Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe has entered the chat.

This is a good idea. How about making pillars thinner, hoods lower, windows bigger, etc. to give the driver a chance to see others - especially pedestrians and cyclists. Sure they help in rollovers, but at what cost?

This just in: Chevy updates the 2025 Silverado to make driving enjoyable again and pickups usable again:

Once you are behind the wheel, how bad are the blind spots? Forward visibility looks especially awful.

Looks at the thin pillars. The low beltline. The stellar outward visibility.

3rd: Mercedes

That’s true. Is outward visibility a lost cause? It seems like accident avoidance should be as big as a priority as minimizing the consequences of an accident. Both are important methinks.

This is a great step, but why do I get the feeling that instead of looking at improving outward visibility and adding helpful accident avoidance tech, we will just get the tech?

Yup, and the swappable battery model which is so wildly popular in Taiwan is about to enter the Indian market. Perfect for the two and three-wheeled vehicles so popular there.

Sounds like a plug-in hybrid would be a great solution for customers worried about that sort of thing. Heck, RAM is going to do a PHEV version of its upcoming BEV pickup.

Yup. Our 2o22 Highlander was designed by multiple committees who hated each other. It really shows on both the exterior and interior.

Yeah, we off-road our Highlander Hybrid, including water fording. Probably are an outlier on the customer spectrum.

Yeah, tried that. To quote Princess Bride, “I don’t think that word means what you (Toyota) thinks it means.”

It’s nuanced but it’s a combination of not having much natural resources that can generate electricity, deep experience and history in relying on engineering solutions to a problem, the human reluctance to change, and government-industry “partnerships”, etc.

I’ll bite. What does this mean?

Also the gain of hybridizing the Corolla is much lower than the gain with hybridizing the Taco or Tundra or 4Runner.

Hey Toyota,

Exactly. Toyota says PHEVs are part of the solution and then... builds just a few of them. Talk is cheap.

This. Talk is easy. Toyota says they are into PHEVs. Show us. So far, it’s really difficult to get a RAV4 Prime. Where’s the 4Runner Prime? Grand Highlander Prime? Tundra Prime? Sequoia Prime?

We have one - an AWD hybrid three row crossover. Yes it gets good gas mileage and the AWD system is surprisingly good. The downside is that it is a “weak” hybrid tuned for fuel economy and is miserable to drive. If it had a strong electric motor for most “punch it” type of situation and 40 miles of all-electric range,…