this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Electric Vehicles
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Now i can afford one even less. Yay /s
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.
Knobs and buttons are nowadays similar in cost to just plonking in a screen and putting all the controls there. That is why manufacturers are doing it not just because it 'feels premium'.
....
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.