There isn't any reason people in America couldn't choose such things. They just don't. If the selling of the idea is failing, maybe the idea is the problem and not the people you're selling it to.
Our cities are designed for cars. Hell, most of our society is designed around owning a car. It is horrendously impractical in a lot of places to go without a car.
Our public transit systems are largely garbage, if they exist at all. Bike lanes are extremely rare, and are really just used as free car parking.
Take my commute to work for instance. It's about 3 miles, but it would be impossible to bike, as there are huge and dangerous hills. Likewise, walking would be very difficult. It takes about 10 minutes to drive to work, and a bus would be over 40 minutes.
We have major infrastructural failures that make it very impractical to exist without a car in most cases.
Our suburbs are designed for cars. Our cities are retrofitted for cars.
That might seem pedantic but I’m not trying to be. The point is that we do actually have significant areas of population which are ready to be reworked to prioritize cycling without completely changing the way we live.
Suburbs can also prioritize safe cycling. Take a look at bentonville Arkansas. It has a tiny downtown but most of it looks and functions like a suburb. They’ve made it safe for everyone to ride their bikes to commute and for pleasure. It’s not a blueprint by any means, it’s a passion project by some rich folks, but it’s proof that the suburbs can be retrofitted with a vision and will.
Bentonville's core is vastly different from the surrounding suburb/exurb/metro area which is mostly 0.5+ acre lots built in confined subdivisions connected via 4-8 lane arterial stroads - typical American car style suburban planning. The damage is done, retrofitting this development pattern to suit cycling over F150 throughput is just not something that will be achievable in the Bentonville, or the greater US.
I live in Kansas City and there is a valiant effort happening here to put in meaningful cycling infrastructure. There are bollard protected lanes from downtown out to the inner ring suburbs, additionally we have a residential grid that would allow safe cycling around town, but the new lanes are going completely unused. Visit the KC reddit and look at the vitriol being spewed - 'why are my tax dollars being wasted on this', 'i cant park', 'it ruins business'... These are the people coming from our outer ring suburbs where cycling is just not an option - they can't even fathom a place without cars.
Have you looked at what's happened in Bentonville in the last few years? The cycling infrastructure that's been built extends well beyond the core and does a remarkable job connecting the suburban style development with the downtown core.
They've built miles and miles of greenways and off street bike paths. I was there three months ago and rode all over town without once feeling threatened by auto traffic. Is it perfect? No, absolutely not. But I defy anyone to go there, ride their bike to commute around, and walk away thinking "getting around by bike in in the US is impossible."
I don't think Bentonville is repeatable everywhere, and it may even be a fluke, but it's certainly proof that it can be done.
I'll admit it has been 3 years since we considered moving there (we tried living for a month to get the feel of it), but I wonder how well suburban style development is going to scale for utilitarian cycling to occur. The population is what, maybe 100k now? What about when its 10x that? (think DFW)
I don't think it does, and I don't think bentonville is the ideal. I just think it's proof that it's possible to start mitigating and designing toward a better future with what we have.
I've done such things. It is surprisingly not bad if you spend ~$500 on fluorescent breathable rain gear and lights.
The biggest problems are leaves on the stupid green paint they coat the bike lanes with, and increased stopping distance / driver fatigue for the cars.
Storing the rain gear at your destination in a way that lets it dry out is also a big concern.
Being cold is not an issue at all. If anything, you will be too hot while rising.
Realistically speaking, what percent of the commuting population could do this on a daily basis? Many people have additional limitations that also need to be considered. E.g. Have to pick up the kids after work, have to shop after work, age/health constraints, etc.
> isn't any reason people in America couldn't choose such things
I mean, sure. I don’t want to. I lived without a car in New York and it was great. I live with a car in a low-density area and it’s also great. There should be a carbon tax, but that’s a fancy way of saying some people get cars and some don’t.
(Specifically: I don’t want to walk or bike when it’s -20° F. I don’t want to load up my skis every time on a bus, I literally can’t with a snowmobile, and I enjoy doing those things.)
To be sure many Americans will worry about the danger of being in the smallest vehicle on the road — having to contend with SUVs, full-size pickup trucks.
But just as the Japanese found a foothold in the U.S. auto market in the 70's, if there were an electric car for under $10K I suspect a lot of people would find that their fears could be somewhat tempered.
Somebody should make a concept car that is electric but without any electronics (apart from battery and the motors, obviously). Apart from the battery, what's expensive in a modern electric car is that you are essentially sitting in a giant smartphone with 4 wheels.
Why is that necessary? Electric motors provide the unique opportunity to create vastly simpler (and thus cheaper) cars than ICE versions. This could over-compensate for the battery costs. But seems car manufacturers fill it with more electronics. I'm sure there are market opportunities for cars that just bring you safely from A to B without having some semi-self-driving-but-not-really Twitter client on board that opens the doors with an app on your mobile. I'm fine using a key, thank you very much.
> Why is that necessary? Electric motors provide the unique opportunity to create vastly simpler (and thus cheaper) cars than ICE versions.
The majority of the market (dollars-wise, at least) doesn't want a vastly simpler car though. They like having heated leather seats, heated steering wheels, comfortable interiors with good AC and heat, and a decent stereo.
Also, its not like you're realistically going to cut the price in half taking out the stereo. The actual car thing is the vast majority of the price.
Heated seating doesn't need to turn my car into a smartphone. A reasonably simple stereo neither. Bascially what you could have in a car in the 70s.
It would be interesting to know how much cost it would cut to leave out the hundreds of sensors and CAN bus stuff and phone-home interactive NFC magic. Less dev costs, less certification, less maintenance, less licensing.
A brand new with markup replacement of the head unit/smart stuff guts of an ICE car I had was ~$1,500 including labor. That core essentially ran Android with a lot of custom skinning and applications, so essentially a cheap Android tablet slightly hardened to handle the heat of a car parked in the sun. What does a set of 19" wheels cost? A set of tires to put on those wheels? The full brake assemblies? The ABS system? We're easily now past a multiple of that cost of the smart stuff guts/head unit and we' don't actually even have a way to spin those wheels or change their direction much less seats or seatbelts or airbags or, you know, a frame.
The screen and radios are usually pretty darn cheap BOM-wise. You really think a computer with less compute capacity as a cheap modern cell phone makes up a significant portion of the cost of a new car?
You seem to be completely ignoring the rest of the iceberg that this glorified screen rests on.
And no, not every car needs to have top-end leather heated fake-racing shaped seats. Some people just want to get from A to B and not everybody has a SWE salary/compensation like the slightly-detached-from-normal-people's-reality crowd here at HN.
Of course when I discuss this with a tech crowd I need to expect a tech-focused attitude. See it as a challenge .. I mean, some people write compilers that output only move instructions (still Turing complete) or build websites entirely running on solar power. Minimizing electronics in an electric car could just be another creativity-inducing restriction. Just saying "it can't be done" does not sound like real Hacker spirit to me..
> You seem to be completely ignoring the rest of the iceberg that this glorified screen rests on.
Yeah the stuff it rests on such as the frame, the suspension, the wheels... That's the vast majority of the cost of a car. What sensors are you thinking about that add supposedly many many thousands of dollars to the cost of a car? Backup sensors aftermarket, at retail, can be had for $20. Mobileye sells aftermarket ADAS kits for <$1k installed, at retail. What do you think an automaker moving a million of those a year pays per unit?
Tear out a all of those computers and sensors from a $35k car and....now you're at a $33k with a lot of the comfort options removed.
Which part of the iceberg do you imagine makes up the majority of this cost? Which seems to be the most expensive part: the Android tablet, the $200 worth of sensors, or the couple thousand pounds of metal called the frame?
Could you ship a car without many computers on it? Sure, maybe. You'd have a hard time meeting emissions requirements without some kind of EFI though, so instantly there's a computer there. Same goes with needing to have some kind of EGR system to once again meet emissions and fuel economy standards. Then, you're going to have a hard time having a purely mechanical ABS, which without you'll get incredibly poor safety scores. These days a backup camera is required in the US, so you'll need some kind of display and a camera.
Like, sure, one could make a car without many computers in it. It wouldn't be radically cheaper than cars with computers in it, it will probably perform worse and have fewer comfort features. The only real selling point would be "hey, its a basic car!"
You probably wouldn't sell nearly as many units as the big auto makers, as I really doubt it would be as popular (for example, why isn't the Mirage the most popular car in the US?). This means your per unit manufacturing costs would be higher. In the end I imagine such a vehicle would actually cost more in the market than less as some of the big costs like safety testing would amortize over a much smaller fleet of vehicles.
Even the Aptera, an incredibly stripped down car, is estimating ~$25k base.
Lets take the Mirage for an example. ~$16kUSD for the extreme base tier. Tear out the computers, the motor, the transmission, we're probably at like $11k. Now add in a 45kWh battery pack at ~$151/kWh so ~$7k, and we're at ~$18k. Add a drive unit/charging system for another few grand, and we're at ~21k. Starting price for the Bolt, $27k, and that comes with all those fancy "make the car a smartphone" features. And if we price it with the Bolt's battery size (60kWh) it gets even closer.
> You'd have a hard time meeting emissions requirements
Not sure what emissions you are thinking about from an electric car that needs regulation circuits. You know, the thing I'm talking about. (And that I'm still claiming could end up vastly simpler than ICE cars if we only tried).
But in any case, in absence of a good faith basis to a discussion, it doesn't seem worthwhile for either of us to continue it.
> But in any case, in absence of a good faith basis to a discussion
I do agree to the absence of good faith in this discussion. My comments have real experiences and cost estimations directly pointing to statements made by the other side. The other side of the conversation makes accusations of being disconnected from reality without actually giving examples, never actually addresses any questions, never actually gives any counter examples, etc. Perhaps we can both learn to be better communicators?
I did go a bit off topic talking about EGR systems, I kind of lost focus on EVs for a second there and talked cars in general. But either way, an EV is going to have computers to actually drive the electric motor effectively, a BMS, etc. Otherwise you're going to have some bad range, you're driving experience is probably going to be pretty poor, and you're not going to be able to really interface with any public chargers.
If you'd answer even one question, can you actually estimate how much an average car would save if they went without the "make a car a phone" stack? What kind of equipment do you propose they actually remove, and what do you think that equipment costs? I'd truly like to understand where you're coming from with that, because from what I see its <10% of the cost of a car.
And maybe I'm disconnected from reality, but the average new car sold today is now $40k, despite the Mirage still being sold for ~$16k. If there was really a massive market for cheap cars and I'm just too disconnected to notice, wouldn't Mitsubishi be moving a lot more Mirages?
I find the city to be better for small children and for disabled people than car focused suburbs to be honest. It means stuff is closer to get to and both groups of people are not completely reliant on other people driving them around to get to places. I do not believe the only way a world can be livable for disabled people, small children, and elderly people, is to pave the entire country in tens of millions of miles of roads and drive on them with heavy and dangerous polluting machines.
