Touchscreens are how electric cars are simpler and cheaper. Buttons, knobs, their wirings and linkages are surprisingly expensive once you include fully load the cost (ie, wiring is often done by hand).
> Imagine the Chinese electric cars are similar to this but the article is lacking much detail.
No, Chinese cars are usually loaded with gimmicks. Even the $10,000 Dolphin has two screens.
> This would be much more effective than electric heating and likely generate less carbon emissions
Even more efficient is to utilize the waste heat from motors, as a proper heat pump system does.
What really kills the range of an EV in the winter is bringing the battery & cabin up to temperature at the beginning. Once the car is moving, the heat pump can scavenge heat from the motor to relatively efficiently heat things. So if you pre-warm your car while it's plugged in the range loss isn't too bad.
Diesel heat would prevent you from doing this because you can't run a diesel heater in the garage. So ironically, a diesel heater could reduce your battery's range even though it doesn't use battery power.
In cold climates in Europe, diesel pre-heaters (such as Webasto) are pretty common. Compared to petrol, diesel cars have a harder time starting at low temperatures, and take a long time to warm up.
Where I live (-25c during winter) houses typically don't have garages where cars are kept. Modern apartments have underground parking, but the temperature often stays above freezing.
That's a good point but I can't understand how it would add up vs servos or other electric air controls vs a manual lever that physically opens the baffle. It really doesn't make sense to me how an lcd can be less expensive than a bit of metal and plastic in a switch but I suppose you're right due to economies of scale.
The touch aspect itself is really cheap. The big benefit of screens over "simpler" instruments is that regulations actually vary quite a bit across the world. Being able to use a screen that can display anything greatly reduces the sku count, simplifying supply chains and assembly lines.
It would be hard to justify not using a screen these days, IMO.
I doubt if it's actually cheap. "The touchscreen" aka 2DIN radio/infotainment head unit slot, is required for Japanese market, as Japanese users require one of indigenous options installed for all cars. Google Maps supposedly had gotten better but aren't quite replacing it, so CP/AA doesn't work. I believe this is a unique country requirement, as many Chinese EVs as well as many European low-end cars seem to ignore it.
Not every cars are made for Japanese, far from it, but abolition of LCD based map-radio on a standardized slot is a weird hill to die on, so every cars has it anyway.
And, I think, this is where the actual "it's cheaper to..." argument begins: since every cars will have the standard issue map-radio, it _can be cheaper to move buttons into it_. Differences between the standard version and one with this context is whether the cost of the entire 2DIN screen is included in it or not - if the screen cannot be removed, to shut up whining Japanese or not, it becomes sunk cost and becomes a constant term of equation, which physical buttons have no chance of winning.
> It would be hard to justify not using a screen these days, IMO.
Unless you were concerned about the safety of someone having to look at a screen to operate vehicle controls. Otherwise you could just make it a smartphone app and ditch the screen entirely.
I should have been more clear. I meant the gauge cluster. TBH, having physical controls for things like climate, wipers, and lights makes sense. I can't imagine the cost difference is meaningful.
That would be atrocious (but not really much worse than the all-in-one infotainment screens we already have...) But my gut says automakers haven't gone there because it would make support and liability that much more complicated - "the operator was distracted at the time of the collision... but they weren't trying to turn on the defroster, they were watching Youtube!" On the plus side instead of being stuck with a never-upgraded head unit, with an orphaned 3G modem, you'd at least have connectivity that kept working.
The cost of the vehicle components is a surprisingly small part of the overall cost of a vehicle. The cost of the line time and the additional tolerances to fit those cheaper components is vastly higher than the cost of stuff they're going to install anyway.
Being able to separate design decision timelines on how the UI works from manufacturing timelines is also very helpful organizationally.
I think these are the right answers. LCDs are already wired and don't need someone's hands to do it. And you can, in software, however late you want in the process, add a button for this or remove a button for that. In software development this is a given, but in real world manufacturing it's like a super power.
Try pricing out physical switches at your local electronics shop sometime. How much does say, 20 or 30 of them cost? How much a 7" touch-screen LCD cost?
Then consider how long it takes to wire up and install the LCD versus 20-30 switches (plus mounting brackets, plus functional testing etc.)
We are now in an era where physical things are expensive. Making a physical knob that actuates things requires machine tools, skilled labour and standardised parts. Compared to a digital widget which eventually can just be coded by an LLM, we are never going back to physical controls unless safety demands it.
Your furnace has a chimney going to the roof. If the diesel heater was part of the car that presumably wouldn't be possible, so you wouldn't be able to use it in a garage.
It’s happening. The mg3 is very common in the third world and has touch screens now in the latest model. They have a few buttons on the wheel but the majority of features are on the tiny touchscreen in the center. If you see cars in the 3rd world without touchscreens they are older models is all. Sometimes it just takes a while for the new cheaper way to do things to become widespread.
Firstly, they're often older cars shipped from richer countries if it's a better deal than scrapping.
And for new build cars, they often lack a lot of the entertainment and safety systems required in western countries, so they also don't have the onboard computers that would run the touch screen.
When your car already has a backup camera required, so it _has_ to have a screen, and add at least handsfree bluetooth phone connectivity, bluetooth audio and digital radio since I haven't seen a new car without them for years, you have an onboard general purpose computer already. Switching to a touch screen is a small marginal cost over that, and you can lower costs by removing physical controls which not only removes the part cost, but also labour cost of installing, wiring, and quality control.
Also all the features not found in cars for low-cost markets don't need controls, so even if physical controls cost more per-item than touchscreens the total number of controls is much lower.
Where do you live? Everything you said could be a mental exercise in this third world country: It makes sense, but it is not reality.
New cars in here (at least chevrolet, isuzu and toyotas) are being shipped with a touchscreen. As you say, it covers the camera display, the infotaiment and map navigation. Everything else still has manual controls, THANK GOD. For instance AC, lights, wipers.
I currently have a 2017 Mazda Bt50
it didnt have the touchscreen. It does have a rearview camera, and the image is displayed in a little square screen in the central rearview mirror. It also has a frontal camera and both of them can record video continuosly. You can have Features without a "general purpose computer"
The most common transmission is manual, automatic costs around $1000 more. Why? Market preference. We do have some poorly maintained roads, and some dirt roads, mind you.
The only reason to ship all controls in a touchscreen is because it is fancy, and since it is already there, they want to save some money by not including physical buttons.
Well I _live_ in New Zealand, but the area I'm most familiar with is the pacific islands. The cars there are mostly used exports from Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
That's also true in New Zealand, half of the vehicles registered here every year are used imports from Japan, normally 5-10 years old. We don't get the low-cost models though as our safety standards are higher, though you do see Kei cars and trucks. When they can't be sold here anymore they get re-exported to the islands, and generally they make it back here as scrap.
There _are_ brand new cars of course, with the full suite of touch screens, but they're out of reach for most people. Even here in NZ we get feature-cut models to keep the price down.
As for 2017, the cost of large touchscreens was much higher then, and the general purpose computer that was definitely running it behind the scenes was much slower.
And as I said in my post, it's certainly for cost saving. Manufacturers realised they could save a few cents on controls and dollars in labour per car by using the touchscreen they were going to add anyway and there was enough compute power to make it responsive enough to sell. Plus a touchscreen look shiny and most people won't realise the problems until it's sold...
Touchscreens are more expensive than buttons and knobs. But screens are required by law in the USA and EU as they require backup cameras. And a digitizer is a lot cheaper than some buttons and knobs.
They aren’t more expensive to start with though. A small touchscreen is <$10 in large orders. This is why you can buy entire android phones for <usd$30 with no vendor lock-in.
Wiring in a set of buttons and knobs costs more than a small screen. The buttons and knobs are more ergonomic. The real answer to the above question is that it’s happening already. All new cheap Chinese (or anywhere else that caters to the developing world) made cars have a touch screen and fewer hardwired controls.
I think the importance of heatpumps is overblown. If you go for a highway trip, your car consumes 10kW+ and 1kW heating won't matter much. Additionally, on longer trips the cabin's already warm, no need to run the heater that much.
I can real-time adjust my car's range by changing the temperature and fan speed. As I bump up the temperature, the range computer immediately goes down in significant increments. It's not been proper cold here since I got my EV, but at the moment I'm seeing about a 30km range decrease with cabin heating on.
Kinda. Im leqd to believe heatpump is a $50 device that manufacturers charge $2k for (must be more to it honestly).
If that saves 10% of range that’s 10% less batteries which cost more than $50. Eventually all these savings add up so much that EV is lighter and cheaper than similar ICE vehicle…
It regularly gets cold enough here that the the temp gauge on my conventional ICE barely rises over an hour without covering the cooling vents manually. We're wasting enormous amount of energy on non-insulation/inefficient temperature control
I'm under the impression that electric diesel pre-warmers are relatively common, in cold climates? (Or engine block heaters, basically a fancy electric blanket at cheapest) Every diesel person I knew growing up had one, partly because they needed it when it got truly cold.
For the mid-cold regions though, yeah - I can believe that.
> Imagine the Chinese electric cars are similar to this but the article is lacking much detail.
No, Chinese cars are usually loaded with gimmicks. Even the $10,000 Dolphin has two screens.
> This would be much more effective than electric heating and likely generate less carbon emissions
Even more efficient is to utilize the waste heat from motors, as a proper heat pump system does.
What really kills the range of an EV in the winter is bringing the battery & cabin up to temperature at the beginning. Once the car is moving, the heat pump can scavenge heat from the motor to relatively efficiently heat things. So if you pre-warm your car while it's plugged in the range loss isn't too bad.
Diesel heat would prevent you from doing this because you can't run a diesel heater in the garage. So ironically, a diesel heater could reduce your battery's range even though it doesn't use battery power.