No touch screens, no telemetry, no cellular modems, no wifi, no apps, no subscriptions, no infotainment.
No camera filming me please.
Braindead take. ICE cars all do the exact same shit. This stuff has NOTHING to do with the powertrain of a vehicle.
Older ones aren’t so bad. Too bad we don’t have EVs without the “smart” stuff.
Nobody said that ev’s have that shit because they’re evs. It’s a new car thing, and unfortunately there aren’t many electric cars that are old enough to not have this stuff (ignoring Tesla, since they kinda started the trend and and also because they’re nazis).
Tesla started this because they oversold EVs for years on the highest profit margins in the industry. They filled the cars with gadgets and screens to add the perception of value because car buyers are morons.
The Smart ForTwo EV was just what you asked for. It did have a cellular modem. But you could just unplug it very easily.
And make it small on the outside and as big as possible on the inside, with the back seats level with the trunk when folded down
Fully open hardware and software would be nice. I don’t plan to tinker with it. But it would give peace of mind to know that it can’t be enshittified and that discontinuation of the model will not leave me out of luck for spare parts.
Honda-san I beg of you, revist your classic designs and drop an electric motor in to them. You will become more rich
Bonus points if you can make it so that all the aftermarket suspension parts that already exist for those classic designs still fit. Ultra-bonus points if the body is externally identical so aero and body mods still fit.
Slate EV
I bought the Kona (2024) and it’s the best car I could ask for. It has some smart things of course, but I have no subscriptions, no phone requirement, I mostly just listen to FM radio. It’s been the best car I’ve ever owned.
Features look nice. I guess I’m just gonna have to get over my “crossover” hate and buy a car that looks like a low-top roller skate lol.
I like my Kia EV6. We were in the market for an EV and test drove all of the ones we could try. I liked the KIA because it had a lot of physical buttons for my regular things. There’s no real subscriptions except for things we don’t use. There’s a touchscreen for a lot but I can get by without using it mostly
Kia allows you to disable data acquiring in options.
We tried to find a small EV everywhere. Bolt was sluggish and had weird controls, leat just hasn’t been updated in 10 years, and so we landed on the kona. Definitely larger than we wanted, but batteries are big. At least worth a test drive I’d suggest
The leaf JUST got updated finally after they made the Ariya (much bigger, already discontinued because it wasn’t profitable enough.)
But yeah I think if anyone wants ANY new car without any of those features, good luck. You’re required to have a screen for a backup camera for anything since I think 2012? So there’s gonna at minimum be something.
Reansult 5, soon Twingo and VW ID.Polo. Hyundai Inster … at least in Europe. I guess in the US they’d rather sell you some oversized childcrusher instead of giving customers reasonably oriced compact options.
Yup, pretty much. Those were the only three “small” versions, everything else was giant SUV sized.
That’s dire. In Europe a lot of new compact EVs have been coming on the market in 2025 and 2026. Manufacturer’s finally got the message. They even started to bring prices down with no nonsense offers. I just had a look, not even VW wants to sell its new ID.Polo in the US. You know, finally VW is building good cars with good interior again, after having gotten rid of the remaining traces of the “copy all the Tesla nonsense” disease and then they don’t even attempt to sell them in the US.
Also no Hyundai Ioniq 3, no Opel Corsa Electric (or other Stellantis variants), Cupra Raval, Mini Cooper SE, or some of the Chinese offers (BYD Dolphin, Firefly Firefly, Dongfeng Box etc)? But there is the Fiat 500e on the market, isn’t it?
I had the opposite experience between the bolt and the Kona! The smaller bolt is a bit faster and I found drove more on the car side of the car/SUV split than the kona, and while the button placement took getting used to it has one for almost everything. We also bought while the tax credits were in effect so it was $10k cheaper for 4 miles less range.
leat just hasn’t been updated in 10 years
I thought I read the Leaf got a fairly big update recently. I’ll have to check on that when I have some time.
I think that was this year, so in 2024 it was super outdated but it’s better now. I think it’s also a crossover now unfortunately
I was searching a few years ago, so makes sense they’d update it right after I got mine
makes sense they’d update it right after I got mine
That’s how my life works too haha.
And also why I’m so hesitant to settle for a body style I dislike (seriously, crossovers: be a sedan, be an SUV, or be a station wagon; trying to be all 3 is just failing at everything…but I digress lol). As soon as I settle and buy one, I just know they’ll bring back sedans.
I would have loved a sedan, but none exist here. I figured that hopefully by buying a Kona it would show that at least one american is buying the smallest car he apparently can. It was a good tradeoff.
As for sedans making a comeback, I doubt it. Sadly, I think the industry has firmly moved away from them.
I think those days are coming to an end, especially now that gas is expensive everyone is buying up the older evs that dont have those things like the older Chevy bolts
Chevy Bolts have almost every piece of modern tech in cars. Display screens, limited physical dials and buttons, car and pedestrian sensors, cameras everywhere (though luckily none in the cabin facing the inside), GPS, OnStar, and data telemetry. The last two can at least be mitigated by terminating the data line antenna cables to stop the car from phoning home all the time.
OnStar is the worst for privacy, it tracks everything you do, even your weight.
I would also like “turn” please
That requires a premium subscription.
no telemetry
In 2026?
I’d settle for Android/Apple Auto and no cellular
Hitting the gas in an EV is like filming with a digital camera.
Yeah. Gas [pedal] is used here in the same way the “save” icon is still a floppy disk.
It’s a skeuomorph!
What a fucked up word
it’s easy and convenient?
My phone has a system app known as a “dialer” despite not having a round dial.
Gas? No thanks.
I think they meant the pedal.
Yes that’s the joke.
Can’t even call it a throttle
I guess I’ll have to stick with “accelerator”
Dunno what it’ll be called when I trade in my motorbike for an electric one someday
An electric bike should be called a motorbike. Your motorbike should have been called an engine bike from the start. Motors are electric, engines use internal combustion.
In a perfect world, yes, but actually, no.
But then we also need to call the brake the accelerator, too.
ohh sorry, i didn’t notice it was a joke I feel dumb lol.
Manual Gears (5 speed)!
And a cool loud exhaust to attract women.
Do EVs even have transmissions? I ask this legitimately, I know shit for dick about cars beyond how to change oil
They gave one drive reduction gear, just one speed, no shifting.
I’m gonna have to ask what that means. Cars are just something my autism just does not comprehend
Internal combustion engines are very picky about how fast they spin, since they get their power from burning fuel the rate at which fuel enters the cylinders to burn correlates strongly to the power they have available. And since each cycle of a cylinder burns about the same amount of fuel the faster the engine spins the more power it generates.
This is why internal combustion engine vehicles have gearboxes (transmission in the US?) to ensure that you can spin the engine fast even while the wheels are slow) or stopped) so you have enough power to start the car.
Electric motors by contrast generate power through the strength of their electromagnetic fields, which is just how much current gets pushed through the electromagnets. How fast the motor spins just changes how fast the electronics have to “move” the generated field without changing the strength, so you get similar power even at slow speeds.
So electric motors have enough torque at low speed that you can start your car without needing a gearbox.
Note: this post is a gross simplification and probably mis-uses some terminology but it should give a general understanding of why the transmissions are different.
Okay pretend they are trains without tracks
I’d honestly love this. I don’t even care if the stick doesn’t actually switch gears and it can just give me fake engine rev sounds. I just miss driving manual and paddle shifters just aren’t the same.
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N wowed the cartubers crowd back in 2024/25 because it simulated a lot of the driving feel of gas cars.
Maybe keep an eye on Hyundai.
Edit: although I don’t think they have simulated stick shifting
There are no gears on an EV. They just go.
if you’re american isn’t that the chevy bolt?
The bolt has buttons and no real smart features but it also has an infotainment tablet. It also still has gps and Wi-Fi and whatever else as options, so I don’t particularly trust it not to be tracking everything. It’s certainly miles better than most of the competition but it’s still a modern car.
As I understand it, one of the other advantages of the bolt is that it’s fairly easy to disconnect. There’s a dedicated fuse you can pull which will disable the telemetry as well as the microphone and a lot of the related infotainment system functions like gps. Or for those who want more of those functions, you can open the panel behind the screen, unplug the antenna, and replace it with with a terminator so that it thinks it’s intact but has no signal.
Of course, it will still try to send data home through your phone if you let it. Apparently it can do that through android auto and carplay if they are connected via bluetooth but not over USB.
There are guides to disabling OnStar effectively which should assuage those concerns. Well, for the 23 and older models. Not sure about the new stuff.
A quick terminator on the cellular antenna makes it receive no cell signal - the other features that don’t rely on cellular all continue working.
