Comparing to the cheap prices in China is quite misleading as much of it is due to lax regulation in China. The cars would cost substantially more here in the US just to meet minimal safety requirements.

Another thing is unless people have been living under a rock, every company has seen what has happened during Covid. Too many companies put all their eggs into the Chinese manufacturing basket and the entire world suffered for it. A similar thing is poised to happen due to all the saber rattling about Taiwan. So it ben…

Yeah, I was about to point out the same thing. These journalists seem to lack very basic logic. After 2021, Tesla sales exploded and Tesla made AP standard. Any comparison needs to normalize the absolute numbers to this (ideally by miles also, given people travel different miles). If you take this into account, it…

Apparently not. Police aren’t able to even open the door. If a car gets completely stuck, Cruise has to send a vehicle to rescue it, which typically takes about 15 minutes, depending on where it is.

SFMTA, the city regulator, has long protested and wants to force the operators to keep having safety drivers until they demonstrate this will not happen or at least have a way for emergency responders to move the vehicles to the side manually when it freezes, but those calls fell to deaf ears.

Except that is not the case. There isn’t a zero sum in battery materials (even though EV naysayers like to assume there is) and the amount of materials required per kWh is not the same between hybrids and BEVs (hybrids need power dense instead of energy dense batteries and up until recently they were using Nimh which…

That sounds all fine and dandy, but as others pointed out, they took a risk with hybrids. This is not to mention hydrogen which they are the biggest cheerleader for. The real reason for their opposition is they invested a lot into hybrids and BEVs steal the most sales from that segment, while making less profits (for…

Not exactly. Automakers have killed most smaller cars/trucks and are making cars larger and larger. So people don’t even have the choice anymore. The reason is the profit margins are big enough that it makes more sense to pay fines or buy credits than it does offering more efficient choices.

No they didn’t. AP1 vehicles were excluded because the hardware is completely incompatible with FSD (it was a single camera with Mobileye chip) and there is no pathway to an upgrade. Tesla never claimed AP1 cars can or would ever get FSD. In fact in the announcement they said only the cars that came out of the factory…

Point is people would not want it even though it is “good” for them. People generally value convenience over safety. The breathalyzer pushback is an example. We don’t even have a logical way to account for collecting money for road wear based on weight either (instead we slap on arbitrary fees) and that’s a relatively…

Consent of the public has never been needed in vehicle testing on public roads (it’s not even required for fully autonomous vehicles). I have seen plenty of prototype vehicles (both of regular and autonomous) and they certainly never asked the neighborhood nor informed them.

Yep, trucks have gotten preferential treatment for so long under the guise of business necessity, it’s about high time for some change. And for the EV mandate, many times people come out of the woodwork and say passenger cars are not the problem and that addressing trucks are a bigger problem, but I wouldn’t be…

None of the EV mandates by California ever applied to used vehicles, neither does this. Used vehicles beyond a certain age is however subject to smog tests.

FYI, Hong Kong is a former colony of Britain, and remains officially semi-autonomous (even though this has eroded in recent years) and English is still an official language there. For example, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong still does speeches in English and is expected to be proficient in it.

Well it did manage to sell almost 9000 copies in the US, and 18k worldwide, which would be considered a success for a niche car. Sure, it died down as the car aged (especially given its long run, a similar problem the GT-R is having ), but was still regarded at least a success at some point.

Hopefully they don’t repeat the same mistakes of the CR-Z however, which had neither performance nor really amazing efficiency.

Instead of more performance, the value proposition would be to offer the same performance (or even slightly less if necessary) for a price closer to the original NSX (which was $62k and inflation adjusted to $114k in 2016). I think most people agreed $156k was much too rich for a Acura at the time. At any rate, the…

The real reason is they invested so heavily in hybrids and they want to milk that to the last drop, so they have a very strong incentive to naysay about EVs.

If the navigation unit is built-in, many states actually do not prohibit inputting addresses or interacting with the infotainment system while the car is in motion. But the better equivalent is to adjusting driving related setting like climate controls or lights.

“It’s something the Germans and other European countries have recognized for years (in Germany Autopilot is called Autodrive for this very reason).”