Unions in the US appear to be in such a bad shape that “buy union” basically means “buy German”

I assume he means giving a shit about worker’s rights, although if you are serious about that, any american-built car is instantly out of the running. If you want a US-market car by workers with a proper union, the choice is limited to cars built in Germany.

Of course the stock price is the only thing that matters. Companies like Boeing proved fairly convincingly that there is no better indicator for the companies’ health

Training seems to be the main issue. In Germany, initial training is three years, and officers have to regularly(3-4x/year) take weapons test. Handling drunk or mentally ill people is also practiced at the academy with actors before anyone is let on the streets, and so are traffic stops. German police kill about 12…

But it also means that Mercedes doesn’t anticipate its drivers fighting each other.

Whether the race will be terrible depends entirely on qualifying and the first half lap. If one Mercedes gets away well, it’s done. But if someone gets a car with less drag on the second or third row and manages to get the lead on the run to turn one, Mercedes could be in trouble

Considering how much Bosch tech is used in that powertrain(Bosch refers to Nikola as a customer), i fail to see what Nikola is doing there apart from paying. If there was money to be made by mass-producing these things, CNH could easily do it on their own ticket. If they became profitable, CNH will probably just dump…

In that project, Nikola isn’t doing nearly as much development as they would like you to believe. Don’t be surprised if CNH and Bosch throw them under the bus when it comes to actually selling trucks and they don’t need that sweet VC cash anymore.

Look at that 2015 content

To me, the front looks like a chinese knock-off MC12

That kind of misalignment would have me walking away from any used car that had it. It just screams poorly repaired collision damage.

That looks like something we would have done in FSAE when something broke in testing, and we needed something to get the car through the rest of the day. But it wouldn’t have survived until the next testday.

Registration papers:

I’m very curious about what Tesla is planning to do in Germany. The workers have a right to form worker councils and unionize, and if Tesla tries to stop it like everywhere else, they are going to spend a lot of time in court.

Also, the Teslas are only fast a quarter mile at a time. In Germany, they are registered with 100-250kw less than peak power because they can’t run higher power for long times, making them underpowered for trackday use.

Speeding-related accidents happen because people violate traffic laws and the laws of physics. There are not going to be less accidents if you give people one less set of laws to ignore.

I don’t think shrinkage would be a major issue. For mass production castings, manufacturers spend millions on simulation and testing before they commission the production tools, so the shrinkage and tolerance issues would be covered in the design phase. The bigger issue would be finding a casting alloy with properties…

I’d be very interested in what they are planning to cast instead of the usual manufacturing. For mass-production casting, the chance of bad pieces is almost zero, as manufacturers will do endless iterations of simulations and test castings before they commission the production tools, I’d expect Tesla to do that.

The problem with that setup is that it would have been impossible to run 1-2, they would have been running 1----2.

Hamilton was also affected, you could see him driving out of the slipstream and backing off instead of overtaking several times, we didn’t get to see Hamilton against McLarens or Renaults, so we don’t know if his car was equally vulnerable as Bottas’. Mercedes obviously reduced cooling so much that they couldn’t run…