is NOT infested with these gadgets. I'm not sure any manufacturer sells a base model of any vehicle.
There's still anxiety with all the EV potential buyers I talk to. They can't figure out where to charge and the infrastructure is not quite there yet.
It's not the miles from 100% to 0%, it's about driving across Pennsylvania and it's a research project instead of "pull off at the next exit"
Lol. Every single one of the ones with a 🔧 doesn't exist yet.
The green ones are useless for a long trip.
Half of the orange ones are also very slow (30+ minutes to charge) and the point is I shouldn't need to look at plugshare.
That's the source of the anxiety, and why EV cars can't be dumb.
Speaking as someone who has only had an EV for years now, I am going to trust my own experience. I have a Chademo car to boot, which means I have some of the worst selections available, and yet, I do just fine.
That may be true of brand-new high-capacity EVs but older models are still on the road (I own a volt hybrid and it's fine for around town) but the charging time makes long-distance trips hard to plan. That's why we bought a hybrid. 6 gallons of gas in 3 months is pretty good, though.
The Volt is long in the tooth now, but with new batteries, one can nearly triple the factory range. And that's one of the beauty parts about EVs, as technology improves, repairs become opportunities to improve that legacy. There are first Gen Leaf now with 200 mile ranges, for example.
Yes please. I would buy a Tesla if it just had a go pedal and a stop pedal. The Dacia Spring is very close to what you want as is the Citroen EC3. The base models don’t even have a stupid iPad glued to the dash
