I’m ok with this direction.  Very few people go to the track and very few people have the skills to drive a track focused car on the street.  A softer more forgiving street car that can still thump others in a stop light drag when called out is a better match for most drivers.

For somebody who likes cars, I haven’t owned a lot of them because I hate the buying process—dealing with dealers. They do it multiple times a day. I do it once or twice a decade. Who do you think navigates this better? My current vehicles are 8 and 15-years old.

You do have a point... but I still think, as a mere commoner, that luxury should represent high quality, ageless design, and scarcity. None of those attributes can be used to describe Tesla.

Every time I hear them referred to as a luxury brand it pisses me off. They aren’t luxurious, just expensive.

Today I learned there are people on the internet that are completely fine with Tesla’s in autopilot randomly slamming on the brakes in front of them.  Huh. Learn something new every day.

Absolutely, the Tesla is still very much in the wrong here. I just get tired of seeing people drive with the mentality of filling all the empty space in front of their car, and then treating pileup crashes (usually due to weather) as an inevitability.

The automakers have been playing games with the EPA and CAFE requirements since forever. PT Cruisers being classified as a light truck for example.  A bit of schadenfreude is ok.

That’s exactly what he thought would happen. He’s a huge Tesla stan and owns stock, as did several other coworkers. We work in IT and are all nerds, so he thought it would just be high-fives all around. We had rotating presentations during our weekly staff meetings, and when my turn came around, I did mine on the…

Agreed. My wife wants us to pay extra for a plug-in hybrid on our next vehicle. I was dismayed to find that most plug-in vehicles are luxury SUV vehicles taking their mileage down from awful to merely bad. Way to save the environment!

I make too much money to qualify for any of the tax credits and I can’t afford a $63k EV. I really wonder how impactful any of this is.

I would suggest taking things a step further and saying that the heavier the vehicle, the smaller the federal rebate- With a weight target that keeps going down, kinda like the way we do MPG requirements now- set it to a 6,000 pound limit to be able to qualify for anything and a 3,000 pound limit for the maximum…

Here are my new rules. Maybe I should call them the anti-Hummer rules:

We are walking away from our Mach-E order that should be on the dealership lot any day now.  With the $8k MSRP bump the day we placed our order, and now on top of the fact it doesn’t qualify for the rebate, that’s a $15k hit we just aren’t willing to swallow.  Could we do it?  Yes, but we don’t need to.  It would be…

I think I read on this site (very recently in fact) that the average transaction price for a new vehicle last year (2022) reached something crazy like $46,000?

Some dealers will budge on this stuff...others won’t. It doesn’t hurt to ask. 

I wholeheartedly agree that they need to review the structure of the rebates and the impacts. Particularly the timing, which obviously wasn’t enough to manufacturers to pivot resources.

You have a BMW logo as your avatar. People in glass houses...

Eh. Thats not as great a feature as you’d think. It can be wonky because it relies on having to have the wifi connection on your device. I never use it in any vehicle its equipped with. Thats just me though. 

Kia should just make their own version of the new Hyundai Ioniq 6.

IMO the stinger looks so much better than the EV6