4th:

It isn’t clear from these stories what the incremental cost to Ford will be vs. if they stayed in the car market. They say $11 billion in charges, much of which will be for designing and tooling for new crossovers and other trucks - but if they didn’t make the switch, they’d be looking at new design costs and…

Nobody is suggesting dawdling down the road.

But when the speed limit is 35 and you accelerate rapidly from the light, you just hit the next light before its green, and you end up stopping while the people who accelerated at a reasonable, modest rate, they actually get to the light as it turns green. All you’ve done is…

You know what the proper solution is?

Monorails.

I hear they glide as softly as a cloud.

0-60 in 8.9 seconds in the mid 90s (a decade before the ford 500) would have been fast for a family sedan. Most of them were 10+ seconds back then.

And that’s the point - our standards have changed and what was fast is now considered abysmally slow, and then people bitch about not getting great fuel economy.  I wonder…

The stupid thing about racing around and flooring it from lights is that it doesn’t normally get you where you’re going any faster - it just gets you to the next stoplight faster....  

They’ve already reached that point, I believe.  There is no reason why the Model S in this video should ever have been totalled.

3rd:

This, coupled with obscene repair costs that you either have to fork out for at their stealerships or risk having features of your car disabled, are prime reasons why I won’t even consider buying a Tesla until they change their ways.

An investment should come with equity.  Seems like they aren’t offering it here.

Repaying credits related to fraud is different than agreeing to a price is different than asking for a lower price after you’ve purchased something.

Similarly, renegotiating rates for future parts is different than asking for refunds on old ones. And if you’re shopping for a supplier for parts, and Supplier A who…

There’s no reason to ever ask for a retroactive price cut or expect that to be given as part of securing a contract going forward. You can expect the best price going forward or go to another supplier, but that supplier wouldn’t have any reason to give you a refund based on what you paid your first supplier - so the…

Set a standard for me, certainly. Might have helped that it was a small town dealer, but I’d never met the people before in my life. They really sealed the deal when after that, their first offer on the car I wanted was a good $3k (14% or so) below what I was prepared to offer them as a starting point (which was…

Hell, when I was 22 and bought my first new car, the Ford dealer handed me a set of dealer plates and told me all the cars had keys in the ignition, and I should feel free to take anything I wanted out for a spin, just asked me not to have any one car out for more than an hour or two.  Didn’t even get a copy of my…

Pfft... the majority of dealerships I’ve gone to have let me take a car out on a test drive without a salesperson along. Around here its only the Honda dealers that insist on going along - and then you have to listen to their incessant lying on the trip and deal with the idiots insisting that you’re not allowed to…

Sadly, they kind of do that in one respect already - evidently if your Tesla needs a repair, it isn’t unusual for them to charge outlandishly high “recertification” fees or they’ll shut down features of your car.

2nd:

Asking for price cuts on future orders? Absolutely normal.

Asking for refunds on past orders? That’s unusual at best.  And any refunds on past orders cannot be used under GAAP to show a profit going forward.  Gotta watch Tesla’s accounting department carefully on this...

Insurance should only be paying for what the car is worth. If she owed more than the car was worth, she needed to have gap insurance. If she had both and they’re still only covering half of what she owes and the other half doesn’t represent her deductible, THEN we might say there’s an issue.

I would argue, though, that FAR too many people think that social security is legitimately their retirement plan, and FAR too many people think its fine to retire early when they could be building a better future for themselves in retirement by working a bit longer. SS should be an “avoid abject poverty” plan rather…

Agreed.. I was just slow on the uptake. :)

On the USPS side, I see it as something the government does well AND poorly. On one hand, its amazing how much they’ll do for so little money, and the fact that they’ll deliver/pickup daily at EVERY home is crazy when the postage rates are so low.

Then there’s the fact that the…

As in most free trade agreements, tariffs are phased out, but some limited ones remain.  The EU’s new agreement with Japan eliminates 99% of all tariffs.  By your definition, that isn’t free trade, but by any rational definition it is.

NAFTA is considered a free trade agreement, but there are certainly a fair number of…

What is not possible or not economically viable?