It doesn't say Toyota anywhere on the page and they don't have a link to a repo or anything like that, so I was a little confused. But it is from /that/ Toyota (well, a subsidiary that is making 3d software for their displays) and there was a talk at FOSDEM about it: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7ZJJWW-fluorite-game-...
Funny how “game engines” are now car parts in 2026.
Can I just have an electric car that’s a car and nothing else? Seats, wheels pedals, mirrors, real buttons, no displays just a aux jack. I’d buy it, hell I might even take the risk and pre-order it
In the US, no. Backup cameras are required by federal law as of 2018. The intent of the law was to reduce the number of children killed by being backed over because the driver couldn't see them behind the car.
It is crazy how many things are downstream of the structural issue where US regulations favor ginormous SUVs and pickups where this is a problem, but if we introduced legislation to fix this we would end up ruining US automakers which have pivoted almost entirely to this segment alone
While I agree with you that the issue is far worse with larger vehicles, I do find that backing up in my wife's 2011 camry (without a backup camera) feels significantly less safe than I feel backing up my 2017 accord with a backup camera. I'm all for fixing the structural issue you are referring to, but I think the requirement for those cameras is sane in an age where the added cost to the manufacturer is miniscule.
Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.
There was the chip shortage during covid which held car production back becasue the auto makers couldnt source their chips fast enough. I am waiting to see if the current supply issue for ram chips modules will produce a similar effect.
> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.
Was there a single mass market consumer car sold in the United States in this millennium that didn’t already have processors and RAM in them?
I would be absolutely shocked if there was a single car for which the relatively recent backup camera requirement required them to introduce processors and RAM for the first time.
Was it ever a problem to get the kind of phone SoC or camera chips you'd need for a backup camera if you were willing to pay an extra $20? I thought the issue was more specialized things. And you need one gigabyte of ram or less.
I mean you can buy add-on 3rd party backup cameras for like $20. They don't have any cost excuses for including backup cameras, camera sensors and display screens are literally cheaper than dirt.
That's great for cars built before the regulation were put into place. Without that regulation, you'd then be dependent on the end user purchasing an after market part and installing it. The vast majority of them won't. So if it is so important to have, you make it part of the car. They did not leave seat belts up to the owners to install after market versions.
It's not just ginormous SUVs with this problem, though, right? You're not going to see a 18 month old out the back window of your compact hatchback if they're too close to your car. Especially now that windows seem to be tinier than they used to.
No, it's common to all vehicles. You can't see small children behind a small passenger car, either.
Blaming trucks and SUVs for everything is a favorite pasttime of internet comments, but all vehicles benefit from backup cameras and collision detection sensors.
The US averages 23 pedestrian deaths per million people per year. The EU averages 8. The US fatalities have increased by 50% since 2013, while in the EU have decreased by 25% in the same time frame.
> The US averages 23 pedestrian deaths per million people per year. The EU averages 8.
Americans drive significantly more miles per year, and larger/more comfortable cars are in part needed because Americans spend far more time in their cars than Europeans.
Euro governments are also increasingly anti-car, which means citizens are loosing their freedom to travel as they wish and unreasonably taxed, policed, and treated like cash cows for the "privilege" to drive.
Collision detection sensors do the job just fine without a screen though.
I have a 2016 vehicle with no console screen and they have saved me from hitting all sorts on things, and are sensitive enough to detect minor obstacles like long grass.
I think the difference is that a 3 year old barely-walking child tends to wander behind moving cars far less often than an 8 year old playing football.
Right, backup cameras make sense even for sedans and other small cars. The high-hood trucks and SUVs in the US are the reason we'll probably get mandatory front cameras eventually as well.
It's a little ironic that the truck that diverged from the trend for high butch looking hood lines for no real reason is... Cybertruck. We kill pedestrians in the name of macho.
It wouldn’t be HN without a commenter shoehorning the topic of a thread into proof of their pet problem. See also any topic even remotely tangential to city planning.
When I'm 5'11" and I often see trucks and SUVs whose hoods come nearly to my shoulder, it just boggles my mind. Of all the regulations around vehicles, I don't understand why "being able to see the road five feet in front of the vehicle" isn't one of them.
Because trucks are extremely popular, and frankly there is a cultural identity associated with them. Most people don't haul things with their truck, and if they do, it's very infrequently. BUT in American fashion, the optionality to do this partially drives purchasing decisions.
Backup cameras do contribute significantly to safety, to the point that I installed one in my 2002 vehicle with a cheap aftermarket head unit. The important thing to realize is that all the modern conveniences can be decoupled from the drivetrain. My $50 Android head unit does basically all the things that the OEM head unit on our 2018 vehicle does. It even does many things better.
The problem with modern cars is that everything is so heavily integrated and proprietary. If I swapped out the OEM touchscreen, apparently I would also lose the ability to set the clock on my instrument cluster. Now that this has become normalized, automakers have realized they can lock Android Auto/CarPlay behind a paywall and you’ll have no recourse but to buy one of those tablets that you stick on your dashboard and plug into the aux port. If your car still has an aux port.
I’m excited for the Slate, but unfortunately I have the feeling that the people who buy new cars aren’t the same people that want the Slate. The rest of us who keep our 20+ year old vehicles reliably plugging along don’t make any money for automakers.
> buy one of those tablets that you stick on your dashboard and plug into the aux port
Every single car I have been in in the last 5 years or so has Bluetooth. No need for aux ports in this day and age, especially when devices dont have headphone jacks anymore.
I still use headphone jacks on my phone, I wouldn't buy one without it. It is just more garbage to manage and more stuff to fix when it doesn't work. It takes half a second to plug in a cable and I don't gotta run around broadcasting a bluetooth signal which drains battery when not in use and takes as long to disable as pulling out a plug. Plus it is often lower quality than the cord.
Bluetoothing to your car is to me the same energy as using "wireless" charging stands for your phone. You are just replacing a physical tether with a less efficient digital tether of higher complexity for no actual gains.
I thought the same until my latest pixel refused to use the headphone jack to the car because it detected the hands free communications in the steering wheel as a microphone and decided to block audio out with notifications telling me to set up Google Voice Assistant first (get fucked).
I feel like "game engine" is a misnomer for what we're actually dealing with here. It's more like an "ECS-based scene rendering engine, which can be used for games or for advanced UI". But that doesn't have a succinct label yet.
Ah sorry, I quickly edited that out of my comment! I had the video playing while posting, they were talking about a precursor project for embedded Flutter which this in some ways builds on, /that/ is running on the new RAV4.
One of the example uses given in the talk is 3D tutorials, which I could imagine being handy. Not sure I'd want to click on the car parts for it but with the correct affordances I could imagine a potentially useful interface.
A Toyota Corolla starts at $23K. I think the "Under 20" and "Under 30" price points (a la the original Model 3 goal) are simply a thing of the past for any volume car with reasonable demand.
Part of what has made modern EVs successful in the wider market is the connected navigation system that knows your battery level, current consumption, planned navigation route, and what charging stations are available along the way.
To have a decent travel experience in an EV you'd likely at least need this data ported out to your phone via an OBD adapter or CarPlay / Android Auto integration with an in-car infotainment display.
Connecting via ODB? Come on. The car does not need any of that built into it. You can connect an app on your phone to handle all of that and just use the screen as a display. There is no need for a car to have a cellular connection just to give this functionality. That would also prevent the car from being able to communicate with the mother ship. If there's an update, have the app do that as well.
Ol' Dirty Bastard? I jest, but I think the theory behind wanting an 'On-board Diagnostics' [1] connection would be to get data from the vehicle. You can get cheap bluetooth OBD-II adapters to transmit that info to your phone, it's not a given. I don't know much about electric cars, but if you want your phone to know the fuel level in an ICE vehicle then you'd need this kind of connection.
I make typos like that lot. The one that is most common for me is CVS instead of CSV. No, this isn't a list of things to get from the drug store ::facepalm::
do you know about the slate truck? give it a search. it doesn't even come with speakers. or electric windows. or paint. it does have a backup camera afaik.
No because more basic cars have much lower profit margins while requiring higher volume and investors/capitalists will not accept that. Why earn 5% on their investment selling a million cars and building brand name when they can instead earn 20% on selling 100,000 cars at the expense of a brand name they never cared about maintaining in the first place? Brand tarnishment is something other smucks will have to deal with down the road, not the guys making these decisions right now who get performance "bonuses" and not the shareholders that want large returns.
Given how many cars have Carplay or Android Auto, but also have their own e.g. Toyota app that you need to/ought to install, it feels as though this isn't that far off from how things basically are.
Personally, I'd be happy with some kind of situation where:
1. You have a small in-dash touchscreen, as most small sedans have these days, as the basic level of "backup camera and radio view"
2. Everything the car does has a physical button so you don't NEED to use the touchscreen
3. The car has a USB-C port that can power a tablet and which provides a standardized interface that e.g. iOS and Android can interface with, so that users don't have to worry about their new OS doesn't support the not-updated app, or the app doesn't support their not-updated device
4. Sell an optional tablet mount that attaches to the dash the way a built-in one would be
5. Sell an optional 'tablet' that does nothing but interface with the USB-C port and provide what it needs, in case someone wants a larger screen without having to buy an iPad Pro
Then again I don't drive, so I'd be happy with none of this also.
Honestly, I'd be okay with this, and then you can upgrade / replace said tablet if you wanted to. In an Alternate Universe, your iPad drives your car, your iPad Pro drives your car through hell and back, or whatever.
> Can I just have an electric car that’s a car and nothing else? Seats, wheels pedals, mirrors, real buttons, no displays just a aux jack. I’d buy it, hell I might even take the risk and pre-order it
You can buy a tubular frame chassis for Beetle-based kit cars from a factory in the south of England, that's been adapted to take modern coilover suspension and an MGF or MGTF engine and gearbox, because Beetles are so rare that anyone wants to put the engine back into a Beetle.
I reckon with a minor amount of fettling you could squeeze a Nissan Leaf transaxle and a sufficient amount of batteries in, and still drop your Manx beach buggy shell over the top. Or any other shell you like.
You'd be running around in a solar-powered beach buggy. THAT is the future.
Real buttons are more expensive than electronic. Not sure if you care, but people make that mistake more generally.
Game engines are probably trivially cheap to produce in 2026. You forget that Toyota sells 10M cars per year. In 3 years thats 30M cars. What does it cost each buyer for the game engine? 30 cents?
I can buy a 104 key mechanical keyboard for under $75 retail. That's 104 switches, 104 labelled button caps, a circuit board, controller and USB interface, with reliability likely much better than any other moving part found on an automobile.
> Real buttons are more expensive than electronic.
It might add up to a lot of money for the manufacturer who is cranking out thousands or millions of vehicles, but to the consumer buying one car it isn't a meaningful difference.
This is 10 year old outdated, but 10 years ago 1 button was ~1.00. Probably closer to $1.20 or $1.30. But sometimes buttons had 2 buttons on them, Those would go for $2.10-$2.30.
Then you had wiring each button wire I believe was $1. This wasnt 1 wire, but a few wires, power, ground, signal. Each button had them. This wasnt my job, so I didn't follow this price too much, but I asked the question at the time. I think going into the ECU, there is also a cost associated with it.
Anyway, you could assume 10 years ago, each button was $2. A car has 40-70 buttons? So its probably like $100 a car. Maybe $150 or $200 in today's money.
Also buttons and wires break, causing warranty problems.
At the time these vehicles were selling for under $20k at the bottom, and $40k at the top. So 1% of costs were buttons.
This doesn't even include the cost of hiring ~20 engineers to handle the buttons. ~6 people to check appearance and do testing... It doesn't include the assembly costs on the line. That 1% was just the cost of button + wire.
> This doesn't even include the cost of hiring ~20 engineers to handle the buttons. ~6 people to check appearance and do testing... It doesn't include the assembly costs on the line. That 1% was just the cost of button + wire.
That doesn't make sense. $1 uninstalled might make sense for a fancy custom-molded button, even if it's too much for a generic button. (I'd rather have some generic buttons with labels than use a touchscreen, by the way.) But there's no way a few feet of signal wire and the proportional share of power wires get anywhere near $1 uninstalled.
Also I can find entire car stereo units with 15 buttons on them for $15? That kind of integrated button is cheap, has been common in cars for a long time, and can control things just as well as a touch screen button can.
> Anyway, you could assume 10 years ago, each button was $2. A car has 40-70 buttons? So its probably like $100 a car. Maybe $150 or $200 in today's money.
I have a late 90s Range Rover. It has about 12 buttons on the dashboard, most of which I never have to bother with (they do things that turn on and off the fog lamps, which I don't need to use, or adjust the air suspension, which I rarely need to use). I turn the lights off and on, and I switch the heating from "normal" to "BLAST EVERYTHING ON, FRONT AND REAR DEMIST ON, SEAT HEATERS ON, EVERYTHING ON, EVERYTHING ON, EVERYTHING UP FULL, WE'RE AN AIR FRYER NOW" mode.
From looking at some new car options lately, it seems like you're lucky if you can get floor mats for $200. This doesn't take away from your point - I suppose I'm just griping.
The combination of Flutter + Claude Code makes cross-platform app development really, really fast. I've been impressed with how well Clause handles prompts like, "This list should expand on the web, but not on iOS." I then ask it (Claude) to run both a web instance and an iOS simulator instance. Can usability test in-tandem.
I recently (as in, last night) added WebSockets to my backend, push notifications to my frontend iOS, and notification banner to the webapp. It all kinda just works. Biggest issues have been version-matching across with Django/Gunicorn/Amazon Linux images.
You don't, and as long as you're comfortable with that you keep prompting to dig yourself out of holes.
The problem is unless your ready to waste hours prompting to get something exactly how you want it, instead of spending those few minutes doing it yourself, you start to get complacent for whatever the LLM generated for you.
IMO it feels like being a geriatric handicap, there's literally nothing you can do because of the hundreds or thousands of lines of code that's been generated already, you run into the sunk cost fallacy really fast. No matter what people say about building "hundreds of versions" you're spending time doing so much shit either prompting or spec writing that it might not feel worth getting things exactly right in case it makes you start all over again.
It's literally not as if with the LLM things are literally instantaneous, it takes upwards or 20-30 minutes to "Ralph" through all of your requirements and build.
If you start some of it yourself first and you have an idea about where things are supposed to go it really helps you in your thinking process too, just letting it vibe fully in an empty directory leads to eventual sadness.
LLMs would not be popular if "spending those few minutes doing it yourself" part was true. In actuality it can be hours, days, or weeks depending on the feature and your pickiness. Everyone acts as if they are the greatest developer and that these tools are subpar, the truth is that most developers are just average, just like most drivers are average but think of themselves as above average. All of the sudden everyone that was piecing together code off of stackoverflow with no idea how to build the damn thing is actually a someone who can understand large code bases and find bugs and write flawless code? Give me a break.
To the degree that those same people are now writing 10-100x more code...that is scary, but the doom and gloom is pretty tiring.
Yeah… I wonder how you write complex software without something that looks like a spec, other than slowly. It seems like the prep work is unavoidable, and this contrarian opinion you are offering is just that.
Same as any other software team? You keep an eye on all PRs, dive deep on areas you know to be sensitive, and in general mostly trust till there's a bug or it's proven itself to need more thorough review.
I've only ever joined teams with large, old codebases where most of the code was written by people who haven't been at the company in years, and my coworkers commit giant changes that would take me awhile to understand so genAI feels pretty standard to me.
I loved learning Computer Engineering in college because it de-mystified the black box that was the PC I used growing up. I learned how it worked holistically, from physics to logic gates to processing units to kernels/operating systems to networking/applications.
It's sad to think we may be going backwards and introducing more black boxes, our own apps.
I personally don't "hate" LLMs but I see the pattern of their usage as slightly alarming; but at the same time I see the appeal of it.
Offloading your thinking, typing all the garbled thoughts in your head with respect to a problem in a prompt and getting a coherent, tailored solution in almost an instant. A superpowered crutch that helps you coast through tiring work.
That crutch soon transforms into dependence and before you know it you start saying things like "Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code".
The trick is to separate your codebase into "code I care about that I give the AI a fixed API and rarely let the AI touch" and "throwaway code I don't give one iota of damn about and I let the AI regenerate--sometimes completely from scratch".
For me, GUI and Web code falls into "throwaway". I'm trying to do something else and the GUI code development is mostly in my way. GUI (especially phone) and Web programming knowledge has a half-life measured in months and, since I don't track them, my knowledge is always out-of-date. Any GUI framework is likely to have a paroxysm and completely rewrite itself in between points when I look at it, and an LLM will almost always beat me at that conversion. Generating my GUI by creating an English description and letting an AI convert that to "GUI Flavour of the Day(tm)" is my least friction path.
This should be completely unsurprising to everybody. GUI programming is such a pain in the ass that we have collectively adopted things like Electron and TUIs. The fact that most programmers hate GUI programming and will embrace anything to avoid that unwelcome task is pretty obvious application of AI.
I wonder if a slightly broader search for existing solutions - for instance, https://defold.com - would have shown that quick-startup, 3d-capable, c-integrable, low-end-hardware performant game engines could have been grabbed off the shelf.
That said, this is cool and I would have probably celebrated a similarly fun project in their shoes. Perhaps the real accomplishment here is getting Toyota to employ you to build a new, niche game engine.
Toyota complained about poor performance on all of Unity, UE and Godot, but also about long startup times with Godot.
I don't know how bloated Godot is, but AFAIK libgodot development started as part of Migeran's automotive AR HUD prototype so I'm surprised to hear it has poor startup time for a car.
For others who were curious like I was: The website doesn't mention "open" or "source" anywhere, but they did give a talk at FOSDEM 2026 about it.
There was a passing comment about "when we open up the GitHub repository" in the talk. So it's not open yet, but they've suggested it might be in the future.
Filament is not a console grade renderer, not even close. It's architectured around GL. Yes, it can use Vulkan but it's not in any way optimized like a console engine.
This is a very interesting but also frustrating comment. If you're right that it's not a console grade renderer (not that I know what that even means) then that's really interesting - but why not? And could it be in future or is it fundamentally impossible for some reason?
This trend of "complexity == moar gooder" makes me itchy. Why does a vehicle display system need a whole-ass game engine? I want my high-speed death box to have utilitarian, well-tested and well-written software, not fucking Unity.
Please stop, all this does is introduce new ways for things to break.
but if they're targeting embedded systems, maybe they haven't prioritized a public web demo yet. If the bulk of the project is actually in C++, making a web demo probably involves a whole WASM side-quest. I suspect there's a different amount of friction between "I wanna open source this cool project we're doing" and "I wanna build a rendering target we won't use to make the README look better."
The UI toolkits in game engine usually suck hard, so here they started from a good UI toolkit and made it possible to make relatively performant games.
I'm guessing its used for some of their in-car UIs - unreal engine has found a market (Rivian, Volvo, Ford...) for embedded automotive use now that so many cars display an interactive 3d model to the driver for things like tapping to unlock corresponding door or trunk etc etc.
Why is a full game engine needed to display a GUI for unlocking a door? There are endless simpler solutions. The apps I use every day don't use game engines (except games).
A game engine is sort of just a UI toolkit for interacting with 3d objects. If you want a 3d model you can interact with, you call that a game engine. Should they invent something new because they dislike the word "game"?
Because you need and want all the fancy features such as
- fancy HDR rendering with reflection planes,atmospheric effects, tone mapping, camera effects, all kinds of animations for doors opening, lights turning on off etc
- content pipelines to get all this data from digital creation tools into packages deployable on target
When everything is said and done this is the same bread and butter what game engines use so the industry has pushed to leverage those and spread to these markers. Both unity and epic have tried with but not without issues.
Game engines, UI frameworks, desktop environments, and web browsers all share a lot of features. The Arcan project is my favorite piece of software running with this idea rn
it'actually Toyota Connected North America, Toyota Motor Corporation's subsidiary founded in collaboration with Microsoft for working on in-vehicle software, AI, and related tech initiatives.
So basically the same sort of thing Samsung does with its corporate subsidiary. At least that's the first one I think of. But I know there others who leverage the brand all the way down the ladder.
I don't think anyone's seriously using Bevy's 3D renderer, only the ECS. The only successful 3D game made with Bevy so far seems to be Tiny Glade, which used its own renderer.
It is interesting to see players other than Google invest in it.
Makes me wonder if you might eventually see the OG Flutter team move to a shop like Toyota, the same way the original React team moved to Vercel. It's nice to see open source projects be portable beyond the companies that instigated them.
It doesn't say Toyota anywhere on the page and they don't have a link to a repo or anything like that, so I was a little confused. But it is from /that/ Toyota (well, a subsidiary that is making 3d software for their displays) and there was a talk at FOSDEM about it: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7ZJJWW-fluorite-game-...
> They use this game engine in the 2026 RAV4
Funny how “game engines” are now car parts in 2026.
Can I just have an electric car that’s a car and nothing else? Seats, wheels pedals, mirrors, real buttons, no displays just a aux jack. I’d buy it, hell I might even take the risk and pre-order it
> no displays
In the US, no. Backup cameras are required by federal law as of 2018. The intent of the law was to reduce the number of children killed by being backed over because the driver couldn't see them behind the car.
It is crazy how many things are downstream of the structural issue where US regulations favor ginormous SUVs and pickups where this is a problem, but if we introduced legislation to fix this we would end up ruining US automakers which have pivoted almost entirely to this segment alone
While I agree with you that the issue is far worse with larger vehicles, I do find that backing up in my wife's 2011 camry (without a backup camera) feels significantly less safe than I feel backing up my 2017 accord with a backup camera. I'm all for fixing the structural issue you are referring to, but I think the requirement for those cameras is sane in an age where the added cost to the manufacturer is miniscule.
Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.
There was the chip shortage during covid which held car production back becasue the auto makers couldnt source their chips fast enough. I am waiting to see if the current supply issue for ram chips modules will produce a similar effect.
> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.
Was there a single mass market consumer car sold in the United States in this millennium that didn’t already have processors and RAM in them?
I would be absolutely shocked if there was a single car for which the relatively recent backup camera requirement required them to introduce processors and RAM for the first time.
I’m pretty sure that you can buy aftermarket backup cameras. The car can be a dumb bunny, and still have a good camera.
Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.
Stability control, pre-collision braking, lane departure warnings, the complexity is pretty inevitable as we improve the safety of vehicles.
All of that is worth the extra safety.
Was it ever a problem to get the kind of phone SoC or camera chips you'd need for a backup camera if you were willing to pay an extra $20? I thought the issue was more specialized things. And you need one gigabyte of ram or less.
I mean you can buy add-on 3rd party backup cameras for like $20. They don't have any cost excuses for including backup cameras, camera sensors and display screens are literally cheaper than dirt.
That's great for cars built before the regulation were put into place. Without that regulation, you'd then be dependent on the end user purchasing an after market part and installing it. The vast majority of them won't. So if it is so important to have, you make it part of the car. They did not leave seat belts up to the owners to install after market versions.
It's not just ginormous SUVs with this problem, though, right? You're not going to see a 18 month old out the back window of your compact hatchback if they're too close to your car. Especially now that windows seem to be tinier than they used to.
No, it's common to all vehicles. You can't see small children behind a small passenger car, either.
Blaming trucks and SUVs for everything is a favorite pasttime of internet comments, but all vehicles benefit from backup cameras and collision detection sensors.
The US averages 23 pedestrian deaths per million people per year. The EU averages 8. The US fatalities have increased by 50% since 2013, while in the EU have decreased by 25% in the same time frame.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm
What does this have to do with the comment you're replying to?
The majority of pedestrian accidents aren't involved with backup cameras. Are you just trying to turn this into a US vs EU argument?
> The US averages 23 pedestrian deaths per million people per year. The EU averages 8.
Americans drive significantly more miles per year, and larger/more comfortable cars are in part needed because Americans spend far more time in their cars than Europeans.
Euro governments are also increasingly anti-car, which means citizens are loosing their freedom to travel as they wish and unreasonably taxed, policed, and treated like cash cows for the "privilege" to drive.
What’s really crazy was Trump forcing the UK to change road safety rules so they could sell more American pick up trucks in the UK.
So pedestrian deaths would start rising again.
Collision detection sensors do the job just fine without a screen though.
I have a 2016 vehicle with no console screen and they have saved me from hitting all sorts on things, and are sensitive enough to detect minor obstacles like long grass.
I think the difference is that a 3 year old barely-walking child tends to wander behind moving cars far less often than an 8 year old playing football.
1-4 year olds are the age group most likely to be injured in this type of incident.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5406a2.htm
I suspect older children are more likely to be able to be aware of their surroundings and have better gross motor skills to react.
That could be true but the 8 year old gets out of the way. I can remember two incidents on the news where a toddler was killed in a driveway. Tragic.
Right, backup cameras make sense even for sedans and other small cars. The high-hood trucks and SUVs in the US are the reason we'll probably get mandatory front cameras eventually as well.
It's a little ironic that the truck that diverged from the trend for high butch looking hood lines for no real reason is... Cybertruck. We kill pedestrians in the name of macho.
This has nothing to do with SUVs. A 3 year old is difficult to see behind ANY vehicle.
Wait until you hear what kind of vehicles the CAFE regulatory framework has incentivized US automakers to build.
deaths from people backing up over their kids predated "ginormous SUVs".
It wouldn’t be HN without a commenter shoehorning the topic of a thread into proof of their pet problem. See also any topic even remotely tangential to city planning.
> In the US, no. Backup cameras are required by federal law as of 2018.
Backup cameras are required for new vehicles in a lot of markets: EU, Canada, Japan, and more.
So it's not just a US requirement.
Yet everyone drives a truck and are incapable of seeing a child infront of their vehicle.
When I'm 5'11" and I often see trucks and SUVs whose hoods come nearly to my shoulder, it just boggles my mind. Of all the regulations around vehicles, I don't understand why "being able to see the road five feet in front of the vehicle" isn't one of them.
Because marketting doesn't really care about vehicle safety, they care about how cool and powerful it looks so they can sell it for a higher price.
Because trucks are extremely popular, and frankly there is a cultural identity associated with them. Most people don't haul things with their truck, and if they do, it's very infrequently. BUT in American fashion, the optionality to do this partially drives purchasing decisions.
Backup cameras do contribute significantly to safety, to the point that I installed one in my 2002 vehicle with a cheap aftermarket head unit. The important thing to realize is that all the modern conveniences can be decoupled from the drivetrain. My $50 Android head unit does basically all the things that the OEM head unit on our 2018 vehicle does. It even does many things better.
The problem with modern cars is that everything is so heavily integrated and proprietary. If I swapped out the OEM touchscreen, apparently I would also lose the ability to set the clock on my instrument cluster. Now that this has become normalized, automakers have realized they can lock Android Auto/CarPlay behind a paywall and you’ll have no recourse but to buy one of those tablets that you stick on your dashboard and plug into the aux port. If your car still has an aux port.
I’m excited for the Slate, but unfortunately I have the feeling that the people who buy new cars aren’t the same people that want the Slate. The rest of us who keep our 20+ year old vehicles reliably plugging along don’t make any money for automakers.
> buy one of those tablets that you stick on your dashboard and plug into the aux port
Every single car I have been in in the last 5 years or so has Bluetooth. No need for aux ports in this day and age, especially when devices dont have headphone jacks anymore.
Are you stuck in the 2000's?
I still use headphone jacks on my phone, I wouldn't buy one without it. It is just more garbage to manage and more stuff to fix when it doesn't work. It takes half a second to plug in a cable and I don't gotta run around broadcasting a bluetooth signal which drains battery when not in use and takes as long to disable as pulling out a plug. Plus it is often lower quality than the cord.
Bluetoothing to your car is to me the same energy as using "wireless" charging stands for your phone. You are just replacing a physical tether with a less efficient digital tether of higher complexity for no actual gains.
I thought the same until my latest pixel refused to use the headphone jack to the car because it detected the hands free communications in the steering wheel as a microphone and decided to block audio out with notifications telling me to set up Google Voice Assistant first (get fucked).
I feel like "game engine" is a misnomer for what we're actually dealing with here. It's more like an "ECS-based scene rendering engine, which can be used for games or for advanced UI". But that doesn't have a succinct label yet.
Ah sorry, I quickly edited that out of my comment! I had the video playing while posting, they were talking about a precursor project for embedded Flutter which this in some ways builds on, /that/ is running on the new RAV4.
One of the example uses given in the talk is 3D tutorials, which I could imagine being handy. Not sure I'd want to click on the car parts for it but with the correct affordances I could imagine a potentially useful interface.
JPY2690k($17,594) 2025 Honda `N-ONE e:`[0], 12km(7.45 mi), unregistered, 4 passengers, 29.6kWh battery, WLTP 295km(183 mi) of range, pack liquid cooling, has one-pedal, airbags, basic LKAS, rear seat ISOFIX, etc etc[2]
It's like, at least one exists in Japan, on used market even, if you absolutely have to have one, I guess
0: https://www.honda.co.jp/N-ONE-e/webcatalog/design/images/e_g...
1: https://driver-web.jp/articles/gallery/41396/36291
2: https://www.carsensor.net/usedcar/detail/AU6687733258/index.... | https://archive.is/gbBzc
Hahah super, ugly I love it. If only it was easy to import.
We're all just waiting for the Slate for exactly that reason.
I was hoping it would be under USD 20k including all taxes but now rumors say likely NOT under USD 25k?
A Toyota Corolla starts at $23K. I think the "Under 20" and "Under 30" price points (a la the original Model 3 goal) are simply a thing of the past for any volume car with reasonable demand.
The announced "under $20K" price was including the now-cancelled $7,500 EV subsidy.
well the website says "mid-twenties" so Id say more than a rumor.
Part of what has made modern EVs successful in the wider market is the connected navigation system that knows your battery level, current consumption, planned navigation route, and what charging stations are available along the way.
To have a decent travel experience in an EV you'd likely at least need this data ported out to your phone via an OBD adapter or CarPlay / Android Auto integration with an in-car infotainment display.
Connecting via ODB? Come on. The car does not need any of that built into it. You can connect an app on your phone to handle all of that and just use the screen as a display. There is no need for a car to have a cellular connection just to give this functionality. That would also prevent the car from being able to communicate with the mother ship. If there's an update, have the app do that as well.
> ODB
Ol' Dirty Bastard? I jest, but I think the theory behind wanting an 'On-board Diagnostics' [1] connection would be to get data from the vehicle. You can get cheap bluetooth OBD-II adapters to transmit that info to your phone, it's not a given. I don't know much about electric cars, but if you want your phone to know the fuel level in an ICE vehicle then you'd need this kind of connection.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics
I make typos like that lot. The one that is most common for me is CVS instead of CSV. No, this isn't a list of things to get from the drug store ::facepalm::
You’re describing the Slate truck. Really hope they deliver what they’ve promised.
The dream. Although a map display would be nice to keep us from needing to fiddle with our phones. And backup camera
do you know about the slate truck? give it a search. it doesn't even come with speakers. or electric windows. or paint. it does have a backup camera afaik.
No because more basic cars have much lower profit margins while requiring higher volume and investors/capitalists will not accept that. Why earn 5% on their investment selling a million cars and building brand name when they can instead earn 20% on selling 100,000 cars at the expense of a brand name they never cared about maintaining in the first place? Brand tarnishment is something other smucks will have to deal with down the road, not the guys making these decisions right now who get performance "bonuses" and not the shareholders that want large returns.
It’s a very small market, but yes you can. In Europe, the Citroen Ami is about that. Or the base Dacia Spring.
More expensive cars will have more electronic. They kinda want to sell them.
That car is the Slate truck.
Cars should be a USB-C peripheral to a tablet that docks on the dash.
Given how many cars have Carplay or Android Auto, but also have their own e.g. Toyota app that you need to/ought to install, it feels as though this isn't that far off from how things basically are.
Personally, I'd be happy with some kind of situation where:
1. You have a small in-dash touchscreen, as most small sedans have these days, as the basic level of "backup camera and radio view" 2. Everything the car does has a physical button so you don't NEED to use the touchscreen 3. The car has a USB-C port that can power a tablet and which provides a standardized interface that e.g. iOS and Android can interface with, so that users don't have to worry about their new OS doesn't support the not-updated app, or the app doesn't support their not-updated device 4. Sell an optional tablet mount that attaches to the dash the way a built-in one would be 5. Sell an optional 'tablet' that does nothing but interface with the USB-C port and provide what it needs, in case someone wants a larger screen without having to buy an iPad Pro
Then again I don't drive, so I'd be happy with none of this also.
Honestly, I'd be okay with this, and then you can upgrade / replace said tablet if you wanted to. In an Alternate Universe, your iPad drives your car, your iPad Pro drives your car through hell and back, or whatever.
I believe Tesla use/d Godot in their automative entertainment-instrumentation system.
The "interactive user manual" sounds neat. It probably doesn't need to be part of the car's computer.
> Can I just have an electric car that’s a car and nothing else? Seats, wheels pedals, mirrors, real buttons, no displays just a aux jack. I’d buy it, hell I might even take the risk and pre-order it
You can buy a tubular frame chassis for Beetle-based kit cars from a factory in the south of England, that's been adapted to take modern coilover suspension and an MGF or MGTF engine and gearbox, because Beetles are so rare that anyone wants to put the engine back into a Beetle.
I reckon with a minor amount of fettling you could squeeze a Nissan Leaf transaxle and a sufficient amount of batteries in, and still drop your Manx beach buggy shell over the top. Or any other shell you like.
You'd be running around in a solar-powered beach buggy. THAT is the future.
Real buttons are more expensive than electronic. Not sure if you care, but people make that mistake more generally.
Game engines are probably trivially cheap to produce in 2026. You forget that Toyota sells 10M cars per year. In 3 years thats 30M cars. What does it cost each buyer for the game engine? 30 cents?
I can buy a 104 key mechanical keyboard for under $75 retail. That's 104 switches, 104 labelled button caps, a circuit board, controller and USB interface, with reliability likely much better than any other moving part found on an automobile.
> Real buttons are more expensive than electronic.
It might add up to a lot of money for the manufacturer who is cranking out thousands or millions of vehicles, but to the consumer buying one car it isn't a meaningful difference.
This is 10 year old outdated, but 10 years ago 1 button was ~1.00. Probably closer to $1.20 or $1.30. But sometimes buttons had 2 buttons on them, Those would go for $2.10-$2.30.
Then you had wiring each button wire I believe was $1. This wasnt 1 wire, but a few wires, power, ground, signal. Each button had them. This wasnt my job, so I didn't follow this price too much, but I asked the question at the time. I think going into the ECU, there is also a cost associated with it.
Anyway, you could assume 10 years ago, each button was $2. A car has 40-70 buttons? So its probably like $100 a car. Maybe $150 or $200 in today's money.
Also buttons and wires break, causing warranty problems.
At the time these vehicles were selling for under $20k at the bottom, and $40k at the top. So 1% of costs were buttons.
This doesn't even include the cost of hiring ~20 engineers to handle the buttons. ~6 people to check appearance and do testing... It doesn't include the assembly costs on the line. That 1% was just the cost of button + wire.
> This doesn't even include the cost of hiring ~20 engineers to handle the buttons. ~6 people to check appearance and do testing... It doesn't include the assembly costs on the line. That 1% was just the cost of button + wire.
That doesn't make sense. $1 uninstalled might make sense for a fancy custom-molded button, even if it's too much for a generic button. (I'd rather have some generic buttons with labels than use a touchscreen, by the way.) But there's no way a few feet of signal wire and the proportional share of power wires get anywhere near $1 uninstalled.
Also I can find entire car stereo units with 15 buttons on them for $15? That kind of integrated button is cheap, has been common in cars for a long time, and can control things just as well as a touch screen button can.
> Also buttons and wires break, causing warranty problems.
It's a good thing that doesn't happen to giant 15" integrated touchscreens. Imagine how much of a problem that would be!
> Anyway, you could assume 10 years ago, each button was $2. A car has 40-70 buttons? So its probably like $100 a car. Maybe $150 or $200 in today's money.
I have a late 90s Range Rover. It has about 12 buttons on the dashboard, most of which I never have to bother with (they do things that turn on and off the fog lamps, which I don't need to use, or adjust the air suspension, which I rarely need to use). I turn the lights off and on, and I switch the heating from "normal" to "BLAST EVERYTHING ON, FRONT AND REAR DEMIST ON, SEAT HEATERS ON, EVERYTHING ON, EVERYTHING ON, EVERYTHING UP FULL, WE'RE AN AIR FRYER NOW" mode.
What do you actually need an LCD for in a car?
> What do you actually need an LCD for in a car?
Backup camera. They are required by law.
It doesn't have to be a LCD. Why not a CRT :)
From looking at some new car options lately, it seems like you're lucky if you can get floor mats for $200. This doesn't take away from your point - I suppose I'm just griping.
I can build you this for $140k, I think. Interested?
I guess they mean a car's console. Not a game console.
The talk at Fosdem about it https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7ZJJWW-fluorite-game-...
The combination of Flutter + Claude Code makes cross-platform app development really, really fast. I've been impressed with how well Clause handles prompts like, "This list should expand on the web, but not on iOS." I then ask it (Claude) to run both a web instance and an iOS simulator instance. Can usability test in-tandem.
I recently (as in, last night) added WebSockets to my backend, push notifications to my frontend iOS, and notification banner to the webapp. It all kinda just works. Biggest issues have been version-matching across with Django/Gunicorn/Amazon Linux images.
How are you going to maintain all that when you find bugs if it generates a ton of code you did not get through to understand it?
You don't, and as long as you're comfortable with that you keep prompting to dig yourself out of holes.
The problem is unless your ready to waste hours prompting to get something exactly how you want it, instead of spending those few minutes doing it yourself, you start to get complacent for whatever the LLM generated for you.
IMO it feels like being a geriatric handicap, there's literally nothing you can do because of the hundreds or thousands of lines of code that's been generated already, you run into the sunk cost fallacy really fast. No matter what people say about building "hundreds of versions" you're spending time doing so much shit either prompting or spec writing that it might not feel worth getting things exactly right in case it makes you start all over again.
It's literally not as if with the LLM things are literally instantaneous, it takes upwards or 20-30 minutes to "Ralph" through all of your requirements and build.
If you start some of it yourself first and you have an idea about where things are supposed to go it really helps you in your thinking process too, just letting it vibe fully in an empty directory leads to eventual sadness.
That's also how you get security nightmares.
The way I use LLM's is that I design main data structures, function interfaces etc. and ask LLM's to fill them. Also test cases and assertions.
LLMs would not be popular if "spending those few minutes doing it yourself" part was true. In actuality it can be hours, days, or weeks depending on the feature and your pickiness. Everyone acts as if they are the greatest developer and that these tools are subpar, the truth is that most developers are just average, just like most drivers are average but think of themselves as above average. All of the sudden everyone that was piecing together code off of stackoverflow with no idea how to build the damn thing is actually a someone who can understand large code bases and find bugs and write flawless code? Give me a break.
To the degree that those same people are now writing 10-100x more code...that is scary, but the doom and gloom is pretty tiring.
Yeah… I wonder how you write complex software without something that looks like a spec, other than slowly. It seems like the prep work is unavoidable, and this contrarian opinion you are offering is just that.
Same as any other software team? You keep an eye on all PRs, dive deep on areas you know to be sensitive, and in general mostly trust till there's a bug or it's proven itself to need more thorough review.
I've only ever joined teams with large, old codebases where most of the code was written by people who haven't been at the company in years, and my coworkers commit giant changes that would take me awhile to understand so genAI feels pretty standard to me.
You ask it to fix it.
I've tried fixing some code manually and then reused an agent but it removed my fix.
Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code.
> Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code.
Truly one of the statements of all time. I hope you look at the code, even frontier agents make serious lapses in "judgement".
I loved learning Computer Engineering in college because it de-mystified the black box that was the PC I used growing up. I learned how it worked holistically, from physics to logic gates to processing units to kernels/operating systems to networking/applications.
It's sad to think we may be going backwards and introducing more black boxes, our own apps.
I personally don't "hate" LLMs but I see the pattern of their usage as slightly alarming; but at the same time I see the appeal of it.
Offloading your thinking, typing all the garbled thoughts in your head with respect to a problem in a prompt and getting a coherent, tailored solution in almost an instant. A superpowered crutch that helps you coast through tiring work.
That crutch soon transforms into dependence and before you know it you start saying things like "Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code".
And before you realize you're nothing more but a prompter ready to be displaced by someone cheaper.
> Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code.
And therein lies the problem
The trick is to separate your codebase into "code I care about that I give the AI a fixed API and rarely let the AI touch" and "throwaway code I don't give one iota of damn about and I let the AI regenerate--sometimes completely from scratch".
For me, GUI and Web code falls into "throwaway". I'm trying to do something else and the GUI code development is mostly in my way. GUI (especially phone) and Web programming knowledge has a half-life measured in months and, since I don't track them, my knowledge is always out-of-date. Any GUI framework is likely to have a paroxysm and completely rewrite itself in between points when I look at it, and an LLM will almost always beat me at that conversion. Generating my GUI by creating an English description and letting an AI convert that to "GUI Flavour of the Day(tm)" is my least friction path.
This should be completely unsurprising to everybody. GUI programming is such a pain in the ass that we have collectively adopted things like Electron and TUIs. The fact that most programmers hate GUI programming and will embrace anything to avoid that unwelcome task is pretty obvious application of AI.
I wonder if a slightly broader search for existing solutions - for instance, https://defold.com - would have shown that quick-startup, 3d-capable, c-integrable, low-end-hardware performant game engines could have been grabbed off the shelf.
That said, this is cool and I would have probably celebrated a similarly fun project in their shoes. Perhaps the real accomplishment here is getting Toyota to employ you to build a new, niche game engine.
This is specifically designed to embed into Flutter apps, which have specific requirements how they interact with the GPU and renderer.
They already tried other engines, such as Unity. The team didn't just go off and build something without trying existing solutions first.
Toyota complained about poor performance on all of Unity, UE and Godot, but also about long startup times with Godot.
I don't know how bloated Godot is, but AFAIK libgodot development started as part of Migeran's automotive AR HUD prototype so I'm surprised to hear it has poor startup time for a car.
For others who were curious like I was: The website doesn't mention "open" or "source" anywhere, but they did give a talk at FOSDEM 2026 about it.
There was a passing comment about "when we open up the GitHub repository" in the talk. So it's not open yet, but they've suggested it might be in the future.
Filament is not a console grade renderer, not even close. It's architectured around GL. Yes, it can use Vulkan but it's not in any way optimized like a console engine.
This is a very interesting but also frustrating comment. If you're right that it's not a console grade renderer (not that I know what that even means) then that's really interesting - but why not? And could it be in future or is it fundamentally impossible for some reason?
What is a console grade renderer? Specifically, what's considered table stakes and what is Filament missing?
This trend of "complexity == moar gooder" makes me itchy. Why does a vehicle display system need a whole-ass game engine? I want my high-speed death box to have utilitarian, well-tested and well-written software, not fucking Unity.
Please stop, all this does is introduce new ways for things to break.
This definitely looks cool, flutter is still my tool of choice for small apps that aren't games, and I see a big company embrace it warms my soul.
Toyota assuming they move forward with this, might even become the main corporate sponsor since Google appears to be disinterested.
Does it mean it also runs in a browser? Why isn't there a demo?
It does look like Filament has a web target:
https://github.com/google/filament
but if they're targeting embedded systems, maybe they haven't prioritized a public web demo yet. If the bulk of the project is actually in C++, making a web demo probably involves a whole WASM side-quest. I suspect there's a different amount of friction between "I wanna open source this cool project we're doing" and "I wanna build a rendering target we won't use to make the README look better."
Interesting, they flipped the problem around.
The UI toolkits in game engine usually suck hard, so here they started from a good UI toolkit and made it possible to make relatively performant games.
There's more info at https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1r0lx9g/fluori...
Looked great. How is it associated with toyota?
source code not available?
How is this related to Toyota? Toyota the car manufacturer?
I'm guessing its used for some of their in-car UIs - unreal engine has found a market (Rivian, Volvo, Ford...) for embedded automotive use now that so many cars display an interactive 3d model to the driver for things like tapping to unlock corresponding door or trunk etc etc.
> https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/hmi
Why is a full game engine needed to display a GUI for unlocking a door? There are endless simpler solutions. The apps I use every day don't use game engines (except games).
A game engine is sort of just a UI toolkit for interacting with 3d objects. If you want a 3d model you can interact with, you call that a game engine. Should they invent something new because they dislike the word "game"?
Because you need and want all the fancy features such as
When everything is said and done this is the same bread and butter what game engines use so the industry has pushed to leverage those and spread to these markers. Both unity and epic have tried with but not without issues.The market for automotive features in the US diverged from "need" long ago.
Game engines, UI frameworks, desktop environments, and web browsers all share a lot of features. The Arcan project is my favorite piece of software running with this idea rn
Yes, that Toyota. Looks like it came out of this group. https://www.toyotaconnected.com/about
it'actually Toyota Connected North America, Toyota Motor Corporation's subsidiary founded in collaboration with Microsoft for working on in-vehicle software, AI, and related tech initiatives.
So basically the same sort of thing Samsung does with its corporate subsidiary. At least that's the first one I think of. But I know there others who leverage the brand all the way down the ladder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Connected_North_America
They needed a GUI toolkit for dash display, and didn't really like long engine init time of Unreal/Unity/Godot.
Was bevy considered?
I don't think anyone's seriously using Bevy's 3D renderer, only the ECS. The only successful 3D game made with Bevy so far seems to be Tiny Glade, which used its own renderer.
Yes. Had to look it up, but apparently it was developed by TCNA (Toyota Connected North America) which does car software and such.
Now we’re talking. If Flutter is dying, how come I still see projects like this popping up instead of using native or KMP?
It is interesting to see players other than Google invest in it.
Makes me wonder if you might eventually see the OG Flutter team move to a shop like Toyota, the same way the original React team moved to Vercel. It's nice to see open source projects be portable beyond the companies that instigated them.