Comment by RandomBacon 2 days ago
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
It absolutely does NOT mean those things.
Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.
<Get off my lawn>
My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.
</Get off my lawn>
> The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago
>"We know ahead of time our product is defective."
All products are defective. Full stop.
Cars are necessarily complex and have a lot of software to get the safety, comfortable, and reliability we expect today.
Most vehicles get some sort of recall; usually minor. I just checked the NHTSA recall website and every car I could think of owned by people I know (~30 vehicles) had some had some recall.
Cars should have an easy way to update. I’m generally against always connected cars (which are the norm today), but there must be some way to patch them.
I don’t like the idea of cars having cellular modems in them (my mind goes to nefarious implications), but having a way to securely update it without having to bring to a mechanic would be nice.
>All products are defective. Full stop.
Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:
Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.
This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.
There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.
If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.
OTA updates are considered bad? What?
OTA updates on my truck have vastly improved suspension response and cruise-control/ lane-assist features. My wife's car has had OTA updates that improve her cars charging curve, and have implemented recalls for stuff like brake light response when regen braking.
Sure one could say these things should have worked perfectly from the factory, but that's not realistic: not with my cars, not with your cars, and not with this new brand either.
The only alternative I see here is the old fashioned way of having to bring it to a dealership. I would rather have an entire foot of ingrown toenails over dealing with dealership service centers of any brand.
What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?
Yes, and no.
I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.
My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.
I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.
You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.
HD Radio tuning is built into the FM tuner, but was disabled in software. It's patents are still in effect, until 2030, so your wife's car manufacturer likely recently obtained a patent license to tune into HD Radio stations. Why they didn't negotiate a license from the get go may be a mystery, but there's no development reason it wasn't capable on day one.
Tesla, on the other hand, has promised capabilities that haven't been developed yet, something they wouldn't be able to do without OTA updates, which is a sensible reason to feel animosity toward their reliance on them.
> It absolutely does NOT mean those things.
I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.
Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).
The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.
If you consider a fur baby a family! :)
I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.
If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.
> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.
Some interesting people find your examples interesting: perhaps native to their personality.
However I strongly believe we can cultivate fascination with the droll.
A gray worldview might possibly say more about you.
Is a gray grain of sand interesting? Blaming a local world for being boring seems overly negative.
So you're cool with living in extreme poverty because it's not "fatal"? "Bring it on"?
Lots of things that aren't fatal are still very undesirable.
Boredom is so essential to human mental health, that after we automated it away with the industrial revolution, we had to reinvent it (we call it "meditation" now) to stay sane.
Being alone with your thoughts for a few minutes is not in the same class as being unable to afford food or medicine. Get out, troll, this isn't Reddit.
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.
They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/
Did they?
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.
Citation needed.
Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
I think you're projecting.
>Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.
ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?
I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.
Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.
My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.
Could you talk us through the over-the-air update concern?
I never heard it quite put that way, but yes, I did something very similar.
The alphabet game still works if you teach them to read.
And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?
A physical holder for a personal pad device.
The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.
And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!
Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.