Business Insider’s reporter and his disastrous experience with GM’s Blazer including the infotainment system:::When the Chevrolet Blazer EV stranded Kevin Williams, a 7-hour drive turned into a 14-hour ordeal.
Business Insider’s reporter and his disastrous experience with GM’s Blazer including the infotainment system:::When the Chevrolet Blazer EV stranded Kevin Williams, a 7-hour drive turned into a 14-hour ordeal.
Counterintuitively, having those alternatives would likely RAISE the cost of that car.
What is being discovered is that the most expensive component of the car isn’t any specific tech. Its the labor to put it together. Making a design decision which shaves off 60 seconds of human assembly saves millions of dollars, and allows the car to be priced lower.
Ways to decrease assembly time include making modules with multiple functions together into one unit. This is one reason why your HVAC, infotainment, backup camera are usually one unit in the car. If your requirement of a replaceable radio is introduced, you’ve now doubled the modules that need to go into the car and drastically increased the wiring needed (wire looms are time consuming to assemble).
Further, your desire for a car with manual door locks and windows is likely not very common. So if this variant of a car were produced it would now have to have a separate logistical change and assembly line. This means more factory space, additional training for workers (there’s that labor again), etc.