I’m a professional mechanic who fixes a lot of old RVs for a living, and you’re not wrong, but the age of these tires means the few that are left are most likely on large class A RVs that haven’t seen the roads in a decade or more, but haven’t been scrapped yet (the newest of these recalled tires is about 20 years…

I don’t know what the law is in your state, but here in California you can drive any 2 axle vehicle with a GVRW of 26,000 lbs or less or any housecar under 40 feet long with a basic class C auto license, according to the California DMV website I just looked up. My customer has a 1962 GM ex-Trailways diesel pusher bus…

I do remote, onsite RV work and re-animate old stuff that has been sitting. Lots of 1980s and 1990s Class A and class C rigs.

There are none of these tires left out on the roads, and Goodyear knows it. At this point, there may be a few moldering away on RVs that have been sitting in yards, driveways and fields for a…

Nah, all these prices were before the recall - IIRC dealers had a stop-sale order for some months during that time - I’m not sure of the exact dates - they weren’t allowed to sell the new Bolts they had on the lot and production was suspended.

The thing is, in this market shopping around and being willing to travel…

Yup. I needed two credit cards to fill up my ‘05 diesel ram 3/4 ton that year - 34 gallon tank. I remember a few fillups in Los Angeles that was over $150. Now, the same 30 gallon fill here would cost me over $210 locally.

Which is why my truck has been parked for most of the last year and a half and I’m driving our…

Yeah, eventually that may be a problem. But for now, even in the city with (I’d guess) the highest percentage of registered EVs in the country it doesn’t seem like an actual problem yet, or anywhere close to becoming one.

I think it’s just as important to figure out at the same time how to lower the cost of use of…

FWIW - I live in San Francisco and have daily’d a non-tesla EV for three years now around the Bay area. We have a ton of EVs on the roads here, and the only public chargers I see that are regularly in use are the free ones around various malls. The vast majority of public pay chargers I see are empty, maybe 1 charger…

I’m comparing Tesla’s actual price to the Bolt’s actual price. If anything, the Tesla is even more expensive now as Musk raises the prices multiple times in less than a year.

We bought ours for $28k, my friend got his for $26k, Costco leased them last year for $107/month with $107 down.

You’re shopping at the wrong…

There’s a huge difference between towing close to max once or twice a year for a weekend, and towing close to max every week, especially in the mountains or with severe winds.

On any EV, running the heated seats/heated steering wheel takes almost no power, while running the cabin heat can dent your range by ~15%, which is even more significant as outside temperature drops, since that dents your range too.

We bought ours new in 2019 for $28k. With the new battery pack we have 275 miles of actual range, which equals the base Model 3 - which costs $48k for a base model. 0-60 on the Bolt is a bit slower (6.5 sec vs. 5.8 sec), and the Bolt also has CarPlay, Android Auto and available Sirius XM, none of which are available…

The good news for used Bolt buyers is, every Bolt from 2017-2020 gets the new improved battery pack with the longer 259 mile range and a fresh 8 year, 100,000 mile battery warranty. And pre-pandemic, used Bolts were cheap, like $10k to $15k for a two to three year old car with 60k on it or less.

Since the new pricing…

All 1400,000 2017-2020 Bolt and Bolt EUVs went back to get the new, updated battery pack, including ours.

There were some buybacks , upon customer request, but it wasn’t a very high percentage of that 140k units in total.

3 kids and a Rivian pickup?

Welp, there’s something you don’t see every day

Yep. When dealers are using expensive, premium new cars as loaners, you can reasonably guess that those cars are either sales lot poison, nailed to the showroom floor or the manufacturer is directly subsidizing loaner use through a corporate program, or both.

Okay, good for you, I guess? Score 1 (one) sale for VW, at 5 grand off MSRP. So what?

VW sold 2,449 Arteons in 2019. That makes it a resounding sales failure, even compared to, say, the 2019 Buick Regal/TourX that sold 10,313 units that year. And that year you could get a loaded 2.0T AWD Regal 4 door sportback, or…

300hp and AWD is not the car they’ve been selling here for the last 3 to 4 years, since it’s US market debut with the 2019 model year.

That car has been a 268hp/258 lb-ft 2.0T and FWD for a starting price of $37k up to $47K for the top AWD trim... with the same 268hp 2.0T.

VW says the Arteon is competing with the…

Not surprising, considering how much of a sales failure they have been.

This is kind of a central question. Ex dealer service manager here - considering that Arteon has a years long record of low and declining sales in the US, I’d think most dealers don’t want to stock more than VW America forces them to. Dealers don’t want to pay to stock cars that don’t sell, especially expensive ones…