I think they made two big mistakes with that interior. The first is that they ditched the mechanical parking brake (good), but didn’t use the savings to add any useful storage space (bad). The second is trickling that stupid touch screen down from the Outback. One of the biggest things that sold me on the current…

All engineering problems are solveable with enough money. What was feasible before the stock took a $200B hit might not be now.

There is no way to increase rigidity by removing material. What you’re describing only works if you start with a much thicker plate. You could potentially machine it down to the original weight and end up stiffer. This would be orders of magnitude more expensive than just spot welding hat channel to the back of the…

I’m not sure how much the SpaceX connection really helps. Spacecraft fabrication and procurement doesn’t necessarily scale to automotive mass production. If anything, the benefit may be intended to flow the other way; you can negotiate a better price for rocket metal if you’re buying it by the train load for your…

Trains have the same issues with loading and unloading times, and they have some additional scheduling problems due to the amount of single track on the corridor. Rail makes sense if you’re running the whole train, but not so much if you’re a lean enterprise moving a few containers a day.

The Jones Act is irrelevant here, because if shipping up and down the coast was an attractive alternative to trucking the market would have responded at some point in the last hundred years. The problem is that ships are slow. Loading and unloading ships is even slower. The cost would need to be extremely low for…

But to be even a minor player in the pickup market means a quarter million units a year. Those aren’t fab shop numbers.

I’m not going to name names, but an engineer at a big 3 company told me about this kind of screwup about twenty years ago. Marketing launched a car early, which froze the grille design. Then they realized they couldn’t get enough air through it to cool the engine. Re-routing the air flow required re-designing the…

Making body panels out of 3mm cold-rolled sheet is objectively stupid.

The stainless ‘36 was gorgeous.

DeLorean went bankrupt after only producing about 9000 vehicles. That really shouldn’t be too difficult to repeat now, but it wouldn’t be ideal either.

Thanks to aeroelastic flutter, you probably won’t even need to hit a bump to get some horrific noises out of those door panels. If they’re not willing/able to add creases to increase the panel rigidity, I hope they have free space for a ton of hat channel.

Both springback and crumpling problems are the result of faster work hardening in stainless steel relative to carbon steel. The crumple zone thing is just a math problem. You can certainly account for decreased plastic energy dissipation in the structural design. But if boy wonder already had a product launch before…

“2. Ditching the engine in a crash is a great way to dissipate a TON of energy, so cars are designed to do this.”

Same people saying that “the car crashed”.

Clearly you don’t work in HVAC.

Or spend that five dollars on beer. The empty can will be worth more than the crypto investment, and you get to drink beer.

But this is missing the engines, so at minimum you’re also fabricating a set of dummy nacelles.

“still engaging on Twitter as appropriate.”

“...showing her filings and stuff.”