And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?

A physical holder for a personal pad device.

The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.

The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.

And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!

Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.

Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.

> It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.

Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).

The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.

> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...

The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.

Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.

>Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?

I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.

Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.

My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.

Or read books!

Kids will return to imagining Sonic running along the car

The alphabet game still works if you teach them to read.

You had a radio?

I have a iron filter that works via app. All configs can be done with button presses on the valve but in a much more tedious process/workflow.

It connects via bluetooth and not WiFi. If the company goes belly up, I'd just need the APK and an android phone to continue using the app to configure the valve and see/download water usage data.

Fast forward 20 years when I can't install the APK on android v79, I'd need an older phone to run the APK.. but that seems to be pulling hairs.

Apps would be great, it's how you handle the backend to it that's the gotcha.

I also have a water softener with an app that no longer works that had it's backend shut down. It can still be configured via the valve head button presses, but none of the "smart" usage data is available. As an example of good design, this is a perfect dichotomy of one company doing it well and one company doing it un-well[sic].

100% agree. I would be fine if they had an estimated time-to-fully-charged displayed on the screen. I don’t need to know the status of my vehicle, personally. I would imagine a third party system could be implemented to achieve most of what one would need.

The article says the rear camera feed will be displayed on a screen behind the steering wheel which doubles as the speedometer and charge display.

Not with off the shelf protocols. Yes WPA3 is plenty secure, but any AP advertising the same SSID with the same key would allow the device to connect. So how do you know that you're connected to your car, and not to the black hat AP next to it?

From there, you can have as much TLS as you want, but that still won't give you server identity unless the server certificate is signed by someone you already trust. So a generic web browser would be screwed, because you either add SlateTruckCertificateAuthority to the globally trusted list, and then you still have to deal with revocations and certificate expiry, or you use some other CA that is willing to delegate. There's no good support for self-signed certificates or pinned certificates, and even if there were, the initial connection would be tough.

Unfortunately this really isn't a well-solved problem. Bluetooth can get you part of the way there, but it only offers really good security in theory (in practice it is constantly having issues) and it is intrinsically limited.

EV battery engineer here. It's not hard. Battery management systems are often over engineered but the state of the art is fairly straightforward and will allow battery packs of sufficient size last 200k miles or more easily.

> exquisite control over power quality

So a... 16 bit microcontroller?

In addition to the sibling comment, you want to be able to check if the vehicle is charging and everything is fine remotely. EVs randomly stopping charging for various reasons is not rare at all. You want to get a notification.

You want to know when the vehicle finishes charging so you can vacate the public charger.

You want to be able to reduce the current when the charging is tripping breakers wherever you are.

Controlling your charging. You shouldn’t be charging more than 80% for daily driving unless you want to destroy your battery.

You will almost assuredly also want to be able to precondition if you live in a cold climate.