Don’t underestimate the nouveau riche rednecks. Those guys don’t mind getting dirty, and buy very expensive toys.

If you go offroad, in your “classic” jeep, at some point, you’ll need to lean out and get a good view of where you are placing your tire.

While a good power inverter is critical to a EV, and designing a good power inverter is no simple task, it’s a technology that, if not exactly mature, than at least very widespread. For this reason, I have serious trouble believing their claims that their model represents some kind of incredible improvement over what…

When you are rich enough to afford this car, you can pay other people to get hit in the head for you.

I wonder what they mean by “design” in this case. 800hrs is 2 full time weeks for a team of 10 people. Which on the one hand is more than enough time to produce renderings of what it looks like, but on the other nowhere near enough to make it production ready. Is it enough time to sort out all the packaging/component…

That request will soon be as easy to accomodate as trying to find a car with a manual transmission, if that isn’t the case already.

I’m sure there will be plenty of people who wont buy another VW after DG. They might be “wrong”, but VW is still not getting their money.

“What to do if you find yourself with a soon to explode Chrysler with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be…

Perhaps you should be a tad clearer as to what you were talking about. Maybe you can draw me a picture.

This isn’t a court of law. I don’t need to prove that a car isn’t great to not buy it. I can choose not to buy it for perfectly false reasons. Many consumers do. Calling them idiots isn’t usually the path to profitability.

The big question on my mind at least, is what happens after the crash? Can I reset the system myself, or do I need to tow it to a dealer? Can I still make some use of a vehicle when some of it’s system aren’t functioning? In other words, how fault tolerant is this whole setup.

So if you buy a car from company X, that turns out to be an unreliable, expensive, heap of crap, it is illogical to refuse to buy another car from the same manufacturer?

I’m less worried about a car not knowing and adress, than I am about it sitting frozen for hours trying to calculate the best route. Do you really think every manufacturer will build systems that will never glitch?

Once a few manufacturers started putting in infotainment systems, vehicles that didn’t have them started looking obsolete to consumers. When selecting a vehicle to buy, people put a very high premium on having a large screen in the dash, even if it will be the source of their frustrations.

If the same people aren’t in charge of developing the system, than the same people are in charge of selecting who is developing those systems. Or perhaps the same people are in charge of selecting the people who will do the selecting. Either way, you go up high enough, you’ll find the same people. Responcibility is…

So newer vehicle, built to higher crash standards, are safer than older vehicles built to less demanding crash standards. One would hope that’s the case.

Indeed, the replacement is coming as soon as the robots are good enough to make good burgers consistently (news articles say they are, but I don’t know for myself).

To complicate things further, sometimes manufacturers move production off shore to be made by foreign robots.

That hasn’t been the case in my experience. Automation isn’t just cheaper, it’s also better, at least at doing those jobs that are suitable for automation. There is a great deal more consistency. Machines don’t have bad days when they don’t feel like working, they don’t try to sabotage production, or produce bad part…

Manufactuing in general, that is, the making of stuff, is doing just fine stateside. Manufacturing jobs are not, because we automate everything we can, so we don’t need the sort of workforce levels we did in the 60s.