The way this country actually operates? I’m not on the coasts, dude. I live in a pretty rural area, and people buy $35,000 cars and especially trucks and SUVs all the damn time. The median income is $56,000, and if you’re not paying out the nose for housing like in a big city, guess what—a $35,000 car can actually fit…

Whoops, you’re right, my mistake. It’s been a while since I took statistics. Always get those mixed up.

It is. I can’t see how that probability hasn’t already been foreclosed upon.

Never? The trend line seems obvious enough to me. Not 20 years ago, a Ford Ranger EV cost $52,000 (compared to the base 4-pot’s $11,000), it got MAYBE 60 miles of range, and took 13 seconds to get to fifty. Sixty came in “eventually.”

You’re a kind coworker. Friends don’t let friends buy into scams.

Is this the point where we can say “I told you so?” No? Is that in poor taste? Okay. I’ll just point and laugh instead.

I have a white ‘89-90 MT Eclipse, but you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. Happy hunting though! The unicorns still exist, they’re out there!

I’ve got one. Sadly the 1.8, so no tears to shed when I toss out the motor (though it did sound nice and rev happily... no fun at high speeds though) and bolt on an electric motor to the manual transmission for to make it a faster, stealthier version of the electric car.

My ‘89-90 Eclipse’s interior is immaculate... but it’s the 1.8. Thank God it’s the stick, at least, and not the slushbox. Even so, the engine’s getting tossed and an electric drivetrain’s getting bolted to that gearbox at the earliest opportunity.

DSM owners, I’ve found, are extremely intelligent, have discerning tastes, and possess an ineffable charm.

Don’t call my car’s styling dated! It’s held up a lot better than the Ford Tempo and Chrysler TC “by Maserati” on my block.

Aww yeah. I have a Mitsubishi Eclipse that’s a dead ringer for this. The engine is, uh, not exactly functioning at the moment, but it’s waiting on a new electric drivetrain scrounged from Tesla parts.

The average American household income is about $75,000. You don’t need to make $200,000 a year to be able to afford a $35,000 car. The average car is about $35,000, in fact, hence the pricing.

A $35,000 car isn’t middle class? And getting funding doesn’t mean you can break physics. They have a production plant to consider, and remember that a ton of their parts are vertically integrated, i.e. made by them. That’s more efficient, but that shit takes time to set up.

Don’t worry. Believe it or not, manual transmissions work better for electric car conversions than automatics. I plan on reviving my own late ‘80s stickshift DSM Eclipse that has a blown engine with a more powerful electric drivetrain. You literally bolt the motor to the manual transmission.

Electric cars of the next generation are likely to diversify now that the range problem is pretty much solved and the batteries are coming down in cost.

The hatch would have killed the rear headroom in a car 20% smaller than a Model S. That’s why they didn’t do it, according to Tesla.

The Tesla website literally reminds people of this on the Model 3 page.

Ugh, I know. It’s like they think their dumb electric car is the fastest-accelerating luxury car in the world or something.

To be fair, there ARE separate physical controls for those things. They’re a pair of configurable scroll-wheels on the steering wheel.