Because people don’t want progress, they want a return to what they imagine as/pretend is “normal.”

Re: the first question: Isn’t there also the fact that because of production and shipping issues due to COVID-19, that there is a large reduction in available and future inventory? To use your same example: not only will they sell just 50 trucks instead of a 100, but they will only be able to obtain 50 trucks to sell…

Exactly. In a time period where no one is anywhere close to meeting quotas for manufacturer bonuses, you have to make as much as humanly possible on each unit you sell.

Serious dealers will go as deep as they can to beat the competition, but they can only go so deep if A) they have additional deaelr cash rebates to do so and/or B) they know by taking a loss on a car now they can make up for it later with unit bonuses.  The letter from reader 1 isn’t some anomoly I’ve spoken with…

They don’t. Dealers can sell below invoice because they aren’t actually paying invoice for the car. Of course what their actual costs are and what sort of profit they’ll accept varies, so just because they can sell below invoice in various circumstances doesn’t mean they are always going to rush to do so.

And then what happens? I’ll tell you: they have to pay off the sold car they borrowed on.

It means:

Toyota isn’t building new Tacomas right now. Supply has stopped. Demand is also down, but lack of supply trumps lower than usual demand in this case. The dealer is saying that they aren’t motivated to make their money through volume at the moment and they will wait for a buyer to come along that will pay more than…

Does someone really think that just because of COVID-19 dealers will lose money on a sale???

It completely blows my mind that people think car dealers should sell cars to them for less than what the dealer paid/pays.

We are not selling these below our invoice cost.

They think the lack of enthusiasm for Biden is actually a positive sign, because it proves he’s a Sober Realist, and that Bernie Sanders proved that having people enthusiastic about your candidacy means you can only lose.

Or repeatedly touching a young woman’s chest as she repeatedly tries to get away. Or grabbing a woman who’s trying to get away from you and holding her in place. Or stroking an uncomfortable woman’s neck. Or ... Or...

Yeah, all the "He would never touch a woman inappropriately, other than all the women we already know about him touching inappropriately." rings a little hollow.

I doubt it, moderates have continually shown themselves to be nothing if not consistently unimaginative.

The streets that would be shut down to passenger cars are not the ones where you see cars parked. Those are mostly residential and less crowded. The streets that SHOULD be shut down are the ones that have tons of pedestrian traffic- commercial districts like Times Square, park-like areas like Union Square, and actual…

You know, you can be a fan of cars and still not want people driving in the most dense city in the U.S. that is served well by public transportation. I love driving (manual only!) and had a car when I lived in NYC, but I never drove it around the city. It was only to get out of the city. 

lmao, what sort of driving enjoyment are you getting by driving around Manhattan?

Pretty sure he could just as easily do that segment in one of the other outlying burroughs of NYC, as the wish to remove cars from some streets refers to Manhattan, primarily.

I don’t know if waiting for all the Boomers to die is the answer. As a Boomer, I distinctly recall waiting for the Silent Generation to kick the bucket so we could take over. Would’ve worked if the Boomers hadn’t turned out to be a bunch of greedy hypocrites who turned their backs on the very issues they had once held…