Perhaps because the buyers for the full-sized, fully loaded luxury-esque trucks aren’t payment conscious, so that segment is less price elastic. They’re people who made really good money in the Covid era, and keep making really good money because they own real estate and other investments that have been doing very…

Agreed on trucks.

Musk exemplifies the mediocre white man failing upward, IMHO.

Thought experiment - what could happen if Tesla were rid of Musk tomorrow (say he sold all his shares to a bunch of institutional investors or donated them to a bunch of not-batshit-crazy charities as an endowment)? Say that group of investors cleaned house on the board (Elon loyalists out, hardnosed business people…

Agreed. Which is one or the reason Tesla is pretty much a non-starter for me. There’s so much future pain built into those - and it’s not nearly cheap enough to take that level of risk.

Realistically, an electric Ridgeline might be a better fit for the market.

Engines and transmissions aren’t all that light, so I think the weight advantage may not be all that huge.

Amen.

Yep, Chrysler has that tradition. Stellantis, however, is making some pretty big strides in Europe with mainstream, mass-market EVs, and they’re pretty clear-eyed about cost. So perhaps that’ll bail them out of the usual Chrysler myopia here down the road. 

From the front, it looks like the natural evolution of where you’d expect an Accord/Sonata/Camry type of midsize car to go. From the rear, oh my. But it’s not outrageous or horrible, and I think for that segment, it’ll grow on people (and maybe they’ll find a slightly subtler way to make it look like a clean liftback…

There are significant differences between dealers. Some of that seems to be dictated by brand (Subaru dealers in my region, the Pacific NW, generally seem to be easier to deal with - lots of up front pricing disclosure, I’ve never gotten a ‘you need to come in for that’ answer when inquiring about pricing and shopping…

We always talk about “Florida Man” this or “Most Florida thing of the week” that... This thing, right here, is probably the most Oregon thing you’ll find in the news for a while (but could easily have happened over here in Washington as well).

That is a rather smart take - that’s probably why none of the staff suggestions are anywhere close to this.

When the article on the K4 came out, I made a comment about how good that would look as a hatch or perhaps even wagon. Here it is - and damn, it looks good. Hopefully, they’ll make something like this (similar in size, hatch, aimed at mass market) as an EV soon. The EV6 is a bit too big and expensive to really drive…

Maybe the best-case scenario for automakers and consumers is that the growing attention leads more car companies to use stricter data privacy practices as a marketing tool, similar to how Apple differentiates itself from competitors, Hodgson said.

Plus there’s probably a nice severance package/golden parachute that was written into his employment contract.

Agreed, Citroën have a lot of bad history on reliability and such (my dad once left ours parked in a middle of our cul-de-sac back in the 70s, because he was convinced it was going to catch on fire...), but design (and ride comfort) have always been a strong suit. 

What that needs back there is a long roofline and a tailgate, like a Euro-style wagon, sort of like what Volvo does. The design does a pretty good job of having a little bit of character, and those hips back there are a good start - but would work better with a longroof. Of course, that might just be my bias, as I…

Which IMO is absolutely shameful and a serious dereliction of duty. For contrast - I grew up in Germany and did my (then mandatory) military service there. Despite Germany having much stronger consumer protections, the classroom curriculum in basic training included a pretty sizeable segment on basic lifeskills that…