I yearn for a simple electric car which is not connected, and does not have a lot of touch screens or features. Can you imagine? A cheap electric car with a radio and crank windows, and basically nothing else? It would be a dream.
I think the Citroen Ami might get close to what you want.
It’s amazingly small, underpowered, and cost efficient (for example, they don’t manufacture separate left and right doors for it, the passenger-side door just opens backwards).
The Citroën Ami is a no permit car, so it is a bit specific and probably won't be used by people who need a car to travel between cities.
The Renault Zoe is a "normal" car and fit the bill for a more "simple" electric car. They now have the Twingo Electric also which is the size of a usual twingo (roughly like a Citroën C1/Peugeot 107) and cheaper than the Zoe.
This is beautiful. To me, cars are appliances and I couldn't care less what they're like as long as they get me from point A to B safely and at minimal cost and time. I hope we get something like this in the US one day.
Just buy an old Ford Electric. The range is pretty decent and you can sometimes find them for around $13k or less if you're lucky. (Perhaps rarer these days with used car prices going up)
The alternative route that I've looking into is to just do the mod myself on an old classic car. There are a few great ev conversion companies like evWest (https://evwest.com/catalog/) and Electric GT (https://electricgt.com/) that offer drop in crates and motors that you can mount. It's not "easy" by any stretch of the imagination but it's a great option to have if you have the time and skills to do so.
I looked into this a while ago— one of the barriers was finding suitable cars to use for the donor body. Ideally you want something with high mileage, so that the engine/transmission are basically worthless, but where the body is in good shape as far as rust, paint, etc. You also probably want RWD for ease of integration.
I have two door 89 Honda Accord I plan to get running again next year. For a while I thought it would be fun to add electric motors to the back wheels. Give a little boost off the line or maybe experiment with adding a little push around corners.
After seeing the prices for electric motors I'm probably just going to get it running instead.
Agreed. Why do all electric cars also need software updates and tons of bells and whistles? Just because I want electric doesn't mean I also want a touchscreen console etc.
Because Tesla's initial target audience is not you and me, but people who buy the fanciest, latest iPhones every year.
If you're curious, I'd recommend reading Moore's "Crossing the Chasm". I'm entirely for electric cars, but I'm part of what Moore would call the "mainstream market". I don't want a car to be amazing and cutting edge. I want it to work unobtrusively and very reliably. That means that I'm going to be hard to persuade and will want to wait for evidence.
That makes me a terrible initial Tesla customer. For a new tech product, you want early adopters, as they will happily spend money on things that don't work very well. You want the kind of people who will, sight unseen, spend $500 on a flamethrower that isn't a flamethrower. [1]
So given Musk's brand and given the size and wealth of the user base you'd need to launch a new car company, it's pretty much inevitable that Tesla (and now its competitors) were going to mine the technophiles who are happy to pay a premium for sealed-box gee-whizzery.
The good news is that the electric car market will be getting more boring over time. There a lot more people in the more conservative market segments, so although we aren't as profitable per unit as the early adopters, plenty of companies will eventually be addressing our needs.
For the Chevy Bolt they've had a similar software update to reduce the risk of burning your house down, which seems better than the alternative of not having that update.
But they've also been agreeing to buy people's cars back if it's an issue, since selling someone a car with a particular range capacity and then reducing it afterward is obviously problematic.
The Bolt's battery reduction is supposed to be temporary while the final recall fix was worked out. I don't have one so I haven't been following the current news on whether that's been sorted.
In Tesla's case here it sounds worse, because this might be a permanent change where they just said "lol your car is permanently worse now, have fun."
> Why do all electric cars also need software updates
Because charging and managing modern EV batteries for optimal range and lifetime is complicated? That's my understanding anyway. If this was easy to do without all the software, why would the manufacturers spend money on it?
Elon's intent was to make electric cars sexy, you know, for the environment and all that. While we techpeople understand the cost and danger of superfluous tech, most people just go "wooo touch screen thing and iphone app for my car kewl"
Also electronics like that have come so far down in price that it adds very little to the overall manufacturing cost whilest making the car feel more premium.
Power windows are such a commodity now I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper to make a car with power windows rather than cranks.
Crank windows are good because they're cheaper and lighter than electric windows. There's no heavy electric motor in each door. It's not that they're necessary, so much that saving money on frivolous features is nice!
I feel you. But this way, the entire car industry would be bankrupt in a couple of years. There's a reason why nobody is offering a cheap, $10,000 dollar, battery-swappable, raw and simple, half-a-ton-light electric car.
That's interesting -- is it not connected? I frankly saw that it was a Chinese car, and simply assumed that it would be fully connected like a Chinese Android phone.
It is getting harder and harder to find consumer electronic products that don't regularly phone home to their manufacturers for marching orders. When I buy X, I expect X to function as it does for the life of the product. I don't want the manufacturer to suddenly decide to change the UI because one of their designers wants to put something in their portfolio. I don't want the manufacturer to suddenly decide to take away a feature because they just made a business agreement with some other company to do so. I don't want the manufacturer to collect usage analytics and use me in their A/B test experiments. I don't want to have to have an account on the manufacturer's cloud service. In fact, I don't want to have any kind of "relationship" with that company beyond the fact that I walked into a store and purchased a product with their name on it. I just want a product--I don't want the manufacturer to be an ongoing part of my life!
I have something close to this with my 2015 Nissan Leaf S. No internet connectivity at all. It's also extremely cheap. I paid ~$13k for it in 2018 with ~25k miles. The range is kind of bad compared to most other electric cars though.
Tesla Roadster? But not cheap. Maybe an older Nissan Leaf.
Seriously, me too. I will keep furiously burning fossil fuels until said car is available, and reject all guilt. Any and all emissions produced in the meantime are the fault of the spyware-car industry.
Was Tesla actually found guilty of something? The article suggests they never responded to the lawsuit and therefore a default judgment was applied:
> According to Norway’s Nettavisen, Tesla didn’t respond to the lawsuit and the 30 owners behind the case were automatically awarded 136,000 kroner (~$16,000 USD) each in compensation unless Tesla appeals to the case, which it has a few weeks to do.
The award amount comes to half a million dollars total. Might be cheaper to just write checks to the 30 people than to tie up corporate lawyers and possibly set a precedent of admission that could trigger other lawsuits.
The article specifically says that only 30 owners were involved in the lawsuit and awarded damages.
The speculation about 100,000 more owners getting involved is editorialization from this blog, although I suppose some of them will be incentivized to do follow-on suits now that the award value is so high.
I have a Chevy Volt, and there is a recall for them where the range is reduced slightly to protect the battery. It’s partially a longevity issue and partially a safety issue.
Tesla just did the same thing with updates.
(Comments here seem to not understand this context...)
Yes, but a primary marketing metric for these vehicles is range. So you if you sold me a vehicle with range X, but it turns out the range is 0.9X, then it's quite right for the buyer to expect some sort of "make good" and the producer to expect the government to force one upon them.
It gets even trickier if it can be shown that the producer was aware that such reductions in range would be quite likely to occur in the near future. When likely transitions to certainty, then it's fraud.
But I’m not given any compensation from Chevy. The range reduction is small, within the warranty (like with Tesla). I wish I had the ability to fix it via software updates instead of having to bring it to a dealer.
Tesla has actually INCREASED both range and charge speed via software updates, as well.
And there’s no reason to suspect Tesla or Chevy knew for a fact they’d need to do this. People throw “fraud” around way too easily. Usually, when people do that, it makes me think they’re likely perma-skeptics.
> Tesla didn’t respond to the lawsuit and the 30 owners behind the case were automatically awarded 136,000 kroner (~$16,000 USD) each in compensation unless Tesla appeals to the case, which it has a few weeks to do.
So that's half a million dollars. One wonders if it was incompetence on Tesla's part, or calculated "well, it will cost that in lawyers fees to settle." Dunno. Leaving it unchallenged in court is a terrible look.
Guilty of what though? The interesting question is not ‘did they change charging speed’, it’s whether their motives were good & whether doing so is OK.
This one reminds me of the Apple “battery-gate” issue. I’m not going to pick sides or anything but I agree that both Apple and Tesla should have been considerably more clear in their messaging to customers.
EVs in general have ridiculous warranty on range/battery capacity.
Consider you have bought 250mile range EV. Most manufacturers will say that there's nothing wrong if your range degrades by up to 30%, down to 175mile range.
And there is no consumer visible guage for degradation either. The manufacturer uses their own, inaccessible, approach to validation. This could become a real problem in the future.
Nissan Leafs do provide a gauge. Makes it really easy when buying used as the battery health meter is right on the speedometer dash and can’t be turned off.
I had a similar drop in battery myself. It used be 254 and in a few weeks it dropped to 220. At that time they also changed the representation to show theoretical miles instead of raw miles as the default. So they used some algorithm to show higher range somehow. I didn’t use that representation and instead got the shock of my life when I saw the drop. Tesla support said there is nothing wrong with the battery. I would be really interested in knowing more about this case and what exactly happened.
Was there any up-front communication when this happened? "In order to keep your car's batteries safe, and ensure they have a long life, we're reducing the range a bit". And maybe throw in some free supercharging.
Have you been able to determine if the actual range of the vehicle has changed at all? That's not clear to me from the article. I rented a Model X for a day and got about 60% of the estimated range (presumably due to my driving). After this update it would have only been 30% wrong instead of 40%. Not sure what to make of that.
The article is short on the interesting part. What are the actual charges? If Tesla is openly admitting that they changed range estimates and throttle charging, what is there for the court to determine?
Readit News
It’s amazingly small, underpowered, and cost efficient (for example, they don’t manufacture separate left and right doors for it, the passenger-side door just opens backwards).
https://www.citroen.com/en/Highlight/131/ami-100t-electric-m...
I really hope that _these_ are the kinds of cars that will get us to mass adoption and not Teslas.
The Renault Zoe is a "normal" car and fit the bill for a more "simple" electric car. They now have the Twingo Electric also which is the size of a usual twingo (roughly like a Citroën C1/Peugeot 107) and cheaper than the Zoe.
The alternative route that I've looking into is to just do the mod myself on an old classic car. There are a few great ev conversion companies like evWest (https://evwest.com/catalog/) and Electric GT (https://electricgt.com/) that offer drop in crates and motors that you can mount. It's not "easy" by any stretch of the imagination but it's a great option to have if you have the time and skills to do so.
Or the cash?
Are there companies that will convert your favorite car to electric, or is that just too much of a liability minefield in the USA?
After seeing the prices for electric motors I'm probably just going to get it running instead.
If you're curious, I'd recommend reading Moore's "Crossing the Chasm". I'm entirely for electric cars, but I'm part of what Moore would call the "mainstream market". I don't want a car to be amazing and cutting edge. I want it to work unobtrusively and very reliably. That means that I'm going to be hard to persuade and will want to wait for evidence.
That makes me a terrible initial Tesla customer. For a new tech product, you want early adopters, as they will happily spend money on things that don't work very well. You want the kind of people who will, sight unseen, spend $500 on a flamethrower that isn't a flamethrower. [1]
So given Musk's brand and given the size and wealth of the user base you'd need to launch a new car company, it's pretty much inevitable that Tesla (and now its competitors) were going to mine the technophiles who are happy to pay a premium for sealed-box gee-whizzery.
The good news is that the electric car market will be getting more boring over time. There a lot more people in the more conservative market segments, so although we aren't as profitable per unit as the early adopters, plenty of companies will eventually be addressing our needs.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/10/17445838/boring-company-f...
But they've also been agreeing to buy people's cars back if it's an issue, since selling someone a car with a particular range capacity and then reducing it afterward is obviously problematic.
The Bolt's battery reduction is supposed to be temporary while the final recall fix was worked out. I don't have one so I haven't been following the current news on whether that's been sorted.
In Tesla's case here it sounds worse, because this might be a permanent change where they just said "lol your car is permanently worse now, have fun."
Because charging and managing modern EV batteries for optimal range and lifetime is complicated? That's my understanding anyway. If this was easy to do without all the software, why would the manufacturers spend money on it?
They don't sell electric vehicles. Their boffins are working on "EV/AV".
Power windows are such a commodity now I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper to make a car with power windows rather than cranks.
That said, you could probably build this pretty easily - folks have been converting old vehicles into electric cars for, well, decades as well.
Though they probably do mostly have electric windows; that's more or less a standard feature these days.
If I have to describe it, it would be closer to a 4 wheeled electric-scooter.
What is the reason? Don't automotive manufacturers offer cheap ICE cars? Why would a cheap EV bankrupt them but not cheap ICE cars?
https://media.gm.com/media/cn/en/gm/news.detail.html/content...
https://www.solarcarchallenge.org/challenge/photos.shtml
Nice read here that history https://mg.co.uk/behind-the-wheel/electric/the-history-of-el...
Every inch of the car is well understood. Cheap and reliable parts are available all over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peugeot_206
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178802
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And even cheaper if you live in the city: Renault Twizy, Citroën ami, ...
Seriously, me too. I will keep furiously burning fossil fuels until said car is available, and reject all guilt. Any and all emissions produced in the meantime are the fault of the spyware-car industry.
> According to Norway’s Nettavisen, Tesla didn’t respond to the lawsuit and the 30 owners behind the case were automatically awarded 136,000 kroner (~$16,000 USD) each in compensation unless Tesla appeals to the case, which it has a few weeks to do.
The award amount comes to half a million dollars total. Might be cheaper to just write checks to the 30 people than to tie up corporate lawyers and possibly set a precedent of admission that could trigger other lawsuits.
I think you have misunderstood the potential consequences.
The speculation about 100,000 more owners getting involved is editorialization from this blog, although I suppose some of them will be incentivized to do follow-on suits now that the award value is so high.
Tesla just did the same thing with updates.
(Comments here seem to not understand this context...)
It gets even trickier if it can be shown that the producer was aware that such reductions in range would be quite likely to occur in the near future. When likely transitions to certainty, then it's fraud.
Tesla has actually INCREASED both range and charge speed via software updates, as well.
And there’s no reason to suspect Tesla or Chevy knew for a fact they’d need to do this. People throw “fraud” around way too easily. Usually, when people do that, it makes me think they’re likely perma-skeptics.
So that's half a million dollars. One wonders if it was incompetence on Tesla's part, or calculated "well, it will cost that in lawyers fees to settle." Dunno. Leaving it unchallenged in court is a terrible look.
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Dead Comment
Consider you have bought 250mile range EV. Most manufacturers will say that there's nothing wrong if your range degrades by up to 30%, down to 175mile range.
This is quickly changing as we comment.
Just assuming the surprise made it worse.