I don’t think it’s a brilliant design at all. It seems to have been designed by someone with no knowledge of how trucks are used as tools. It’s not function over aesthetics; it’s all aesthetics, based on the limits of trying to bend 3 mm. stainless steel. The body panels were formed on a brake instead of an English…

With no engine in front, it could have been more cab forward. As it is, the box is too short to be useful, and who is supposed to sit in back, midgets? It's a truck made for a sci-fi movie, not real life.

Not in the Twin Cities metro where travel is isotropic and most cars are going from one suburb to another and not downtown. The other morning I was going north on I-35E from south suburb to northern Minnesota. There were more cars heading away from downtown St. Paul than into it.

FCA in America is a truck company. PSA in Europe is a small car and van company. The two need each other. Since Sergio died, FCA has been boring. Does the world really need another Hellcat? 

Before wholesale conversion is made, batteries need to become solid state. Liquid lithium ion batteries are notoriously flammable.

I’ve never bought a new car in my life, and, at the age of 70, I don’t intend to start now. I pay cash for used cars, especially the ones Consumer Reports hates and have high depreciation, so you get a reliable car for a song. Here’s the secret: they’re mostly Mopar minivans with the 3.3 liter. You can get them for…

The problem is isotropy. Public transport is linear and scheduled, but people go in all different directions to work, school, shopping, etc. Car travel is isotropic and schedule free. In 1950, half of Minneapolis jobs and retail were downtown. The city was served by a hub and spoke trolley system, but by 1954 it was…

A real 6x6, like a Russian Kamaz, will go almost anywhere. They're the work horses of Siberia. 

Last year I was towing an overloaded U-haul trailer with my stuffed full Dakota quad cab which only has the 3.7 liter V-6 and 6-speed manual. For about 50 miles I was drafted by a Tesla. Even on steeper hills when I was down to 40 mph, the Tesla stuck to my tail. Perfect example of a hot car with range anxiety.

Seating for four doesn’t cut it. My much-maligned Dodge Journey is AWD, has seating for seven, and a fold flat floor from back to passenger front seat. My old Caravans, however, can haul a lot more, have been off-road more often than most SUVs will ever go and can be bought used for a song. Thank you to everyone who…

In 1950, half of Minneapolis’ jobs and retail were downtown, which was served by a hub and spoke trolley system. By 1954, the trolleys were gone. In 1956 the first indoor mall, Southdale, was built in the suburb of Edina. Today, only 3% of the Twin Cities metro’s business is downtown. Jobs and retail have become…

The modal use (most common) is for a private vehicle to go from point A to point B and then back to point A in a daily commute. That’s quite efficient. It goes the minimum distance and while parked does not use energy. The size of a transportation fleet is dependent on peak load, not average load, so a fleet of shared …

Artificial Intelligence does well in situations with rigid rules, such as math and chess. It doesn’t deal well with uncertainty, such as jaywalking pedestrians coming out from between cars or deer at the side of the road looking like a tree stumps until they suddenly bolt in front of you. AI doesn’t have heuristics…

Millions of people don’t buy unreliable scrapheaps, and companies don’t make profits if they’re perceived as producing scrapheaps. The market is brutal. FCA increased sales and produced profits under Marchionne’s direction.

Human bodies were made for travel. We have a very effective cooling system, thus Tarahumara Indians could chase down deer on foot until the deer collapsed of heat prostration. The Zahavi-Marchetti Constant informs us that throughout history, humans have been willing to budget one and a half hours per day to travel. At…

Sergio did the most with the limited resources he had. Daimler had drained Chrysler of capital leaving it unable to deal with the 2008 financial crash. He was a finance guy who kept his eye on the bottom line, and thus was able to pay off high interest loans ahead of schedule. He was not afraid to dump FCA’s sedans…

In the world of personal transportation, the new Vette is really quite irrelevant. It breaks no new ground. It’s a car for wealthy enthusiasts, which is a miniscule market. It doesn’t point the way to the future of transportation. It’s a toy. A nice toy, but still a toy.

Exactly. It’s a work vehicle so use it as a tool not a toy. I think a reason these may be popular for food trucks is their low floor height, meaning the vendor doesn’t have to bend over so far to serve customers.

There was a guy in Crane Lake, MN who built something like this 20 years ago. He wanted to go into production, but couldn’t get it together, although it was used for several rescues in the bush. It used skid steer steering, had wheels that could be run flat or filled with water and used as storage tanks for fire…

Developing an autopilot system for automobiles is several orders of magnitude more difficult than for airplanes, which have fewer variables and more space to operate in. The assumption that autonomous vehicles will be safer than human drivers is not based on actuarial data but faith in technology. There have not been…