It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. Sounds like you can mount your own infotainment system. Just an electric motor, battery, and chassis, and the rest is up to you. Isn't this what we've been asking for?
Yea, it's pretty exciting. I'd like to see how much more they could strip out to reduce the price and still have a viable commercial product. I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car. Then again, I haven't bought a car new since the 90s, so I'm probably just an old fart who hasn't grokked what things cost today. I still remember the day when the base-model Corolla started costing more than $9999 and I thought the world was coming to an end.
EDIT: Yep, I'm just old. Another commenter linked to a "10 cheapest new cars" list and there seems to be a price floor of around $20K. No major manufacturer seems capable of making one cheaper!
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[1], $9999 in 1995 is equivalent to $21,275.25 today, so it's a pretty spot on price for a barebones car.
Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Not impressed.
>Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms.
Except with all the safety equipment, crumple zones, airbags, sensors, etc. I would expect an increase in price.
And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS have a hard job. Both options— a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up.
> moving to plastic for the body
Some of those $10k cars in the 90s had more plastic in the bodies than cars today, e.g. Saturn S-series, where all body panels below the belt-line were plastic.
It isn't necessarily the cost savings one might expect though, because steel panels can also be load bearing and part of the crash structure, which is not really practical with plastic panels.
With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to.
Steel panels can also be made to be replaceable. Plastic has to be because it can't be welded to the frame.
In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced.
If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Yes, bodywork is quite a mature discipline. I was presuming the parent commenter meant user-replaceable, i.e. bolted on.
> The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Often this is because the special high strength steels used in vehicles today depend on proper heat treating to attain their strength, and welding can compromise this. Many OEMs even specify panel bonding for repairing particular crash-critical parts of vehicles now because of this.
It's mostly because the factory welds are the result of someone running numbers until they find the bare minimum whereas the autobody guy would rather not risk it.
The OEMs have proper repair procedures that are the correct way to fix the vehicle, and if the autobody shop is reputable, they follow them. And the stated reason OEMs specify panel bonding instead of welding is:
1. because UHSS is sensitive to heat, and robots are much more accurate in how they heat than Jimmy with a tig torch, and they were programmed by a process engineer, where as Jimmy welds until 'it looks good'.
2. welding may compromise anti-corrosive treatments on the inside of inaccessible cavities, which can lead to corrosion issues
e.g. https://rts.i-car.com/crn-24.html
A crappy shop will certainly just weld panels in without any regard for materials engineering, but it results in a crappy repair.
Cost savings wasn't the reason for the Saturn plastic panels, IIRC -- they were intended to make the car more durable; they were hard to dent. Some Saturn salespeople would kick the side of the car, hard, to demonstrate their resilience.
Those cars always looked great on the used car lot because they never had any door dings.
Modern cars are almost universally safer and more fuel efficient than the older models. And in many cases faster.
In nearly all cases they're faster. 10+ second 0-60 times used to be pretty normal for "regular" cars. Now days, people will complain that a car is slow if they can't put down 7 second 0-60 times. And "quick" boring cars of today are as fast as sports cars of the past.
The 1996 Ferrari F355 Spider and the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N both have a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds.
The average price of new cars sold in the US last year was nearly $50k. The manufacturers make more money from expensive cars than cheap cars, and people keep buying them, so that's what they sell. Before they canceled the Fit, Honda was selling almost 10 times as many of the larger CR-V each year.
You can find numerous new cars for sale in Mexico for under $15k USD.[0] Even Europe has several new cars under €20k.[1] These are the same manufacturers we have here, but lower cost models that are only sold in lower-income countries.
[0] https://compra.autofact.com.mx/blog/comprar-carro/mercado/au...
I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car.
You're not even living in the past. Our 20 year old Scion xB cost us $20K out the door new (granted, that's with most of the paltry list of options added, $15K base). And that was a cheap car at the time, Toyota marketing to "the kids".
The last time $20K was "a high price" for a new car was probably before most HN folk were born.
For those price-comparing, it is $20K after the federal incentives. So, its real cost is around $27K which makes it way more expensive than what the article claims.
Keep in mind $20k in 2025 dollars is the equivalent of ~$10k in 1997 dollars, if that helps set your frame of reference
According to this, there is only one new car model of any kind selling for under $20K in the US these days
One would be wiser to based on annual depreciation in real $ plus time value of purchase price. I suspect out of new trucks a tacoma would be the cheapest since the depreciation is low to negative (IIRC recently a Tacoma was worth more 1 year old than new).
All new car brands/models will not have comps for several years. Even folks buying Rivians, etc have no idea how the resale value will play out so you’re always going to have to take a gamble
This article is missing at least the Mitsubishi Mirage - the 2024 model year still seems to be available for 17k in the base trim?
> $20K still seems to be a high price for a car
Keep in mind this price is before the USA federal tax credit. So we're potentially talking about a $12,500 car. And consider inflation.
After federal tax credit, ergo $27K.
(Hat tip to @vaidhy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794867)
That's with federal incentive and likely before they factored in the tariffs. Those 500 parts aren't all coming from US. I wouldn't expect any usable version of it to be below 30k once it's actually available.
> It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform.
And it'll always be sold out.
This is an $27k car, with $7.5k rebate, so much for the unfairly competing Chinese. The MG4 is £22500 in the UK before tax, which is about $30k in USD, and that's a full-featured 5 door car, with double the range.
I do applaud the philosphy of cheap and barebones, and easily moddable, but my two cents is that trim is not the thing that's making cars expensive to make.
I'm sure you can get on the waiting list (for a lead time of 3-40 years) or buy it from a reseller for $70k. Problem solved.
> a comprehensive active safety system that includes everything from automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection to automatic high beams
No stereo, but luckily they still found space for a few DNN accelerators that will slam on the brakes randomly when getting false detections. Likely still has a 4G uplink and all the modern car cancer to make sure they can datamine their clients as much as possible and offset the subsidized purchase cost.
Worst of both worlds?
Another comment said there is no cellular modem; updates come through the app using a phone.
Is it? They show speakers mounted in the front as a "soundbar". Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?
I just want some power ports and good mounting points, then I can put whatever I want there, and upgrade it. I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.
> I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.
I am hoping like hell this ends up being the case. Give me power, a place to put my own stuff and some details on the CAN bus and leave me to it.
I do not want to pay a premium for your slow, locked down, buggy / seldom-updated touch screen.
DIN format radios are still around. My recent-ish corolla's infotainment display is just a well integrated double-DIN. I'm surprised this car doesn't as far as I can tell, have a DIN slot for one.
Yes, they have a nice storage bin right behind where you put the optional tablet mount, but the only option I've seen for that bin is a speaker kit. I don't want a tablet mount or speakers in the bin. I want the left side of the bin (above the controls) to be a double DIN mount.
So mount speakers all around the vehicle? The idea is: customize it yourself.
> Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?
No, because they knew what they were getting into when they bought this truck. And I'm sure there will be a dozen DIY ways to add a more traditional sound system.
on long car trips, it seems like everyone in the car (except, me, the driver) has headphones on. no one will miss the lack of rear speakers.
Sounds very twenty-first century. No shared music recognition, no sing-alongs.
If passengers want to DJ, you can get one of those little FM transmitter thingies that plugs into a phone/table headphone port.
The interesting modern tools for passengers wanting to DJ are shared Spotify playlists and Apple SharePlay.
A lot of Bluetooth speakers today can fill a car with a sound wall better rear speakers used to. Apple says you just need two of their Bluetooth speakers to fill a room in a house with great stereo and reasonably good surround sound. The square footage of a car is generally smaller than the supported room size.
What phone still has a 3.5mm headphone jack? Sincere question, I'd like to buy one.
Samsung Galaxy A Series (A15 / A15 5G, A14 / A14 5G, A25) all have headphone jacks. These are their "lower-end" models, though. The higher-end ones don't. And of course, iPhones haven't for a long time, too. Alternatively, for other phones with just a USB-C port, you could get a USB-C to headphone jack adapter.
edit to add: if Slate is successful, I wouldn't be surprised if a decently sized ecosystem pops up around easily installed custom sound systems and the tablets (possibly with headphone jacks!) to control them.