I think a big part of the issue is that the Chinese market is fucking huge, and the Chinese market also seems to love gimmicky software crap in their cars, and often emphasizes that over hardware features and other general aspects of, you know, being a car. It’s an unfortunate and obnoxious case of carmakers following the money.
Nissan leafs and toyota Prius have been around in big numbers for more than a decade.
It's the enshitiffication that all modern cars are doing: cramming way too much tech into something that is for moving people around, not entertaining them
We are locked into the big heavy vehicle paradigm. People have become so accustomed to moving around in a 2t vehicle they have forgotten about the alternatives. Lithium batteries are not a good fit for this type of vehicle and most of the time the use case is single occupant, where the bicycle is king of efficiency.
Look into used Bolt EVs, many are in the 12-14k range after tax credit, 230 miles on a charge, no bells and whistles, drives great. Many have new batteries after the recall that happened a few years ago.
Software that is completely unnecessary. There is zero reason a battery powered vehicle needs to be much different software wise than an ICE. They do not need 20" touchscreens packed with a custom infotainment system written by hardware focused developers.
Electric cars need software to smooth out motor output to create an enjoyable driving experience. They also need to manage battery health and regenerative braking.
Edit: cars like the Ioniq N seem to be the exception while most cars have problems like the Mercedes EQS that people report has unpredictable braking which means you can't learn how to control it.
The first thing is something ICE vehicles also do. A BMS, figuring out regenerative braking, and maybe one or two other things are the only things that need to be different. Car makers have shoved all the software they can into EVs without the experienced developers to do it on the hopes that they can fix shit in the future and charge subscription fees for it.
Yeah but when ice vehicles aren't perfect it's not a huge deal for the average driver. When an electric car isn't smoothed out well you have the same problem but it's amplified any times because of the instant torque.
battery controllers and motor controllers are available as cheap, simple, stable, off-the-shelf dedicated hardware and there's no reason budget evs would need to do any coding for them, maybe just some variable adjustment. those things are not controlled by the user facing software being talked about here.
Maybe it's like you say if you're making a shit box but you can't make a driver's car without careful consideration. This conversation would be better to have with car enthusiasts rather than technology enthusiasts.
The Megane E-tech has functionality in its satnav that lets you plot a route with charging stations on the way, showing how much capacity you will have left when you get to them. Not essential, but very useful for somebody who is new to EVs.
Software that communicates with power companies to allow the car to charge overnight at advantageous rates, or even feed energy back into the grid. Again, not essential, but good for the customer and helps with the transition to green electricity.
Your ICE has a significantly longer range, and the road network has evolved so that you can be reasonably confident that you'll find a filling station when you need one.
Today I'm driving an EV that doesn't have it, and I'm missing it. Different EVs have different ranges and not every filling station on the autobahn has chargers. On the other hand, there are lots of places just off the autobahn which do have chargers. It's a different game. Your mileage may vary of course.
And since when have you known any computer to be problem-free?
Software that's not made from overworked engineers working 80 hours a week pressured to work even faster to complete this week's sprint.
I'm so tired of "computers are buggy and everyone accepts that". No! Computers don't have to be buggy, you just have to not shove trash software on it made by morons doing the bare minimum.
I have software that's been running on servers for literal years, not a single bug. The hardware's been sized appropriately and I wrote good, sustainable and maintainable code. My computers all can easily do weeks and months of uptime. I pick up my laptop and open the lid and 100% of the time it wakes up from sleep and it's ready to go.
The overwhelming majority of "production" and "enterprise quality" code I work with is total garbage that should never have been written and its author never hired in the tech space. We repeatedly get reports on how X car manufacturer was pwned for not following best practices that are a decade or two old.
Corporate greed makes EVs suck because it's developed for as cheap as possible and the target is "good enough customers tolerate it". Shit barely works properly when going through the happy path and the error path just... usually crashes your car.
I've had to reboot my car at red lights way too fucking often and it's not even an EV. 2020 model and the infotainment reliably crashes if I have a Slack or Zoom call going because it tries to read the phone number off my phone over Bluetooth and doesn't know how to handle a null phone number = the radio crashes.
Yes, there's an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there's way more arbitrary complexity that doesn't serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.
Also, maybe just don't copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.
Edit: also cloud everything. The amount of overhead it takes to put 100 million users in the cloud when there's nothing they need that can't be done locally is stupid as hell.
