This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.
The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.
Holy CRAP. That is some ground-breaking stuff - One can only imagine what people would have made of it, had they seen something like that back in the Speccy's heydey.
I was thinking about this last night - the European car industry's ripe for disruption by a nimble car company that can make really basic EVs with none of the pointless, excessive cruft that seems endemic in every new car release.
It's only Dacia who seems to understand that there's big market for basic but half-decent cars that don't bill themselves as infotainment fourth spaces, or whatever the hell it is that they're trying to go for [1].
Give me wind up windows, give me an analogue dashboard, give me a basic interface for my phone, etc.
[1] ok, we know what they're going for - the Euros in our wallets... .
I'm a bit of a stuck record on this, but quite a lot of the tech is either legally mandated or a EURO NCAP requirement. You can try marketing a barebones car which doesn't have a 5 rating on NCAP and see how that goes.
I do think Renault/Dacia have ""got it"" all of a sudden and started actually trying with EVs. Stellantis less so, although Citroen are a Stellantis company. Even Toyota, whose CEO is an overt petrolhead who feels sorry for the loss of engines, are suddenly doing well despite naming their car bz4x in an effort to make it unmemorable.
The war(s) are only going to accelerate this progress.
Sure, but that's a different kind of safety than _crash_ safety.
Plenty of people (rightly or wrongly) are confident in their ability to prevent accidents. Or, at least, confident enough to be skeptical of the tradeoffs involved with these assistive systems.
If I had to choose between a car that has high survivability in a crash versus a car that how worse survivability in a crash but has a few assistive systems that can prevent some crashes (which, mostly, I already prevent by paying attention), I'd choose the former every time.
> Sure, but that's a different kind of safety than _crash_ safety.
It literally is not. Both are crash safety systems, active and passive, respectively. The active category also includes things like ABS and ESP.
> (which, mostly, I already prevent by paying attention)
This is an extremely well researched area (car crashes cause trillions in dollars of damages annually and therefore get a lot of attention) and not to the support of your stance.
Yeah, those sensors are great (and, incidentally, even the budget model of the Dacia Sandero has them).
The ones that are less great are the attention sensors they mandated in last-year's models. I test-drove a Kia EV3 a couple of months back, and they've set that sensor up so that even a brief glance at your instrument cluster can ring the attention chime...
I rented a basic Fiat sedan recently in east Europe with a tiny (6-7cms maybe ?) screen for a backup camera that can barely be seen in daylight and a 1990s era type OS that had maybe three functions and never needed to be used.
All the lane warning and wheel shaking nonsense (who the hell thought that shaking the steering wheel at speed is a good idea) are controlled by clear buttons on or around the wheel/dash.
The car to be honest was not great, because it was very cheaply put together, but the controls were heaven compared to most of the new offerings.
İt can be done.
I'd be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
"Infotainment" functions in that require interacting with a touch screen were bad ideas at the time and seem incomprehensibly bad in retrospect. It's a certainty that people have died in accidents that occurred because of this.
On the other hand, backup cameras are a genuinely helpful tool. And so are electric power windows: it's far easier to roll windows up and down pushing a button than manipulating the roller. It takes less concentration, so you can focus more on driving. In 2026, the cost of adding motors instead of a hand crank to control the windows has got to be negligible.
There are other improvements that were luxuries in traditional ICE vehicles, but become necessities in hybrid or electric vehicles. Hybrids like Priuses have CVE transmissions, so there's no manual transmission or stick shift. Electric vehicles have electric seat warmers and even steering wheel warmers because there's no gas-burning engine to heat the cabin.
The Prius-style Toyota hybrid transmissions are actually much simpler than in an ordinary car. The planetary gear system allows engine RPM to be decoupled from the wheel rotation, with the motor/generator taking up the slack. There is no clutch or changing gear ratio.
> "Infotainment" functions in that require interacting with a touch screen were bad ideas at the time and seem incomprehensibly bad in retrospect. It's a certainty that people have died in accidents that occurred because of this.
My father is 75. I got him Tesla earlier this summer.
2 months later he wouldn't change it for anything.
Just because you can't tell apart good UX from bad UX, doesn't mean the whole concept is bad.
He comes from Hyundai Kona EV, which some even declared a decent car lol.
Why is it illegal to operate a touchscreen mobile phone while driving but legal to operate what is essentially a large ipad stuck on your dash?
It just isn't logical at all.
The fact that one is fixed and one is not is irrelevant, your still looking at a screen and not at the road.
Both are extremely dangerous.
The problem was that European manufacturers sought to market EVs as a "premium product" because they make no noise, accelerate quickly, produce no fumes and the lack of vibrations.
That idea almost sank the entire industry because the Chinese were undercutting them left and right. And unlike the U.S. Europe still hasn't closed off its markets to Chinese EVs.
What people want most of all is a cheap and reliable car.
> The problem was that European manufacturers sought to market EVs as a "premium product"
Tesla came up with that strategy, executed well on it, and is top of the European BEV market. Despite Musk's subsequent antics.
I don't think the European manufacturers really wanted to do BEVs in the first place, which is why so many were anemic until recently. This is finally changing even though VW are desperately lobbying against the competition. The VW EVs are adequate despite the mis-design reliance on screens (which they are correcting) and pricing (nobody ever bought German cars for their low prices, except the Beetle). Renault have a hit on their hands with the 5.
It's fine for EVs to exist on a market segment curve like regular cars. So long as they deliver value at each level. This is different in the US and Europe, yes, but the real problem has been a combination of lack of seriousness and the general malaise that forced all the legacy manufacturers into Stellantis in the first place. I wonder if there has been an equivalent of the Nokia "burning platform" memo which has made people in the industry realize that, yes, the transition away from petrol engines is now happening and they need to adapt properly.
Ghosn (the previous CEO) is widely credited with turning around Nissan. Some people figure he was actually too successful and his legal troubles in Japan were an extension of the boardroom fight he had with the old guard at Nissan.
Also, the world's first mass market EV, the Nissan Leaf, was spearheaded by Ghosn. Obviously Nissan completely squandered the first mover advantage, but that was no longer under his watch.
I personally think the VW ID designs are excellent, save for their price. They're just too darn expensive.
BEVs will eventually be (much) cheaper than ICE cars since they have almost no moving parts compared to the latter. We tend to forget that ICE cars are mechanically very complex machines which only work so well because manufacturers had more than 130 years to refine and perfect them.
Well yeah, that's the problem for most people, things being expensive. It would be nice if we could all afford Bentleys or at least top end Volvo EVs with all the safety features and long range.
But VW ID is not a luxury car, not even a premium car brand, it's a working class brand, and even that one it's too expensive for that.
VW lost the plot on what their customers can afford since the VW Golf days and are now moving to the wealthy urban yuppies segment of buyers.
Nice to drive sure, but software is TERRIBLE (like embarrassingly bad, even years and years after release and endless OTAs) both in the car and app. And the dashboard is all touch sensitive nonsense where they've cheaped out in places that really really really cause annoyances - e.g. to control the rear windows, you have to press a touch sensitive "rear" thing and then you can use the same two window buttons that normally operate the front buttons - wtf?! There is no backlight on the touch sensitive heating controls so you can't change them at night without just flapping your hand around etc. There are no rear speakers, no alloy wheels, drum brakes, no reversing camera, hell there is even visible exterior paint panels around the window where they didn't put a bit of fabric like every other car.
The ID3 is a very very basic and badly implemented car as a daily driver. Take it in to VW to fix the faults on the warranty and you always have to pay a diagnosis fee for them to even look at it because that's not covered. Hateful contempt for the user/owner/driver.
I understand they have made some updates in the newest model, but certainly the OTA updates have not prevented the software problems so you'll probably still have those even if you are wowed by having physical buttons for demisting the windows or unlocking the doors.
It's quite funny how VW is overcorrecting with their latest ID models. Something like 30 buttons on steering wheel because they messed up basics on previous model.
Tesla is a premium product because they had first-mover advantage.
But VW is merely a manufacturer of cattle-class vehicles. They saw BEVs as an opportunity to "grow" the base price of their best selling vehicle (VW Golf) to $50K. They were just misguided to believe that buyers would accept that.
Fortunately they've seen the error in their ways and are now releasing cheaper vehicles.
We just got a rental Tiguan eHybrid. It's so big I can't park it anywhere without wasting my time, the high turning angle is annoying compared to my Suzuki, the controls are a hallmark of bad ergonomics and the driving experience is a let down even compared to a Toyota Yaris. I would never pay upwards from 36k euros for such an underwhelming car, when I could get a Corolla hatchback for 26k. The latter is boring, but it offers a seamless driving experience and okay controls.
>nobody ever bought German cars for their low prices, except the Beetle
Huh? VW Golf cars were hugely popular in Europe for being low price and sturdy. Not every German car was a Mercedes or a BMW. But now even the Golf equivalent, the ID, is too expensive for a vast majority of Europeans.
VW moved itself as the premium brand of the group and relegated Seat and Especially Skoda as the cheaper brands.
VW got a majority stake in Auto Union (later Audi) in 1966, and the Audi 50 was launched in the 70s. The Audi 50 was rebadged as the VW Polo, and by the 90es, Audi was the luxury brand. Why would you then label the VW Golf the premium supermini at that time? They had a dedicated brand for premium.
They marketed EVs as a premium product because of battery cost and availability.
You couldn't build a cheap EV with a decent amount of range and make a profit, and car companies literally couldn't give away EVs with only 50 miles of range. So they stuffed 2-300 miles worth of battery packs into a car, added a bunch of cheap electronics with huge margins and sold the cars for a lot of money to people with a lot of money. Then they realized they could just to that to ICE cars and make a lot more per car.
Meanwhile, China focused on building battery factories instead of cars and now has a lead in both cost and numbers of batteries produced, and can undercut everyone else on the most expensive part of an EV.
EVs are marketed as premium because the cost much, much more than ICE vehicles. Or at least did/do today. The logic is this: you make a car with a very expensive battery in it. It now costs 1.5/2X the cost of the same size ICE vehicle. Nobody will buy it. But if you add some bells and whistles that have high margin, you can now make a luxury EV that only costs 1.2X as much as the equivalent ICE vehicle. Government tax incentives close the gap further.
> The problem was that European manufacturers sought to market EVs as a "premium product" because they make no noise, accelerate quickly, produce no fumes and the lack of vibrations.
There’s a few lower-end EVs around here, from the Zoé to the Ami (it’s a funny one, but they are not that rare, probably what I would get if I really wanted a daily car). More recently, the Renault 4/5 seems to be doing ok.
There’s a bunch of mid-range hybrids as well, mostly Toyotas it seems.
> Ami (it’s a funny one, but they are not that rare, probably what I would get if I really wanted a daily car)
As someone who uses their Ami every day: it's too under-specced for me to recommend it (for example, no AC is tough in the summer), and it's cheaply made, but man, it's the best car I've every owned.
This concept is supposedly aimed at the new "E-car" regulations in Europe that means (from what I can tell) that while they still have to retain the same standards of physical crash safety (airbags, crumple zones and all that etc) but don't need to have all the other things like AEB, road-sign detection, lane departure assistance etc which apparently push the price up many thousands somehow for some software and a few sensors.
False. M1E means type approvals will be valid for ten years instead of requiring compliance to changing / updating rules and requirements on a roughly biennial schedule. The requirements will be the same as the current M1 requirements. You can just sell an outdated/unsafer car for way longer without investing into changes and R&D.
Yeah, the safety features aren’t _bad_, though. If you want to go 75mph and not die (or kill others), that’s the cost. You don’t need the next 2 tons and the infotainment system, but 500kg at 70 ain’t safe.
In theory yes, nobody opposes more safety, but in practice some new digital electronic safety features range from destructive and annoying do downright dangerous and surveillance dystopian which is why people are looking more towards physical safety at crash results rather than the checkbox safety that's purely theoretical on driver aids.
Yeah, always the problem with tech - a camera is a useful tool and also an opportunity for a parasite to watch over your shoulder, a display is a place for presenting information and also an opportunity for a parasite to influence your behavior. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
I didn't mean the technical safety requirements - presumaby those create a somewhat level playing field as all manufacturers would be required to include them for the EU market - I simply mean all the luxe crap that every car seems to insist upon.
Every car review vid I watch on YouTube has me shaking my head at the sheer excess they seem to have.
It's actually customers who insist on the lux crap. If that were not there, they would be looking at a spartan but very expensive car, vs a spartan but cheap ICE car, and they would always buy the ICE version.
> It's actually customers who insist on the lux crap
I don't know that we can say that with any surety - when is the last time a manufacturer offered a "no-frills" SKU with all the safety features intact?
Literally the only brand I can think of which does this is Dacia, and they sell like hotcakes in the EU...
>It's actually customers who insist on the lux crap.
Pretty much. Consumers are suckers for luxury, or just cheap tat that gives off the impression of luxury (touch screens, computers, gizmos, etc)
Ironically, computers and screens were a real luxury in expensive cars 20+ years ago when computers were large, expensive and bulky, but now that they're cheap comodities, they make most cars look and feel cheap as the actually luxury cars moved away from them to more discrete and vintage designs that try to hide screens and tech as much as possible.
Dacia is a brand of Renault, same as Skoda is a brand of the Volkswagen Group - both are attempts of offering more affordable cars built in Eastern Europe (which is especially ironic in the case of VW, which translates to "people's car").
And the only electric Dacia so far is a badge-engineered Chinese-built car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Spring - but, according to Wikipedia, the second generation will be built in Europe starting in 2027.
>the second generation will be built in Europe starting in 2027
I'd rather more they'd be "designed in EU" as well, as that's the most complex and highest value add of a product's margins. That's why iPhones, are "Designed in California and Made in China". Imagine where the US economy would be if they'd be the ones assembling iPhones tha Chinese workers would be designing.
If future EU cars will just be "Designed in China, Assembled in the EU" just to brag about EU manufacturing, then I have very bad news for the EU economy.
Yes, of course it would be better if the cars were designed in the EU as well.
My main point was that them being built in the EU wasn't something auto makers did out of the goodness of their hearts, or for some marketing ploy: it was forced on them by EU law.
I suppose that design requirements could be imposed as well.
The "built in EU, designed in China" situation is more hypothetical. I don't think anyone would seriously say that Europeans have forgotten how to design cars (and designing an electrical car is, besides the battery, easier than designing a gasoline car), it's just that they can't sell them nearly as cheap as the (subsidized) Chinese models.
You are pretty much describing the Renault 4/5. They still carry a big screen but everything vital can be controlled by buttons and switches around the wheel.
>the European car industry's ripe for disruption by a nimble car company that can make really basic EVs with none of the pointless, excessive cruft that seems endemic in every new car release
Thats where China comes in. The EU makers enjoyed decades of protections from disruption and laziness and compliance settled in because they didn't want to get disrupted.
This is exactly what Slate Auto[1] say they'll do in the US. Unfortunately for me, their initial models are a truck and an SUV. I'm crossing my fingers they'll succeed, then make an econobox for me.
The BBC article fails to mention that this new 2CV is aiming for the new M1E vehicle category, created especially for small, affordable EVs.
If you want something bigger (than 4200 mm) then the battery will be so expensive anyway that most of the added tech does not change the price considerably. And also forget about the analogue dashboard because we have a billion mandatory digital assistants anyway (I'm not complaining, anything to save lives).
Batteries are expensive. LED light strips and big LCD screens are cheap, sometimes even cheaper than bespoke buttons and switches.
The flashy features are to make the more expensive car seem worth the price. As battery prices fall and the automakers aren't trying to hide an extra $10k worth of baseline costs, you'll see more basic economy-focused EVs.
A video display for a backup camera is mandatory; an all-encompassing whiz-bang touchscreen glass cockpit is not.
(And yeah, I am very appreciative of the fact that physical buttons, levers, and knobs often cost much more to produce than touchscreen interfaces do.)
Dacia is fine but dont crash in it, it wont be nice at higher speeds where more premium brands will protect you and your family better. Its not about some adac stara but real world collisions and what happened to occupants.
Same for chinese, recent MG scandal where driver's seat during crash can start continuing original trajectory even if rest of car does not.
I ignore infotainment and electronic crap as much as possible, its pathetic how bad it is still in 2026 across whole industry, beta test at bsst. But real safety I ignore not.
>Dacia is fine but dont crash in it, it wont be nice at higher speeds where more premium brands will protect you and your family better. Its not about some adac stara but real world collisions and what happened to occupants
It's not just Dacia it's all small cheap cars, including the Fiat Panda. Obliviously big expensive cars will have more protection simply for being bigger and heavier with more metal mass.
People who can only afford a dacia won't be able to afford a Model X or Volvo EX60 so it's not like they have a choice.
'everything looked worse', I entirely know what you mean, coming from a tight, high fidelity Amiga background, but now all these years later it all looks so logical.
It was Comanche on my Dad's shitty office pc that allowed me to appreciate big pixel 'shit' graphics.
Tempest Rising was taunted as the old school C&C RTS comeback and it ended as niche game with small player base and 9.5k player peak on Steam.
Probably best RTS game going on currently is Beyond All Reason, and that's because guys are doing it as an open source clone/followup to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander Alliances and not actual business (but they started to look for a way to monetize it to fund future development).
Gon on, as in you mean like to explain the obvious? Just google/chatgpt sales of RTS games vs shooters and other shit.
Good luck convincing an exec to give you 200 million $ to make a new RTS for the 50 player based market out there who's playing the oldies anyway: AOE, RA, SC, etc.
It's a small and saturated market that's long been fished out and no point investing into, other than HD remakes/remasters of previously mentioned established IP.
This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.
The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.
Which they will, because Musk is all ego.
reply