“Abandoned”?
That’s hilarious. The last car rolled off the assembly line in April of 2010 and Tesla bought the plant the next month for $42 million. You have a strange definition of that word.

Net or gross? If you watched the actual video, he says net first and corrects himself to gross. Because seriously, how would he know the confidential figures required to correctly calculate net?
And which model 3 is he talking about? I’m pretty sure it’s not the $35,000 base model that hadn’t had any deliveries when…

Not a lot. And I would own the bike anyway, regardless of whether I used it for commuting, which is why I’m not including the cost of the bike, registration, insurance. Also bear in mind that sane commuters will be on the train for December - February.
But that’s a totally reasonable question, so here’s the…

Yup. - I would own the bike and have insurance on it regardless of whether I commuted on it. I’m looking specifically at commuting costs, which are impacted by the congestion charge.

And the Saturn manufacturing plant was ~4.3 million square feet in ‘97 when around 3,000 workers built 315,000 cars. Tesla’s plant is around 25% larger, at 5.3 million square feet, with triple the number of employees to do 350k cars.

Hi - actual former commuter here. I rode my motorcycle (all year round) from NJ to Manhattan to work for several years in 2007-2009. Holland Tunnel. Parking cost me nothing but the very occasional ticket. The toll at that time was $6-8, which works out to $2,080 per year out of pocket in 2008 tolls. That motorcycle…

So? They’re still very labor inefficient, even when comparing manufacturing plant to manufacturing plant. When I was at Saturn’s Spring Hill plant in 1997 they built 315,000 cars with about 3,000 employees, and they were a fully vertically integrated manufacturing plant that built major and minor components like…

Tesla haven’t come close to the volume of cars the Fremont plant built when NUMMI owned it - around 450,000 cars/year. Last year’s record production was about 350,000. Fremont was capable of doing 500,000 cars/year under GM/Toyota.

Because you’re one guy, not an enormous $140 billion multinational car company with 200,000 employees and 22 brands and joint ventures manufacturing 10 million vehicles annually in 37 countries? GM is a global behemoth with inertia to match and Cadillac sales are a blip; Cadillac division also has a long history of…

I don’t know what to tell you, man. I spent a month and a half in Australia (including Tasmania, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney) and New Zealand last year and everyone was nice. Neither Perth nor the Gold Coast were my favorites but everything else was pretty great. The only place I saw groups of Australians acting badly…

Ah, the Gold Coast - the Jersey Shore of Australia ;)

More like ~18 years for Mercedes and BMW, even considering the mid 90s when they regained their leads for a few years. Not quick by any means.
They have definitely upped their game since 2010, while Lexus has had their own issues during that time.

So does everyone else, though. Look at the 2 liter four cylinders from, well, everyone. GM, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Toyota, Hyundai, Jeep, etc. There’s a bunch of 3.0L six cylinders and a Ford 1.5L 3 cyl too.

That’s true, but a lot of that was a missed bet on sedans remaining relevant. I drive a ‘12 CTS-V on the regular, and it was pretty amazing performer when it was new. Still is. The Escalade was a huge hit then and a profitmaking juggernaut and the CTS drove and handled better than any sedan GM had made thus far, and…

IMHO DeNysschen was wrong to hold Cadillac prices as high as the german competition, especially when the bottom was falling out of the market for sedans, which made up nearly their whole lineup at the time. They have to sell at least partly on value until they get competitive SUVs across the lineup. And they need to…

BMW and Mercedes “learned quick” against Lexus how? Lexus held the US premium brand sales crown for 11 straight year, and sales beat Mercedes through the first half of the 1990s and 2001-2010 inclusive. That’s the better part of 21 years to put themselves back on top. And Mercedes depends mightily on Sprinter van…

1992-1995 civics were the same size. And the 1993 Del Sol was on a civic platform, was all of 3“ shorter than a same year Civic hatch. Try again.

Yes, thank you for reinforcing my point.

Yes, that’s the point of the article. Compare dimensions to dimensions over time, not model name to model name.

The Del Sol was 7" shorter than a same-year Civic hatchback but not much lighter since it was based on the Civic.