Hell, they would be even happier to ignore the 'rabble' altogether. You at least had to keep the slaves vaguely alive.
There's a reason Larry Ellison said ""Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on", they want to contain the "unwanted" and keep them from being a risk while excluding them from the 'economy' to the extent feasible
Sure, those are premium things, but don't actually drive the manufacturer's cost as those come mostly for free.
So it drives bigger margin for them instead, but at the expense of people perceiving EV as somehow fundamentally too expensive.
You have a rough point, but a $20k delta is too much. Thankfully, the comparison is between a "special" car and a boring workhorse, so the price delta isn't reflective of the practical choices. 7-passenger PV5 looks to be about $50k, so less than $10k delta between a Sienna and a comparable EV van. Still a pretty big gap, especially to take up front, but closer to reasonable given your reasons. We are seeing the gap close more aggressively in the 5-passenger segment, but 3-row still has been focused on EV only for 'premium' experience.
People talk about that topic all the time.
The drive train generally doesn't need service. You don't have to change oil, you don't have to change transmission fluid, your transmission probably won't grind itself into metallic dust because the transmission is a single speed and it's certainly not a CVT. You don't have a timing belt to change, or a serpentine belt to change, or an air filter to change. You don't have to sweat an emissions problem, you don't have to worry about error codes about running too rich or too lean. You don't have to worry about your headgasket leaking. You don't have a bay of stuff heated to around water's boiling point for extended durations accelerating wear on various hoses. You aren't going to have a belt tensioner go south, the DC/DC converter is less likely to lose it than an alternator. You won't need to replace spark plugs, you aren't going to have a turbo that screws you over.
Instead of all of that, you have a pretty bullet proof drive train except that the battery will chemically wear, but even that seems to be not as bad as believed with battery management systems babying the batteries. The car almost certainly weighs too much, which will manifest in handling and tire wear.
And of course, there's gas v. electric. If (and sadly only if) you charge at home, an EV in my area is roughly like having a hybrid and $1.00/gallon gas. If you charge publicly... yeah that's priced really high.
So at one point, there will likely be a huge single expense for the battery. However, that is instead of frequent oil and air filter changes, occasional belt replacement, and a host of likely repairs that a gas car generally incurs over that sime time. One very big expense at once instead of tons of little expenses and a few big expenses.
If the initial cost of the vehicle were competitive, hands down the EV is going to be the right choice if you can charge at home. Trickier question in an apartment or renter's scenario.
It's also because of the scrapers.
Without javascript, you can't realistically do the "prove you are human bits", which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a 'No-JS' challenge, but it's super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even 'proof of work', but increasingly the proof of work isn't considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
The paradox of a good company and product.
Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?
Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.
Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.
The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro's need replacement, then they won't have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can't compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.
The USA has great data infrastructure and comparitively cheap power compared to anywhere else that has a vaguely credible grid.
Staff barely matters, the handful of folks they need is a rounding error in the scheme of things.
Real estate in rural America is pretty cheap too. Since they don't care about proximity to anything day to day, they just need to make sure there's credible access to power, data, and water.
Meanwhile, they have a government that varies through different degrees of support and pretty much never wavering toward the side of making life difficult so long as they stay at home, but will make things more complicated.
If they did build somewhere that was cheaper, it would be unreliable for their customer base due to network connectivity, and they'd probably have a problem keeping their datacenter suitably powered, and some the US would get pissy about exporting that much compute.
My car does this based on which keyfob is in the driver seat.
Various things like the seat position, radio presets, the color of the ambient lighting, some various driver mode settings.
I mean, it's weird terminology and to my knowledge doesn't imply anything about logging into any 'online' profile, just changing to another person's settings. Adding a profile just requested some label, no email address or anything. Just something to associate with the keyfob.
It also has a driver facing camera, but it doesn't use that for detecting which driver is there.
Sadly, the strategy tends to work. Just like slop and clickbait by any sane world should not be rewarded, it rakes it in for the people who do it.
Because in this scenario, taxpayer money has been tied into the "winners" already. So that company eager to take his place? Well, that's bad news because the taxpayer fund already picked his company to be the right answer. So we want to prop up Altman and discourage that upstart that might disrupt this theoretical fund.
Same reason why OpenAI was pushing for regulation that they get to shape. Easy for OpenAI to navigate, hard for newcomers to get going.
They would be happy to have a 'low volume, high value economy'. Only trinkets for them to trade among themselves at relatively high price, while they have no use for and therefore no interest in the bulk of the population. There is a reason they are very keen on surveillance and "law enforcement" because they think that might keep the rabble away from them cheaper than trying to appease the rabble.