Automakers in the U.S. are struggling to find ways to meet increasing demands for cheaper cars as the long-term repercussions of Trumpian economic uncertainty continue to unfurl. Some automakers have shown an interest in de-contenting existing models in an effort to make them less expensive to produce and pass some of those savings on to the customer. For now they’re all half-assed measures, because consumers don’t have an option to buy a car with no flashy and expensive infotainment screen at all, like they do in Europe. I thought this was the land of the free? Where’s my freedom from paying for a shitty screen that will look dated in two years?
The Fiat Grande Panda Pop (below) is Stellantis’ newest foray into the cheap and cheerful segment of small European cars, and it, like the Volkswagen Up! (above) before it, has a nice little phone mount and a USB port for you to use in lieu of a large and pricey 10.25-inch infotainment screen available on more expensive Grande Panda models.
A similar setup is standard fitment on Stellantis’ bare bones Citroën Ami electric city “autocycle” (below). There is just something so basic and artful about this. It solves so many ridiculous problems that I have with integrated car infotainment. Take, for example, the two daily drivers in my household, a 2013 Porsche Cayenne and a 2016 Audi A3. Both have nice integrated screens with gobs of related wiring, programming, sensors, and controls, but neither of them has fucking Apple CarPlay. If Porsche and Audi hadn’t wasted millions of dollars developing those systems, which are already well out of date in 2025, those cars might have been a couple grand cheaper at the dealer, and I could plug in my brandy new Tim Apple iTelephone and be bang up to date on everything informational and entertainment.
Not only does this make building the car cheaper and more likely to be operated cheerfully for many years to come, but it takes the cell phone right out of the hands of the millions of distracted fuckers driving around in two-ton death machines staring at ticky tocks instead of the road.
Give me a car with manual windows, optional air conditioning, and steel wheels, while we’re at it. Let’s get those average transaction prices back down below $30,000. The American auto buyer has been living fat on the hog for too damn long, and rolling negative equity into another damn new thing nobody can afford isn’t the answer to our collective debt problem. We demand austerity, goddamnit!