Like the title says, are there any EVs that just have a Bluetooth radio and that’s it? Like a normal car, not a smartphone on wheels? If not, do you all think that this will actually happen at some point? This is the main reason why I can’t (and will never) buy an EV. I like to have actual buttons everywhere on my car. I think those massive tablets on these cars with all the touch buttons are very dangerous. I like an “entertainment system” that only connects to my phone with either a headphone jack of or Bluetooth. It’s a car, not a PC.
Not that I know of. Let smaller automakers make EVs and we might get something like that.
But with the federal government mandating that all cars must have automatic braking after a certain date in the future I guess we’re never going to get away from tons of sensors and computers in cars.
Automatic braking doesn’t require the level of tech that’s being packed into EVs these days
You could make automatic breaking without a full blown computer, but it’s so much cheaper to put a full-blown computer than it is to do it all in hardware. Everything uses turing complete equipment now, it’s actually less expensive at this point.
There’s absolutely no reason not to put multiple computers in the car I think the real win is not surfacing it to the end user.
“Tech” is a conflated term. The way I read OP is that they don’t want their cars main user interface to be a smartphone app. Doesn’t mean the car can’t be technologically advanced.
Exactly. If my car can connect to the internet then it has too much tech in it.
The ability for a car to call emergency services in the event of a crash, and thus the mobile / data connection required to do that, has been mandatory since 2018 in all new cars sold in the EU.
So there is no cost incentive not to have the internet connection in there, as it is a basic safety feature now, like seatbelts.
You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.
This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.
Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.
I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.
They also mandate a backup camera, so that means they need to have a screen.