Even crazier to think how far we could've been if they didn't kill all of these projects as soon as they could!

Glad I could open your eyes! I have no idea how rare they are so it's possible you'll never see one (or you'll have to build one yourself maybe?)

I only heard about them a day or two before commenting because of the recent EV1 auction! Turns out Jared from The Questionable Garage (formerly Wrench Every Day) got one driving again, which he brought up in his video talking about the EV1 auction

Perhaps, but having tactile options like buttons and dials is considerably safer as the ui can’t change and you can keep your eyes on the road

Meh. Debatable.

I think a few crucial buttons and a screen is most safe. To have all the modern features and settings of a normal car and have buttons alone would leave you with a 747 cockpit you have to look at anyways, and you'd have to cover more area to find things.

Oh don't worry, it isn't! Its just backed by Jeff Bezos himself.......

Yeah......

This world sucks, and sometimes you gotta make some shitty pragmatic choices. I would judge someone harshly for a Tesla but less so for Slate given that 1. Jeff isn't so openly racist so much as being a greedy bastard of a human being, and 2. Slate is backed by him but not fully owned by him.

My understanding that the "Amazon backed" was a comparatively small portion of the funding, and largely to generate an air of legitimacy for the normies.

While you do not need software devs for a button, once you have enough buttons doing enough things controlling them with a computer becomes much easier than controlling them using mechanical circuitry. This is the whole reason for SBCs like the Arduino, so people can make the transitionary step between "my project is simple enough to have physical logic built into it" and "my project is so complex it no longer makes sense for me to hand build the logic"

If you haven't messed with physical logic gates before, I recommend it! If you don't have a physical workspace to do it in, Minecraft actually Makes a 'great' sandbox for playing with logic circuits. Superflat Creative worlds are the bomb for that.

Start with a simple yes gate, then learn a not gate, then an And, then an Or, and build up from there!

You'll find very quickly that once you need persistence involved, projects with physical logic can scale massively with each additional bit of storage added. Doing something with that storage? Good luck! As a result, nowadays we pay someone for a tiny computer they already made, and program it to make our buttons do stuff, instead of just having the buttons do stuff directly.

Edit: removed a word, analog does not mean mechanical, mea culpa.

You need someone to figure out how to get the car to interpret that button press. Whether it's an electrical engineer or a dev doesn't make too much difference to the argument.

the software route actually makes a bit more sense at scale, as you can abstract all the same functions into the car's computer regardless of what human interface device is activating that function.

Depends on how the button works