> Can't we just have simple electric vehicles without all the high-tech?
No, because ~nobody would buy them.
> I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle.
Because 99% of people want it. Not everyone wants everything, buy each group of people wants some features and the end result is that you have to stuff your car full of tech to be competitive in the modern car market.
And this isn't an EV thing. The tech is going into all the ICE vehicles too. Tesla is the exception, they put huge screens into cars well before everyone else and they happen to be an EV company. But normal manufacturers are mostly putting similar tech in their ICEs and EVs.
This reads like pre-Covid auto industry logic. And the car market right now is so bizarre right now that if any of what you wrote still applies it's by sheer chance.
There aren't even any base-level trims available from most of the big manufacturers to offer to the "99% of people." Less than two months ago I was looking to see if I could find a manual Nissan Versa 2023 for my uncle. It's basically the paper-cup-and-string-phone tech equivalent for a car. It wasn't available within 300 miles of me, and pre-orders were above MSRP.
If an Eastern European country could export 5,000,000 two-stroke wooden cars to the U.S. right now they would probably dominate the auto industry in less than a month.
So you don't want remote locking, a reversing camera, automatic brakeforce distribution, antilock braking, airbags, or system diagnostics? I do.
(Let alone the fancy stuff like electronic stability control, blind spot warning, autonomous emergency braking, autodipping headlights, lane keeping, dynamic cruise control, auto-parking, or attention monitoring? Those'd be nice too, probably.)
Things like heated steering wheels, and heated seats with rise and fall motors and motorised windows and mirrors, yeah, OK, I could do without those - but lots of people would disagree.
Not touch screens, which have been rejected by most of the market. Tech like adaptive cruise control, collision warnings & automatic breaking, reversing cameras, lane assist, automatic parking, blindspot detection, spotify playlists. I've got a 25 year fully manual tin can with an engine just perfect for puttering around the local area at the 50km/h speed limit. I'm looking for another car with modern safety features for regular distance driving, and most of that requires computers (and buttons!).
Would they? Or is it like the small phone segment, where the a very vocal group of hardcore enthusiasts, but when it comes to market size, it turns out theres just not really enough of us out there to sustain the segment.
Cars aren't phones, and maybe a $15k car would sell well in this economy, but with way higher margins on a slightly better car at $40k, why would any automaker willingly give up a big pile of profit?
Well there are no small phones… so we buy large phones, because we still need to buy a new phone occasionally; so marketing research goes: "see!!! LARGE PHONES!!!!!"
This is what you get when you have incompetents doing statistics.
At this point nobody on the planet can fit a phone in their hands, but they keep getting larger.
No, because ~nobody would buy them.
> I don't understand why we need to put so much technology in a vehicle.
Because 99% of people want it. Not everyone wants everything, buy each group of people wants some features and the end result is that you have to stuff your car full of tech to be competitive in the modern car market.
And this isn't an EV thing. The tech is going into all the ICE vehicles too. Tesla is the exception, they put huge screens into cars well before everyone else and they happen to be an EV company. But normal manufacturers are mostly putting similar tech in their ICEs and EVs.