That's a very good point.

Tesla’s real advantage until the past 2-3 years was that they didn’t need to be profitable and their stock price was still gigantic. That’s such an incredibly huge advantage for a business trying to make new products or take risks, if they needed money they just did a stock sale and the stock value went UP, which is…

Obviously, as shown by the data, the absolute value of people buying Teslas isn’t a large portion of the market.

1st Gear: Apparently Toyota are the only ones paying attention, this has been obvious for awhile. Everyone wanted a piece of that ridiculous Tesla stock valuation, they weren’t really listening to customers.

0% financing is how we got into this mess in the first place. We learned nothing from 08/09.

There’s some decent suggestions in here, but overall I can tell many Jalopnik readers have never driven a truly terrible car. The Chevette person has, 80s crap version of the Escort, Hyundai Pony....but Chrysler 200? Toyota Sienna? You can cruise these on the highway in relative silence and listen to music.

You’re right, but you’ve got the cause and effect backwards. Americans will pay more money for a larger vehicle, end of. If I’ve got to develop advanced tech to get a vehicle through tough crash and emissions regs, the headroom afforded by a higher sale price with effectively the same engineering and manufacturing…

? They cut them because no one buys them, if there was a business case for fuel efficient vehicles they’d absolutely make them.

1st Gear: Looking through the comments, it’s clear people think the automakers dictate what people buy. They don’t.

It most definitely has ABS and TC.

Okay, even a cursory search would have shown the CGT has both ABS and traction control. It was 2005, not 1985.

The Model T is so completely the answer to this question that it borders on fact, not opinion.

Trying to argue for anything else is just a hipster move. This is the correct, albeit boring, answer.

If your ambient temp is 31 C, but the cockpit temp is 50 C, clearly airflow could make a big difference.

If they’re that nuts about it, just do cooled suits. Include the suit in the min driver weight criteria.

100% agree, this could be solved on the vehicle side.

It’s the same reason people love cold-weather football games, marathons, or stuff like the MJ “flu game”: we love to see people approach super-human feats.

Track temp ranged from 36 to 40 C, I believe air temp was around 31 C.

drop the ICE regulated min weight to 250-270 lbs and get a big chunk easily. The 2005-era V10s were around 82 kg and developed 950 hp by themselves, putting the turbo V6s at 120 kg wouldn’t even be a challenge. Hell, I bet they could get to 100 kg with the turbo and all associated plumbing.

But they’ve got like $10B in the bank, so they can keep burning for at least 2.5 more years. If they can follow their current trend, they should be able to be profitable by then.