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.
The problem is that it takes a lot of computer power needed to run an EV. Battery management, power management, motor control, etc. Requiring that much computer power makes it a cheap and easy decision for car makers to just make everything part of that system.
We will get there eventually but it’s going to take a lot of people to want it (many people aren’t even considering an EV as a future car purchase), a lot of the under-the-hood stuff will have to be shoved away, and charging/battery management need to be simplified while still being robust and reliable. I don’t see it happening any time soon, ICE vehicles have only been getting more and more complex in this way. “Stick a tablet in there” is so cheap and easy and resolves so many manufacturing hurdles.
Bespoke windows controls? Nah, button on a screen. Custom entertainment system? App on a tablet. Backup camera screen? Just put in on the screen so it’s the only thing you can see while backing up.
If car makers cant get around these hurdles without incurring, previously saved, costs, the trend will continue.
How much does that take, exactly? It sounds like something a cheap microcontroller that you might find in a dumb appliance could easily do.
The thing about screens being easier than n custom physical buttons is true, though. I’m waiting for someone to put a haptic display in a car so the safety problems are somewhat ameliorated.
I am not an engineer, but I imagine keeping multiple DC motors running efficiently/in sync together while outside influences change by the second isn’t easy. Communication with a variety of EV chargers at different levels of power must take a logic system. ICE vehicles have a lot of physical parts with 120 years of engineering behind keeping things in order. There just isn’t that level of engineering for EVs, which have only really been developed during the era of microchips.
This is handled by the inverter and charging modules, some use FPGA chips others use dedicated ASICs, but it doesn’t require anything wild in terms of raw compute power, mostly up to having good algorithms to handle the situations correctly. Nothing more than a modern ICE engine which needs to very precisely manage intake and exhaust cam phasing, ignition timing, intake pressure, and multiple injections per cylinder/cycle along with monitoring a multitude of sensors to keep everything in tolerance. In terms of simplicity, the first automobiles at the turn of the century were electric before the ICE caught on thanks to the advent of the electric starter and limitations in battery technology at the time.
It’s easy. I’m not a professional engineer, but I’m close enough to know this one.
A typical phone CPU can make adjustments to an output many tens of millions of times a second. It might be “only” thousands for the 10 cent toaster CPU. If it had to model and predict the road ahead somehow, that’d be harder, but just responding to changes as the wheels hit them requires some trig operations at most.
As for the other bit, electric motors are way, way simpler than IC engines, just intrinsically. It’s a clever arrangement of magnets, vs a block of metal that has to produce and withstand constant fuel explosions using barely-standardised fuels, and then convert the resulting energy into rotation at the gear ratio of your choice, and do it for years without breaking. With electrics, the magic is all in the battery chemistry.
None of that takes much power, nor is it unique to EVs. ICE have much of that now.
Also cars are not centralizing those systems. They’re all in independent modules.
Maybe we are looking at different cars, I only really am exposed to American cars. Any vehicle I have been in made after 2021 have integrated most things into the infotainment system. Which are now also integrated into the operations of the cars.
And ICE vehicles rely, quite heavily, on the hundreds of moving parts that have been engineered for 120 years. Nothing mechanical can really regulate managing the charge rate of the battery, or are able to calculate the necessary changes in power to each motor, or managing any kind of safety system. As some of those things have been added to ICE vehicles, the lack of buttons has been notable.