I so wanted the smart cars connected together to form a giant ferris wheel thingy.

A truck this size can easily have over 10kg of paint alone, within the same order of magnitude of your 17kg estimate. Don’t get me wrong, I think a stainless truck is dumb, but I don’t think the fact that a car with something like 2500lbs+ of batteries is going to be overweight solely because of stainless body panels.

Completion in 2026 or 2027? They sound optimistic. I would have guessed sometime between 2036 and 2047.

Exactly, I don’t get OP’s complaint. If Ford is really that much cheaper, Ford could have bid and won the contract. Hell, if Ford really is substantially cheaper like OP makes it sound, OP could have middle-manned it like tons of government contracts and personally raked in the cash like a true government contractor.

To be fair, the other two trucks Ford makes that don’t use the F series cab  aren’t aluminum. But yeah, Ford solved the rusty body problem on their volume seller better than any other truck on the market right now.

Yeah, you can’t really take much of anything from the 15mpg if it includes off roading. My 3rd gen Tacoma would normally average a measly 16mpg doing DD duties, but when I would go off roading it would drop below half that. This engine gets somewhat decent EPA numbers in the much larger Silverado (18/21/19 for a 4x4)…

It’s not actually that big a difference in total cost in NY though. I don’t even think it’s 1:1 meaning if your have a car 2x as heavy, you don’t even pay 2x the registration fee. Considering road wear increases by the fourth power (x^4) and the other problems heavy vehicles cause like generally more pollution, more…

I, too, wish for a return of Audi’s less aggressive styling.

That’s the last gen Tahoe. The new one has a good amount more room now that it has an IRS.

Yup. Repealing the Jones act would just lead to foreign ships making these routes that use a flag of convivence so they can treat their employees horribly while paying almost nothing. Is that really a win? I mean, there are probably really good ways to improve the Jones act (maybe softening the US built ship…

Parts of the Jones act are actually good though, such as requiring the ship be US flagged (so it has to comply with US labor laws and safety requirements). Pay and conditions on many of these large oceangoing ships is notoriously bad when the ship is using a flag of convenience; we shouldn’t stoop to that level. The…

IDK, but I can’t help but think that new powertrain is a total downgrade. 

Your trope is like 15 years out of date.

It’s already happening.

For example, does every modern Land Rover Discovery deserve the stigma of the LR3 years or further back?

What? The MDX is a very good SUV, that is for the most part, quite a bit cheaper than similar SUVs. Sure, personally I’d rather have a X5, Q7, XC90, etc, but are they really worth the 10-20% premium the command? And if you want to keep the car beyond it’s warranty, the Acura looks even better. If you’re shopping 100% o…

You’ve misunderstood what was happening. Manufacturers were limiting 3rd party buy outs, they could not limit the leasee from buying out their own lease however. Basically, this stopped a leasee from taking their vehicle on over to a 3rd party to directly trade in - instead, that leasee would have had to buy out the…

The stock is performing worse in terms of how much it declined. However, that has almost no relation to how well Rivian as a company is actually performing relative to the others though. The sell-off could 100% be related to IPO mispricing, past expectations being way too lofty around vs now causing investors to…

My mother-in-law had one of these. It was this weird reliable but not at all reliable car. Everything was broken yet somehow worked. It was functional crap. Top got stuck? Pull/push it aggressively and hear it make really bad sounds, but then it will work again. Moldy smell because it leaked? You bet. Half of the trim…

The worlds fastest man can’t improve his 100M time as much as the average Joe either. Of course more established manufacturers can’t grow similar amounts to Tesla.