“it’s the fact she said these things with a fucking baby in the front seat with her. Good God”

DRM won’t stop a company from replacing modules in a pack that need replacing.

“ How much of that 30K bill do you honestly think is dealer markup”

Putting a small block into a car that came with a small block isn’t an engine swap, it’s playing with LEGO.

To be honest, automakers should feel pretty lucky that they are only being asked to clean up their act now.  They aren’t being asked to pay for the decades of carbon their products have spewed into the atmosphere.

Did you seriously copy-paste a Google “people also ask”? I linked you to actual users reporting actual costs.

1st Gear – I’m not the only one saying this here, but when you’re pricing EVs at $70-125K, you run out of First Mover sales in a hurry. There are valid financial reasons why the Chevy Bolt and Tesla Model 3 sold a lot better than Hummers and Tesla Model S. Hit price points regular car buyers can afford and you’ll sell…

But Tesla DID lose a lot of money in the beginning - something BODs and shareholders are okay with for a startup, not so much a 100 year old company.

No one said anything about standardization across manufacturers, just that aftermarket supplier will make generic replacements.

All the Big 3 had to do to avoid losing money on BEVs is simply follow the Tesla playbook... start with something high end, high margin, low volume... something like a high end Cadillac or Lincoln model or two. Then with the experience gained there, figure out ways to take the cost out of the design as well as…

I can understand why automakers are worried about their endgame ( profits ) while the EV transition is happening. I get it, it’s going to cost them money. And it won’t be easy.

That said, they should have started that transition decades ago. But they did not. They kept churning the same ICE engines year after year,…

“ it appears as though dealers across the nation are slapping i3 owners with huge repair bills.”

Terrible take. The retail cost of a dealership installing batteries has almost no bearing on the actual cost of replacing a battery now, which is completely disconnected from what the world will look like in 15-20 years.

The market will provide them as demand comes. I can get a bunch of different brand laptop batteries for my 8 year old MacBook. Same idea.

This is the fear-mongering garbage that all of the anti-EV dummies reference every time the idea of battery wear comes up. You end up with a bunch of razor-sharp takes like this:

San Francisco is pretty bad - the police don’t enforce anything and everyone knows it. People breeze through red lights and stop signs all the time.

This is silly. You could make an argument that everything on the planet is killing the environment. The idea is to harm it less and over time as little as possible. Basically what you are saying is, “All Cars Are Bad”. We know that Trains are much better for the environment.

In order to be a longer wearing tire, it’ll have to be made with a harder tire compound, right? Then you’ll have the owner doing a 180 and then bitching about the EV suffering a harsh ride—it’s lose, lose.

It’s sort of funny that we couldn’t help ourselves with the performance possibilities of EVs so we just HAD to make every one of them accelerate like a Lambo.

The EQS starts in the low $100k range so my sympathy is lean for Mr. Semel.