The Ridgeline is a bit too big for the “small truck” people. It seems like the Platonic ideal for the small truck people is a regular cab ‘94 Toyota Pickup or a pre-2011 regular cab Ford Ranger, depending on where your loyalties lie.

Any of the no-frills cars sold in the US for under $20k aren’t built here, so the chicken tax makes that a non-starter.

I think a big problem is that for the majority of the public, before they pony up the cash for the second most expensive thing they will ever buy, they need to know that it works for 100% of their use cases, and not 90% plus a rental for the 10% of the time it doesn’t work.

Both of those are expired as of 2019. Same for Bradley’s Leaf.

Some local Nissan and Honda dealerships may be able to service Infiniti and Acura cars, and in some cases even do warranty work on them.

We will see how many people actually prefer a friendly CUV now that the angry Bronco Sport is coming. Didn’t the Compass/Patriot show that the rest of the world preferred a more rounded CUV whereas Americans wanted the angry angular one?

The service side of our regular dealership has been wonderful, but the sales side likes to dick around with ADM and useless junk like that. On the other hand, the local dealer that seems to be good on the sales side has horrible service...

Been on both sides of it. It makes sense in a really weird accounting way if special projects come off a different line on the ledger than labor costs. It also makes sense if regulations mean you can’t hire career staffers at prevailing wages but you can contract out. There is of course an entire school of thought…

You’d be real surprised (or maybe not) about all those companies out there that don’t document core processes until the person who has the institutional knowledge resigns/retires/quits and takes the entire team with them to form a contracting company billing at 4x the rate doing the same job...

In states that issue driver’s licenses to undocumented drivers, that little Real ID star becomes in essence “papers” for Asian/Latino drivers. If anything, that will drive take-up of Real ID, not the need for domestic air travel.

Don’t forget the push to document core processes, so that career staffers are milked for the documentation and pushed out.

It’s not really a wasted $10M; it’s a taxpayer funded social psychological experiment that says if given a choice between the use of a gasser and electric where the user isn’t paying for either acquisition or operating costs, it’s a gasser every time.

Truckloads. Plural: more than one. Assuming you’re talking about a full-sized car carrier, a truckload would be generously 10 Honda es. Twenty sounds about how many they’d sell in the US.

At the time, VW is like one plant and one product. That’s like someone passing up getting Tesla for free in 2009 with the Roadster and the Fremont plant.

You would think that, but the problem with making your legislators a revolving cast is that the lobbyists are the people who retain the institutional knowledge and power.

Good to know other bike manufacturers have 6kw on board! Our PHEV only has a 3kw charger so I was under the impression that the 6kw was prohibitively large on a motorbike. The failure of them to even include a 3kw is definitely on H-D, then.

I see the point of limiting the AC charging circuit to 1.5kw as having a 6 or 12kw AC circuit in addition to the DCFC, esp when weight-limited on a bike, but having some level 2 capability would mean the ability to top off to make it to the next DCFC.

Don’t buy a brand new $60,000 car with a freshly minted PharmD unless you’re independently wealthy. You could be receiving calls from the DEA relatively soon.

China loves them and they need an American presence to retain legitimacy as an American brand. Sure Buick may become a stub brand selling curvier iterations of GMC SUVs but that channel needs to remain open.

That’s an argument for dealerships to be essential, not manufacturers. In Tesla world that would be keeping their mobile service fleet operating but not the plant.