While the whole idea of making the franchises/dealerships pay for Model E program is dumb, the split between their EV and ICE businesses does make it feel like they set it up so the ICE business could go bankrupt in the future and not effect the EV side of the business at all. Just close it out and let the dealers who…

Agreed, battery tech and even the price is acceptable now for most new car buyers.

Is that it? I’ve been surprised by how many I’ve seen. At least one per day up in New Hampshire or several if I’m venturing into eastern Massachusetts

Sorry, meant to phrase it as the Defender costs $10k less, restructured sentence but forgot to change that part. Point being that it’s still a good deal because you get the modern specs but the classic more desirable (IMO) looks

Sure is! I’d love to have one but $$$$$

Honestly that sounds like a great price, I would’ve expected it to cost way way more. I feel like there’s barely even going to be competition between this and the Land Rover Defender.

I’ve seen one of the prototypes in person in white. It’s honestly really good looking, and seems like the design will age very well since it’s not super crazy

A huge number of those 80 people are YouTubers getting millions of views on each video, so it isn’t necessarily friends, but I suspect most did happen through a time consuming interaction, even if it was parasocial

I’m guessing in the end it will still be beneficial to give out the Roadsters, because then there will be a new halo car, and it will be in the hands of people who have already proved that they’re good at peddling the product. Even if it doesn’t result in a lot of people buying Roadsters, it will surely create even mor…

I don’t know where my math broke down but good catch. So 4000 sales or estimated $200m, meaning $16m is only 8%

Though 80 people getting a 100% discount from 2% at the time, by my math, goes to 2500 vehicle sales, and let’s say they were $50k each on average, that’s $163 million in sales, in exchange for the $16m in free Roadsters, or about a 10% pseudo-marketing budget. Which I think is about what Polestar pays as a rate for…

Same in New Hampshire. Maybe it was the 85th percentile when the speed limit signs were created in the 80s or something, but literally nobody drives 55 anymore. 65 to 85 is very normal

The difference with an EV versus “any other” car is that going from 3/4 throttle to 1/4 throttle is like pressing decent hard on the brake pedal in most cars. If you are cruising at 40 and suddenly pop your foot off the accelerator in a Tesla, you can have stuff slide off the seat and lunch slide out of your…

I feel like it’s a little bit rare that I’m actually fully off the accelerator while doing regen since it’s more of a subtle modulation thing. It’ll make you queasy (and especially your passengers) if you just pop off the accelerator of an EV like you would pop off the accelerator in a gas car.

Agreed. Let off the accelerator to come to a stop, forgot where their foot was, mashed down on the accelerator instead of the brake, and voila.

That is indeed it. They’ve said before that regardless of what move the car wants to make, the human operator will always be able to override it

Gates is invested in FedEx and UPS, who are probably indeed some of the more polluting companies in the world since they operate a massive fleet of delivery vehicles and airplanes. It does seem dumb to assign those all to Gates. It’s not like he is personally driving around in 200,000 vans every day.

Also wasn’t familiar with him. Turns out he’s a major player in the Latin America cell phone service industry, as well as the construction industry in Mexico (that would explain a lot of emissions), commercial banking and the New York Times.

Fair enough, makes sense that there wouldn’t be any navaids in the sea. Unsure what kind of range you get out of them. I know airways make use of both navaids and waypoints (waypoints being just imaginary named lat/lon points).

Agreed. I own a V8 that gets 17 mpg but it drives maybe 500-1000 miles per year where my EV is what actually does the 10,000+, so it would be dumb to calculate it as if all of my vehicles were being used all of the time.