Small EVs and efficient people carriers update familiar names for the modern age.
“We a have a free market, so long as you only buy what we allow you to buy.”
These are all concept cars. In other words often just fantasy. Even if they do make a prototype it’s in no way guaranteed that it will see production. Anyone remember the Citroen or Renault where the seat was part of the door. Even featured as a prototype on Top Gear.
Just famtaay
Well, I do remember the Renault R5 e-tech concept car: https://images.carexpert.com.au/resize/1920/-/cms/v1/media/2021-09-renault-5-3.jpg
and here is the R5 production vehicle: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/BXN7nm/s1/renault-5-e-tech-electric.jpg
Concept cars can be outlandish, or they can be damn close to what is being delivered in the end.
That 2CV concept was all over the place but I think it will get manufactured. The production version will need to change a lot of things (the concept is ridiculous in some obvious ways) but it will appear in a year or two with a crappy range, a bench seat, plastic everywhere and a roll up roof of some kind. The original 2CV was a terrible car too that sold itself on its cheap & cheerful mantra so I suppose if they capture that it will sell pretty well.
I saw many people saying they wanted that new CV2, but looking at the interior it doesnt even seem to have space for airbags
That interior is fantasy land. The final version will have airbags, seatbelts, air ventilation etc. I doubt it will have an egg holder. It will have lots of scratchy plastic and probably fabric or foam selectively glued in place to distract from the overall cheap feel. If they keep the bench seats they’ll probably still have to put a split so the driver / passenger are independently adjustable.
“Scratchy plastic” … why does everything have to be luxury or else it is trash? When did this trend start? Affordable cars need to be robust, practicable, efficient and well … affordable. They don’t need luxury materials. Hard plastic with selective fabric and foam where it matters is perfectly fine and serviceable. You don’t sit on your door side surface and you don’t hug your dashboard or interior car floor, do you?
Plenty of interesting cars in the world and all the new ones are EVs which are unlikely to get to the US.
Yes, but their point is that concept cars are just that, concepts, they’re not designed for production or regs so the version we get is usually way more bland than the concept. There are a few exceptions where the vision of the concept car makes it into production, but 95% of the time the real thing is bland af.
This does not apply to limited production cars that don’t get redesigned to come off an assembly line making 5 other models, such as very expensive cars, loss-making models produced for homogulation, fleet regulations, or flexing purposes
the new CV2 looks like it could make it to production (with a ‘normal’ interior, of course). I keep seeing more and more Renaults 5 in the street. Im sure they want a piece of that.
Think about the poor oil barons.
Looking at these photos, all I can say is god I’m so sick and tired of modern vehicle interiors. I hate these flat, 1980s-style dashboards with nothing on them but vents, a steering wheel, and two giant touchscreens. They’re Spartan as fuck and ugly as hell, yet they have the nerve to charge $60K+ for this crap. Whatever happened to proper interior design? I get that these are concept cars, but their interiors still look llke every modern car on the road.
Vehicle interior design peaked in the late 2010s and it’s only been downhill from there.
Well what else do you want? Other than some buttons for AC on the center console.
I don’t want my instrument panel to be a digital display screen. Guages! Buttons! Knobs and switches! That iPad glued to the dashboard shit is for the birds
I want a full panel with Nixie tube odometer, analogue dials, and a huge, rustic jackknife switch that throws a bunch of sparks when it turns the car on. Any physical buttons should have the loudest mechanical keyboard switches available so that I can hear them clearly with music on.
I want the skinny 125 R15 tires and flip up side windows on the new 2CV!
I honestly don’t think most of the cooler looking ones will release at all; the 2cv maybe. I’d be surprised if, apart from the VAG cars, any of them came to Australia
Somehow I’m not going to lose sleep over not getting
You don’t get the 2CV. The ugly duckling is something special. And this revamp is good fun.
Y’all worry so much about looking tough that you don’t see the fun in life.
It isn’t about looking “tough” or “cool”. It is about not sticking out like a sore thumb.
Most cars in the US are civics, mid size trucks, and family vehicles.
That thing looks like it came out of a gumball machine.
NO! NO COOL CARS ALLOWED!!1!!!
You like something with a bit of style? Get ready to get your dick size mocked, dumbass 😎
Ah yes, the country of rugged individualists…
Most cars in the US look like the driver has to heavily compensate for something. Why else would they drive cars excessively dangerous to others, excessively expensive for what they deliver and with excessively bad usage of space? But some are worried that their car could look too much fun or be too efficient and affordable.
You’re right, it’s not available in the US, so I don’t get it.
Sometimes ugly ducklings are just ugly, and looking tough while going VROOM is the fun in life!
Key word: “looking”.
If you only knew that you don’t look very tough in oversized vehicles designed to avoid safety standards, emission standards and whatever other quality standards, just to pretend they could theoretically go off-road and put everyone else at unnecessarily grave risk to health and life.
Sorry wanting the barest hint of style makes you think I’m driving a Hummer at 50 mph through residential neighborhoods.
You mean you think these obese vehicles exude style? Oh well. A sleek sports car might be stylish, SUVs are just amorphous blobs.
No, I mean that:
Isn’t exactly a Corvette.If I’m pulling up in the fancy new whip, I want the assumption to be “this guy likes to drive”, not “this guy likes to make Mario noises whilst being fucked in the ass in the backseat”.
If that car inspires you to finally release your inner gay, you do you.
Not all driving needs to be fast to be fun. That’s why gokarts exist. Smoll cars are fun because of the turning radius and they can be a fast slow.
Also have you ever seen the original going through corners? Especially in the movies from “La Gendarme de Saint-Tropez”. The nun driving it is having a good day.
Wow, you really appear to need some heavy compensation. Apperently you think you get it from disproportionately designed overweight childcrushers. A fit guy in such a 2CV looks like twice the man than some compensating “alpha male” in some obese truck.
I’m in the US, you can have any EV you want as long as it is a half baked crossover. What I really want is a maximally efficient low slung aerodynamic wagon.
Or like Henry Ford had it: you can choose any color you want as long as it is black.
(Wasn’t he a nazi sympathiser BTW?)
It’s all fucking junk. Everybody here wants a giant tank, I hate it.
I’m a Chevy Bolt EUV driver. This 100%. I’m in the market for a mini van and want something electric. Nothing except the VW Buzz exists.
Fat people want fat cars.
Let them walk
Made for the civilized streets of Europe, not the kill-or-be-killed Mad Max hellscape of the the automotive United States.
civilized streets of Europe
Prolly better than USA but i’d not call any Italian street “civilized”
Tell me you have never been oversea’s (let alone drove there) without telling me you have never been overseas.
Everywhere in the world people drive like ass hats. It part of the human condition.
Yes, but the problem in the US is we have several generations of cars built to be “safe” for the driver, which means more dangerous for everyone else, meaning drivers of large vehicles drive wrecklessly with absolutely no fear for their own lives and aren’t removed from the gene pool.
I was driving from coast to coast in the US granted, a good while ago when there were still much fewer ass clown oversized trucks on the road (but still more than enough anyhow), in a Sedan. Didn’t feel too stressed to be honest. Where it gets really dangerous real fast is if you dare to walk anywhere outside of the few somewhat pedestrian friendly areas in the country.
I just sorta assumed this was true (in no small part because I accept xkcd as infallible gospel). But I was curious and just dug into it, and it appears that the fatality rate for accidents with injury in the US is among the lowest. And while the accident-with-injury rate is higher in the US than the combined EU + EFTA it’s not so different as to change this relationship. I really didn’t expect that, and I wish I could find more recent data to see how the trend has changed up to today (the best data I could find on this was from 2015 - which is well into the era of the US fixation on suburban combat vehicles, but as they may make up a higher % of all vehicles on the road now, I’m very curious to see what the current data shows)
(Chart in spoiler because I don't want to clutter up the thread:)
The report this is pulled from excludes non-injury MV accidents
This is heavily dependent on incident report rates. Incidents are underreported in countries where insurance doesn’t require police reports and/or litigation risk is much lower.
Deaths are pretty well recorded, and there you see that the US is much higher in vehicle deaths per capita. Deaths per billion vehicle-km is also useful, as you can argue that per capita the US drives a lot more, so you will see more incidents due to the traffic exposure being higher.
Summarizing: The US has well over twice as many traffic deaths per capita at 110+ vs 45 in the EU. The worst EU country is Romania with 78. The US is closer when you compare kms driven: about 7 deaths per billion km, still way higher than northern Europe (2-4) and about on par with Belgium (that’s unfortunately not something to be proud of). Quite a bit safer than the lower scoring countries though on that metric, like 14.4 for the Czech Republic.
Nah, on average, people in Europe are way better drivers than in the USA. To the point where it’s shocking to me as an American.
Twice as many road deaths in the US IIRC.
FYI people drive wildly differently in the EU already.
Per capita yes - but as so often in statistics, per-capita measures are an oversimplification. By deaths/km driven, the US isn’t a particular outlier (Top score is Mexico with 27.5 (!!!) deaths / 1bil km, then #2: Malaysia with 16.2 and #3: South Korea with 8.2. Other countries of interest are Belgium (7.3), New Zealand (7.2), US (6.9), France (5.8), Australia (4.9), Canada (4.3))
(source)
Taxi drivers take it to the next level tho. First time I rode a taxi in Tallinn was pretty white knuckle.
Guangzhou, China takes the cake. I was there for a few weeks. Wrong side of the road, wrong way on one way streets, ON THE FUCKING SIDEWALKS w/ ped traffic. It was insane!
Dominican Republic is a distant second, there was order to the chaos I could see after a few weeks… China it was pure entropy at its finest!
Guangzhou isn’t that bad, have you been there recently?
I learned to ride in Hanoi, I spent a year in various parts of vietnam and was very comfortable in SEA traffic on a bike.
None of that prepared me for the chaos of HCMC. People going the wrong way, people visibly drunk on bikes, randomly finding yourself surrounded by semis on cracked and broken pavement, you and 20 other bikes making offroad detours to get around cars.
Not since Xi showed up, from what I heard China has really cracked down on the shenanigans plus they put up bollards to prevent it.
Probably, but I wouldn’t overstate it, like there aren’t cars driving at speed on sidewalks, but its not like western countries where cars simply don’t drive or park in sidewalks. Bicycles and escooters still drive however they like, which imo is fine, since they’re so much less dangerous than cars, but it is different from further north. Its a but of a transition when you go further north and remember you’re not supposed to walk or ride your bike across moving traffic.
Motorcycles are banned outright, which is bullshit.
Heres a cat I saw last night:
Its wild how many parts of the world outlaw motorcycles. As a rider too I feel for the locals…
And that cat it too dang cure, all tuckered out guarding the store :) Too dang cute!!!
Did you know that the highway scene in Tenet was filmed in one take and entirely accidentally? They just built the film around that.
But only in Germany the Hilti Pasat is trying to breake any speed record om existence
Rome is easy mode… farther south it starts to look like GTA on a slow day
It’s freedom! We’re free to not be permitted to buy certain car brands.
Real competition would ruin their share dividends.
It’s so cute, I want one.
I’m fine if some of these cars stay in Europe. They can have all the fun with them.
What arcane way of thinking makes you believe the amount of fun Europeans can have with these cars depends on US Americans being able to buy them if they want them or not?
I swear had I this exact 2cv when I was 5 years old! I wonder if they fixed the annoying whining.
I have to admit that I waited until I was a little more than 5 years old to take on car ownership 😳
Tell me you’re not French without telling me you’re not French.
Weak.
Built from Lego, right?
Or Playmobil
It is a good thing that EU car makers are developing new models, but why do they have to be ‘inspired’ by decades old models in terms of looks?
Retro-revival trends happen every few decades in the car world. We were due for another one.
As long as it means interesting looking cars, I’m all for it!Because they look great!
What’s wrong with that? The essential thing is that those models are based on proper only electric platforms and not some max-compromise combined platform with ICE models.
I wholeheartedly agree that EVs should not be built as tanks. I just think that it’s a bit lazy to rehash 50s or 80s design in order to make a car interesting. I know, in those times they were not designed in a wind tunnel, but c’mon.
I have friends who drive an EV built by Dacia. It looks ugly, as all Dacias do, but at least it looks like a car from the 2020s. Or at least the 2010s…
BTW, I am not dissing ugly cars. I drive a Korean car, so I do not care much for looks anyway. :-P
Wtf when do you think wind tunnels started being used?
0 Days without Americans making everything about them
my take on this is that whoever wrote this doesn’t know that there’s ~190 additional countries that don’t have these cars.
I mean… it’s an American website, not surprising to have an American point of view. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Google is telling me that Lemmy was founded in the UK. And it’s a decentralized federated service. How is it an American website?
He’s referring to Ars Technica you box of rocks.
Oops, my bad. No need to be mean about it. It was an honest question.
lmao I’m sorry. I tend to respond with the energy I’ve been given and this week Lemmy has been giving me lots of rude BS.
No worries. Hopefully next week treats you better!
I don’t think this site will return to normal until the US midterms are over, but I’ll try to be less of a dick until then.
I’m adding this to my unironic obscure insults list.
