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> no displays

In the US, no. Backup cameras are required by federal law as of 2018. The intent of the law was to reduce the number of children killed by being backed over because the driver couldn't see them behind the car.

I feel like "game engine" is a misnomer for what we're actually dealing with here. It's more like an "ECS-based scene rendering engine, which can be used for games or for advanced UI". But that doesn't have a succinct label yet.

Ah sorry, I quickly edited that out of my comment! I had the video playing while posting, they were talking about a precursor project for embedded Flutter which this in some ways builds on, /that/ is running on the new RAV4.

One of the example uses given in the talk is 3D tutorials, which I could imagine being handy. Not sure I'd want to click on the car parts for it but with the correct affordances I could imagine a potentially useful interface.

"Nice car. What kind of engine does it have?"

"V8"

"Which kind of V8?"

JPY2690k($17,594) 2025 Honda `N-ONE e:`[0], 12km(7.45 mi), unregistered, 4 passengers, 29.6kWh battery, WLTP 295km(183 mi) of range, pack liquid cooling, has one-pedal, airbags, basic LKAS, rear seat ISOFIX, etc etc[2]

It's like, at least one exists in Japan, on used market even, if you absolutely have to have one, I guess

0: https://www.honda.co.jp/N-ONE-e/webcatalog/design/images/e_g...

1: https://driver-web.jp/articles/gallery/41396/36291

2: https://www.carsensor.net/usedcar/detail/AU6687733258/index.... | https://archive.is/gbBzc

We're all just waiting for the Slate for exactly that reason.

But once they replace gas engine with electric motor, car has NO engine. Gotta slip in a game engine.

The last car that I remember being just an engine and seats was the Dodge Viper. I think some K class Japanese domestic vehicles are also likewise basic.

I loved the Viper, but its spartan interior and features list were its detriment.

Part of what has made modern EVs successful in the wider market is the connected navigation system that knows your battery level, current consumption, planned navigation route, and what charging stations are available along the way.

To have a decent travel experience in an EV you'd likely at least need this data ported out to your phone via an OBD adapter or CarPlay / Android Auto integration with an in-car infotainment display.

The dream. Although a map display would be nice to keep us from needing to fiddle with our phones. And backup camera

You’re describing the Slate truck. Really hope they deliver what they’ve promised.

It’s a very small market, but yes you can. In Europe, the Citroen Ami is about that. Or the base Dacia Spring.

More expensive cars will have more electronic. They kinda want to sell them.

do you know about the slate truck? give it a search. it doesn't even come with speakers. or electric windows. or paint. it does have a backup camera afaik.

dawg idk how you have a car that's "electric" and also "basic." everything in an electric car is _necessarily_ mediated by software. if you want a simple car, you want combustion.

No because more basic cars have much lower profit margins while requiring higher volume and investors/capitalists will not accept that. Why earn 5% on their investment selling a million cars and building brand name when they can instead earn 20% on selling 100,000 cars at the expense of a brand name they never cared about maintaining in the first place? Brand tarnishment is something other smucks will have to deal with down the road, not the guys making these decisions right now who get performance "bonuses" and not the shareholders that want large returns.

Cars should be a USB-C peripheral to a tablet that docks on the dash.

That car is the Slate truck.

> Can I just have an electric car that’s a car and nothing else? Seats, wheels pedals, mirrors, real buttons, no displays just a aux jack. I’d buy it, hell I might even take the risk and pre-order it

You can buy a tubular frame chassis for Beetle-based kit cars from a factory in the south of England, that's been adapted to take modern coilover suspension and an MGF or MGTF engine and gearbox, because Beetles are so rare that anyone wants to put the engine back into a Beetle.

I reckon with a minor amount of fettling you could squeeze a Nissan Leaf transaxle and a sufficient amount of batteries in, and still drop your Manx beach buggy shell over the top. Or any other shell you like.

You'd be running around in a solar-powered beach buggy. THAT is the future.

I believe Tesla use/d Godot in their automative entertainment-instrumentation system.

Real buttons are more expensive than electronic. Not sure if you care, but people make that mistake more generally.

Game engines are probably trivially cheap to produce in 2026. You forget that Toyota sells 10M cars per year. In 3 years thats 30M cars. What does it cost each buyer for the game engine? 30 cents?

I can build you this for $140k, I think. Interested?

The "interactive user manual" sounds neat. It probably doesn't need to be part of the car's computer.

You don't, and as long as you're comfortable with that you keep prompting to dig yourself out of holes.

The problem is unless your ready to waste hours prompting to get something exactly how you want it, instead of spending those few minutes doing it yourself, you start to get complacent for whatever the LLM generated for you.

IMO it feels like being a geriatric handicap, there's literally nothing you can do because of the hundreds or thousands of lines of code that's been generated already, you run into the sunk cost fallacy really fast. No matter what people say about building "hundreds of versions" you're spending time doing so much shit either prompting or spec writing that it might not feel worth getting things exactly right in case it makes you start all over again.

It's literally not as if with the LLM things are literally instantaneous, it takes upwards or 20-30 minutes to "Ralph" through all of your requirements and build.

If you start some of it yourself first and you have an idea about where things are supposed to go it really helps you in your thinking process too, just letting it vibe fully in an empty directory leads to eventual sadness.

I love using AI and find it greatly increases my productivity, but the dirty little secret is that you have to actually read what it writes. Both because it often makes mistakes both large and small that need to be corrected (or things that even if not outright wrong, do not match the style/architecture of the project), and because you have to be able to understand it for future maintenance. One other thing I've noticed through the years is that a surprising number of developers are "write only". Reading someone else's code and working out what it's doing and why is its own skillset. I am definitely concerned that the conflux of these two things is going to create a junk code mountain in the very near future. Humans willing to untangle it might find themselves in high demand.

Same as any other software team? You keep an eye on all PRs, dive deep on areas you know to be sensitive, and in general mostly trust till there's a bug or it's proven itself to need more thorough review.

I've only ever joined teams with large, old codebases where most of the code was written by people who haven't been at the company in years, and my coworkers commit giant changes that would take me awhile to understand so genAI feels pretty standard to me.

You ask it to fix it.

I've tried fixing some code manually and then reused an agent but it removed my fix.

Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code.

The trick is to separate your codebase into "code I care about that I give the AI a fixed API and rarely let the AI touch" and "throwaway code I don't give one iota of damn about and I let the AI regenerate--sometimes completely from scratch".

For me, GUI and Web code falls into "throwaway". I'm trying to do something else and the GUI code development is mostly in my way. GUI (especially phone) and Web programming knowledge has a half-life measured in months and, since I don't track them, my knowledge is always out-of-date. Any GUI framework is likely to have a paroxysm and completely rewrite itself in between points when I look at it, and an LLM will almost always beat me at that conversion. Generating my GUI by creating an English description and letting an AI convert that to "GUI Flavour of the Day(tm)" is my least friction path.

This should be completely unsurprising to everybody. GUI programming is such a pain in the ass that we have collectively adopted things like Electron and TUIs. The fact that most programmers hate GUI programming and will embrace anything to avoid that unwelcome task is pretty obvious application of AI.

Toyota complained about poor performance on all of Unity, UE and Godot, but also about long startup times with Godot.

I don't know how bloated Godot is, but AFAIK libgodot development started as part of Migeran's automotive AR HUD prototype so I'm surprised to hear it has poor startup time for a car.

Why is a full game engine needed to display a GUI for unlocking a door? There are endless simpler solutions. The apps I use every day don't use game engines (except games).

So basically the same sort of thing Samsung does with its corporate subsidiary. At least that's the first one I think of. But I know there others who leverage the brand all the way down the ladder.

Was bevy considered?