I drove a Volt for six years and now I drive a Model 3. I think there’s a lot of reasons that someone would want to drive a Tesla over a Bolt, and evidently most consumers overwhelming feel the same way.

Frankly Chevy made a huge mistake with the body style of the Bolt as a weird econo box that’s somehow too tall and…

I have a 72 MG Midget and a Model 3 Performance, both are about as fun as it gets for completely different reasons and neither could fully replace the other. The MG was the first car I ever purchased (in 2011), I’ll keep it forever, but I’ll never buy another gas vehicle. Its hard to imagine something that’d make me…

Think of a carbon fiber arch connected to a flat steel base. The carbon fiber doesn’t expand noticeably but the steel does, so when temperature fluctuates the carbon arch would raise and lower as the steel base became longer and shorter. Imagine the issues you could have when your steel door frame shrinks around your…

The wheel and all its components are the only thing to not like about this refresh, but it’s a big one.

For pretty much all of Tesla’s existence the thing that limits their annual sales isn’t demand, it was initially production capacity and for years since its been battery supply. That’s the main reason their battery backup systems haven’t really gone anywhere, they can make a lot more revenue off the same battery…

Does it still have the bizarre restriction that you can only watch on demand 24 hours later if you didn’t watch live?  That’s what stopped me from signing up.  I’m not going to wake up in the middle of the night to watch a race on the other side of the planet, and I’m not going to pay to wait 24 hours when the…

I have less of a problem with Musk’s wealth, obtained via success on several consecutive all in gambles bringing new and original products to market (Zip2, Paypal, electric sports cars, commercial rockets), than I do for people who make all their money through anticompetitive business practices, slave wages, or…

Both of those cars are significantly more expensive than a Model S, with significantly shorter range, and don’t have access to the superior Supercharging network. There’s plenty of reasons to choose them over a Tesla, but there’s also plenty of reasons not to.

The only reason lidar is useful at all is because you need a lot of processing power to turn two parallax cameras into a 3d model. The human brain does it very quickly and very accurately, its not easy to build a computer that can compete, so you use lidar instead. Its not really up for debate that you need more than…

You operate a car with two cameras and two sonic sensors on a swivel mount, the car has eight camera, a forward facing radar, and 360 degree ultrasonic sensors.  Its not a data gathering problem, its a data processing problem.

Believe it or not, there’s actually consumers that know what Autopilot means, and that it doesn’t mean that both pilots can both go take shits at the same time.

Road damage scales by the square of weight.  Semi trucks, garbage trucks, and similar mahoosive commercial vehicles cause orders of magnitude more road damage than consumer vehicles.  If we’re going to have road use taxes instead of just funding from the general budget, it should be through fossil fuels as long as is…

Remind me to skip the bland-ass 90/10 burgers at your cookout.

1. Carrot and Stick. We’re doing the carrot with the subsidies but there’s no stick. The subsidy should be funded by a tax on ICE vehicles that starts off small and increases every year. Over time ICE vehicles get more expensive while electrics get cheaper via improving tech and scale, and you force automakers to…

Probably no one, but the two that may want to merge with Tesla are Mazda and Subaru. Both need help if they’re going to electrify, and both bring Tesla more manufacturing capacity and experience for relatively little cost. Whether any Tesla would be allowed to buy up any Japanese OEM remains to be seen.

If Tesla were to merge with someone, they’d want a partner with lots of low cost, high volume manufacturing experience. They’d want them to be small enough that they don’t need a spend a bunch of money buying and maintain a large ICE portfolio they don’t want.

Merging with Tesla is attractive to other OEMs that don’t…

TVR Cerbera Speed 12. Up to 1000hp, manual everything. Other TVRs of the era didn’t even have ABS, so I doubt this one did either. What a glorious way to die it would have been.

There’s no way the car was in autopilot during that. I was on a wide open stretch of empty highw... a closed track in Mexico with Autopilot on. I’d never had my Model 3 over 80mph before, I was curious to get it up over 100 for just a brief moment. I forgot to disengage autopilot before I mashed the gas, and the dash…

To anyone claiming she endangered the life of her baby, decades ago my aunt finished mowing the lawn after she went into labor. It’s fine.

There’s already electric mining trucks and they work brilliantly. There’s one mine where the electric trucks produce more power than they consume. The mine is at the top of a mountain. Full of ore it regens downhill, producing more power than it takes to drive the empty truck back up. They have to plug it in to dischar…