Electric Vehicles

The car market is so weird, plenty of cars like that in the rest of world.

Even Ford sells the Puma here, small electric car, but it's not available in the US for some reason 😅

This is one reason I drive a BMW i4. It's got some gimmicks, sure, but it's mostly just an EV that looks like a regular car.

There's plenty of much cheaper regular-looking EVs outside North America, too. The US is too busy protecting the low-quality local car market to allow better, cheaper models to be sold in the country.

I love my little BYD dolphin essential,

It's everything I need without much that I don't

ok. Everyone says this on the Internet, but in the real world they buy a different car because of the color of the LEDs inside.

Car companies learned a long time ago to learn from sales, not what people say they want to buy.

Dealers fucked Ford Corporate's EV strategy, by adding fees and slowing down sales on the EV versions, and using the wait-list to try to sell people on a truck today.

There have also been statements by Ford's CEO that there were design lessons learned from the F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach E about being more thoughtful and efficient with wiring and harnesses to save weight/material/cost with a dedicated EV platform rather than adding an EV powertrain to a vehicle designed for ICE powertrains.

The small truck they're going to release next year should show some of the lessons learned.

Never mind the fact that they have a new midsize EV pickup truck coming out next year.

Yep. And yet they only sold ~25k of them, with sales dropping off incredibly quickly toward the end. Even the hybrid sold ~85k units. I would never buy one but I know 2 people who have them, and I have done a couple of road trips in it. It is really really nice. The infotainment is the best I've seen in any modern vehicle. It still has physical buttons!

They stopped making these months ago. The have lots filled with unsold trucks. Tesla was supposed to be a build to sell model, but now they build to generate fake sales numbers.

It's so futuristic that it's worthless until some point in the distant future.

I’m amused by the notion that Musk thinks they will somehow become more fashionable

You'd be surprised. I mean there are people today - retrocomputing enthusiasts - who pay insane amounts of money for 286, 386, 486 beige box PC garbage just because it's old and rare. Yeah it's rare: that's because it's crap and people my age couldn't wait to throw it in the trash. In retrospect, I should have kept all that garbage to sell to today's fools.

The Cybertruck too will be rare some day - for the same reason - and then it'll be worth a lot of money to collectors with more money than brains.

At the reveal, they promised that it would be under $40k. They also claimed that it looked the way it did because of using a steel exoskeleton instead of a traditional frame. It was supposed to be a much cheaper way to produce a car. Then it turned out they couldn’t produce it that way and instead of cutting their losses, they built it on a frame and kept the hideous design by gluing the panels on.

Used Mad Max vehicles sell for way more than used Cybertrucks.