I touched it, and both rocker panels immediately disintegrated.

I’m now banned from Vietnam. 

Wow, Game of Thrones and Let it Go!

Beleive it or not a lot of people really liked these cars when they were new. They could be had with an inline six whose starter had more power, or a slightly more potent V8 inhaling through a drinking straw.

Nothing will kill the SUV in the US, people love them too much. 

Counter counterpoint: this is stage 4. No mention of range, and a completely irrational "manly man truck does man things" commercial with a deep voiced narrator is coming. The brand name, ridiculous specs, and bro truck image will sell this vehicle. It's definitely stage 4. 

Two cars in different segments with different purposes that will cost different amounts will sell in different numbers? Do tell.

But still will look better than a Cybertruck. Bet me.

Counterpoint - we’re still very much in “Stage 3". GM just throws out a couple big numbers to get the blogs all hard, and we get articles like this. People still care very much for EV-centric stats like range and battery size.

Ehhhh the contracts with Ford alone will keep Rivian alive one way or another. They’ve already been confirmed to produce the first EV Lincoln platform. They’ve been working with Ford on the F150 electric....They’re pretty solid.

I would argue that the Type 3, though less modern, was still a better car than the Excel... certainly alot less disappointing :)

I’m not anti-Amazon at all, but their purchase of Whole Foods has been something of a disaster from a customer standpoint. I went from being a semi-regular shopper to three or four times per year. Even without “disappearing suppliers” the stocking of many shelves (particularly produce) has been terrible since Amazon.…

People ruin everything. Something new pops up, is really awesome, gains traction with the casuals, still really fun, then eventually gets overwhelmed by the general population and jackasses start showing up and acting out. Goes for bars, music festivals, car shows, racing series, pickup sports, you name it.

To me this doesn’t feel like the “Cars and Coffee” I used to go to 10 or even 5 years ago. This is no longer a casual and quiet get-together of car lovers to check out each others’ rides while having coffee early in the morning on a Saturday. Over the past years, like you wrote, it has morphed into a massive social…

Dunno how well this would work for aggressive riding (street or MTB) since the contact patch is almost flat here. No way to get the tire on edge —> no way to ride anything without big ole berms.

Tubeless has essentially solved most of these problems. Also, you don’t want a tire to act as suspension. You want it for traction. You can adjust air pressures to get the best traction for the riding conditions and allow your real suspension with compression and rebound adjustments to handle the actual suspension…

Don’t air-filled tires already give your bike free additional suspension?

IDK about the Bridgestones, but I’ve been reading about Tweels for a while now. During the testing on cars, the lateral rigidity was very good. These things can corner very well.

I don’t think that tweels would have any more compression/travel capability than pneumatic tires. However, they might have more lateral stiffness because a ruler-like support would bend easily vertically, but be very stiff horizontally. However, this might allow for higher profile tires, which could add suspension…

Bicycle wheels rely on spokes for much of the give in the ride. My road bike has sub-25mm tires at 100psi. They don’t give much at all. The wheel as a whole does the job, not just the tires.

No more so than VW air-cooled engines, which cockroaches will be fixing 20 million years from now. A Corvair-fan friend once told me that if he needed someone to work on it, he’d take it to a VW mechanic and tell them “Just treat it like a VW with two extra cylinders”...and invariably, the mechanic would be completely …