I’ve said before that Tesla’s biggest advantage was the Supercharger network, but since that’s been opened up to anyone, people who want an EV are no longer funneled to Tesla.

They all bet on cheap interest rates, they could lease 60K cars at 0%apr for 60 months or finance these cars at 1% for 96 months and folks were able to get away with these cars for a sub 500 monthly payment, and people were buying in bigly, what can go wrong !

The big thing that I take away from this is two things:

I wonder if anti-union people understand that the other side is always organized in some sort of “union”

Many Honda Civics that I’ve seen driven as a passenger in the last few years even includes cameras in the mirrors which display the video of said camera on the center screen when turn signals are activated.

Its on purpose. Do not want to impact sales of the F-150.

You hit the nail on the head.  In this day of irresponsibly and inexperiencedly-run tech companies, I could never in good faith base my investments on market cap values. Remember when VinFast had a market cap of $80B and now it’s at $6B which is still overvalued by at least $5.5B.

you are on point
1) quarterly numbers for stockholders
2) Execs get a golden parachute when they fail; and then they go to a different company.

Right. How do you explain the Korean and Japanese automakers continuing to produce small cars? Kia has 4 small cars for sale that start under $22k. The cheapest Hyundai is an Elantra for $22k. Entry level Japanese sedans/hatches start under $25k. They seem to be doing fine to me. The law has no blame for Ford’s lack…

There’s the Maverick starting $2,400 more than Trax if you can find one. I can hardly believe Ford still hasn’t figured out Maverick production.

And what does that have to do with government mandates? Honda sold 200,000 Civics alone in 2023. Were they exempted from these onerous government mandates?

When exactly did the government mandate the killing of small hatchbacks and sedans?

No, the manufacturers are run by shortsighted people who chase quarterly profits. The government didn’t have much at all to do with it.

The government didn’t mandate that Ford kill off all of its affordable offerings. Ford was simply following the cynical “build less, charge more” pricing model that a number of car manufacturers thought they could get away with in the wake of pandemic supply chain issues.

Seems like we went through this in the ‘90s. Sedans were ignored and left to wither on the vine; Explorers and Grand Cherokees and pickups got all the attention and money. Short attention span, these C-suite types have.

They all thought they could be Tesla on day 1.

The cheapest new Ford you can buy will set you back over $31,000 once fees are factored in, fully $10,000 more than a base Chevy Trax.

There’s tons of water ice out there in the cosmos to be had, for a lot less effort trying to get it out of a planet-sized gravity well.

But what if some of these things are actually visitors from other planets, or maybe the unexplored depths of our own oceans? What then, federal government, if we aren’t prepared for any eventuality, we could fall victim to our own hubris.

Aliens and UFOs is one of the most frustrating topics that rubes love to go on about, and it’s exhausting to try and explain how technologically advanced a civilization would need to be to traverse the cosmos.

IF such a civilization currently exists, we would either never see them coming or be immediately wiped out of…