Simpler Vehicles
Who needs all the expensive electronic stuff?
Our household is, like most here in rural Japan, a one car per adult one. Since there are two adults we have two cars. One is a new Subaru Levorg with all mod cons (adaptive cruise control, smartphone integration, automatic sensors for windscreen wipers and headlights etc etc). The other is a 12-15 year old Mitsubishi i kei car. The latter has some smarts (e.g. keyless door lock/unlock and an unupgradable built in GPS, which displays maps that are seriously out of date), but not many.
For reasons that may have included someone not wanting to get the inside of our new car dirty, I recently drove my father in law’s Daihatsu kei truck which is over 20 years old (~22 I think) and has pretty much zero smart things. It doesn’t even have central door locking, let alone remote lock/unlock, and is manual transmission. It does have a working radio/tape cassette player (my FiL has four music casettes he can play on it) and it has air conditioning but that is about it…
It is unclear to me what benefit to the driver is gained by most of the new smart automation things. Most are in the “nice to have” list and it would be nice to have the option to NOT have them in fact because they add a lot to the price and even more to the cost of repairs but give little benefit.
All the sensors and cameras for safety are absolutely in the “expensive but not needed” category. One of the reasons we leased a brand new car instead of buying a 2 or 3 y.o. one is that Subaru covers fixes to these expensive things in the combined insurance, lease and extended warranty package we took. Considering that replacing a windscreen that gets a crack when hit by the wrong piece of gravel can cost ~5% of the cost of a car this seemed like a bargain. We know exactly how expensive gravel is because my brother in law, who also owns a Subaru, just had this problem and it cost him over US$1000 to get fixed. I know other people who have had minor low-speed fender bender accidents and had to pay between US$500-1000 to replace the cracked bumper because of all the sensors in the current ones.
I admit I do appreciate the smart headlight sensor that turns them on in tunnels but it didn’t take me more than a couple of tunnels to remember how to do this manually while driving the kei truck. Ditto the automatic wiper sensor, which BTW really ought to be smart enough to figure out that it needs to do one wipe at the start when the car has been left out in the rain.
The adaptive cruise control / collision detection system is of minor use and appears to not work in the afternoon/evening when the sun is shining right into the front. This is however better than the Nissan version which I experienced a few weeks back in the US and which had problems functioning in the rain. The lane detection stuff is just annoying though it does help build better driving habits such as always signalling when changing lanes.
Rear (and side) cameras are in the nice to have and actually useful category. Yes you can do perfectly well without them, but for getting in and out of tight parking spaces they are really really handy. Unlike many of the other features I probably would pay a little extra for this.
The GPS, media player etc. are completely optional. I have this handy portable computer called a smartphone. It does all that. All I need is bluetooth audio and maybe a larger screen to connect to. Oh and a charger. And a decade ago I got by just fine with the smartphone attached to a stickon thingy on the windscreen so probably all I really need is a proper docking slot for one to the side of the steering wheel. If I were to use the kei truck more I would dig out the stickon thingy again.
Remote unlocking, not needing a key to start the engine are where where we start moving up from nice to have towards worth having. It is a pain to have to put a key in the door to unlock. It is extremely convenient to just leave the key in your pocket and unlock the doors and start the engine thanks to proximity. However it isn’t in the absolutely must have category. Neither, for that matter, is automatic door locking when the car is moving or central unlocking. All these features are worth having for sure, but when push comes to shove and they aren’t there, it’s not too hard to get (back) into the habit of manually doing the same things.
The Levorg does have some kind of call-home feature as well, though since we declined the expensive drive recorder all of the more intrusive tracking features are not enabled. In the US it seems that many vehicles are sold with some mandatory call home/tracking feature that you have to have for the car to work. While this adds to the profit of the car maker, it doesn’t necessarily add much to the benefit of the driver. In fact, from a cyber security point of view, having the car connected to the internet all the time is a security risk (as are some of the keyless door unlocking etc. features).
Automatic transmission, antilock braking are the sorts of feature that end up in the must have category. And airbags tend to be mandatory in most developed nations. So we have to have those.
Really a car that had nothing but that would be cheap to buy, cheap to run and safe from the kinds of cyber attack that happened to this Jeep. If we skipped all (or most) of the above features you get passenger version of the Toyota IMV-0 truck, which is intended to sell for $10,000 without airbags etc. and about $15,000 with them.
When you consider that new regular vehicles in the US cost close to US$50,000 now it seems to me that there ought to be considerable demand for entry level new vehicles that cost $10,000-$15,000. Here in Japan Kei vehicles, though they are increasing in features and price, do pretty much meet this need. Kei vehicles have performance challenges (the engine is 660cc albeit often turbocharged) so here in rural Japan they are generally the family’s second vehicle (as they are in our one). I do not believe that the engine size is a major cost factor since a 2000cc engine is what Toyota is planning for the IMV-0. A 2L engine gives plenty of pull in a car - in the case of small hatchback cars like the Peugeot 205 of decades past probably too much.
So why don’t US car makers produce a range of affordable cars with limited features? or European ones for that matter?
I agree that there are a lot of gadgets that come with new cars that just expensive toys at best. Just add to the cost and complexity. Though, some are nice to have. The back view monitor is nice, especially when backing the boat of a mini van we settled on. Being able to open and close windows while driving is nice too but not necessary. Lived fine without this feature in my first several cars. Keyless entry is really nice; we wish we had it for the house. But, as you mention, there are safety issues. And when there is a problem, as we had both of our keys stop working at the same moment, it is not easy to use the safety key and the repair is not cheap. We got rid of our last car, which we loved, because of electronic issues. First the airbag control system went out. ¥70,000 repair. The idiot light for it came back on just weeks after getting it repaired. Then we had the key issue. Mechanically sound but the electronics were shot. A bit of a waste, really, to have to get a new car when the old one is mechanically fit.
While shopping for a new car, we looked at customized Toyota Pro Boxes. We camp and these cars are popular with outdoorsy folk as they can haul a ton of stuff. Look quite nice with a lift kit and the other additions. However, they are originally built as commercial fleet cars and lack many of these electronic features, no big problem, and creature comforts for those sitting in the back. The back seat is like the hard bench seats of pick up trucks in the 70s. Wife worried about the kids sitting back there on long trips. While at a dealership, the ten year old was sitting in the back and asked, “Daddy, what is this?”. I looked at what he was pointing at and laughed. Called my wife and the salesman over and had them ask again. They too laughed. Poor kid, asked why every one was laughing. It was the crank for the manual window. At ten, he had never seen one nor had any idea that such a thing ever existed.
The wife bought the mini van second hand. The original owner added a lot of fancy extras that we would not have gotten if we brought new. Among these are radio controls on the steering wheel. This I like a lot. One of my rants against technologically revenge deals with touch screen controlled radios in cars. I still think that the old two dial and preset buttons of old car radios superior but like that a I do not need to take my eyes off the road to adjust the volume or radio tuner.
The car you used in the States had a lot of monitoring that you and I do not like. Do you know if that was due to just that State’s regulations/laws or is that a nation wide thing?
Simple answer to why US auto makers no longer produce inexpensive vehicles for small budgets, the powers that be do not want just anybody to be driving.