"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.
It’s so simple, but so adaptable, and far simpler than any other transmission I’ve seen in a car.
Dacia did, and their CEO said they would let customers decide - which they did in droves, to his benefit, despite scoring three stars or fewer.
The newest Dacia Spring has one star.
NCAP lost its way years ago when it diluted its ratings from just crash testing into including "safety assistance" software.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
(edit: I have just been reading up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_de_Meo vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn and think the Renault turnaround can be attributed to the old CEO being arrested and replaced by someone actually trying to do a decent job)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every car review vid I watch on YouTube has me shaking my head at the sheer excess they seem to have.
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.
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...