I love this dude’s channel. He covers all sorts of old tech, often obscure stuff.

Also, I love that one of my favorite obscure creators shows up in my feed on my favorite obscure social network. Lemmy is my people. ❤️

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I’ve never worked for an auto maker. I am a computer engineer (BS in Electrical and Computer engineering) though. While earning my degree I developed the hardware and software that served as a battery management computer in an electric car for a student competition. I currently write software tools for hardware engineering.

I say all that to say this: on the BOM, yes, a touch screen may be cheaper. However, you cannot even complete the BOM for discrete components without doing at least a MVP sort of UI development pass. With a touch screen, you can just do the physical design around it, and kick the UI design can down the road.

All kinds of fuckery can happen from there, including understaffing development of UI, poor quality control of code, and just plain inexperienced decisions in a relatively new landscape for many software developers. ‘Just turn it on and off’ isn’t an option for your dashboard when it goes blank at 70mph on the highway.

Just give me reliable knobs and dials. This is a machine, not jewelry.

No, unnecessary tech and luxury features make evs expensive. They’re marketed as luxury cars.

I was wondering if automakers thought the market would be shinking to an untenable point. Perhaps then they would decide to pivot and market them to a larger, lower income market. That would like include said knobs.

I’m wondering if they’ll finally offer a real base model, with knobs and buttons for climate controls instead of a giant tablet in the dash. If they want to make them affordable they can.