Based on how I understood the deal, it was more of an option/futures approach where they had the right to buy discrete amounts for an agreed upon price. Also, given the magnitude of the Stelantis deal, it was first discussed by these firms in early/mid 2019 and approved internally at the end of 2019, so I doubt they…

The strange thing is... and all it takes is a quick look at his resume... he actually never had any training as ‘an actual engineer’. Design processes. Tolerances. Statistical analysis.

Its actually the weirdness of such nerds that first made me aware of Elon Musk and thinking he might be a bit of a con artist

The solution to soaring development costs while leaving open the possibility of “meaningful” advancement of real automotive technology is to figure out how to eliminate the “aero” arms race.

boujour oui oui

Bro it’s a publicly traded company ($RACE, lol). They haven’t been a sports car and branding manufacturer for awhile now.

They spent all that money and someone else won anyway...

As an engineer I love seeing advancement of technology, but this does seem on point that how many millions of dollars are we spending for a minuscule advancement that does not make the racing better, and everyone else figures it out eventually so you have to keep doing it. As a broader society there has to be a better…

1st/2nd: Matt Farah nailed it on his podcast recently (#600 if you’re curious): Tesla’s stock price is not tied to their ability to profitably build and sell cars, it is tied to their ability to keep selling the stock. If you buy their stock, you are betting on other people buying it too, not the whole business of…

The glorious sounds.

Me: “Look, I really just want to get this Palisade and get out of here...”

I should just find my previous posts and emails on this.

These solutions are crazy.
Not crazy in the Jalopnik sense, crazy in the firey-death-at-80-mph crazy.

We can’t manage to keep our roads lined with the proper signs, markers, and reflectors right now - even the stupid kind that you pound into the ground with a hammer, and they have a little yellow reflector on top.…

You don’t seem to have direct access to our current reality, so please take off your Oculus headset now. There are no automated vehicle systems currently in existence that can perform anywhere near as well as a conscientious human driver.

Some of us are actually not that old.

Neither of you are wrong. You are correct, a tax loss is not necessarily an actual loss - and it saved him having to pay income and self-employment taxes. But ultimately, he didn’t make poop doing all this work - even using actual expenses rather than the IRS mileage, I doubt he earned minimum wage for the hours he…

What they've learned is that competitive electrification is not worth it, and the things that need to be developed to make electrification commercially viable (without government incentives) won't be done through racing. 

I’ll offer up a reason: electric cars are boring. No noise, no changing of gears, just sterile silence on the track which is incredibly dull for spectators. It’s almost the equivalent of watching RC cars race via remote control, just on a larger scale. Keep ICE for racing and use it as a test bed to develop clean…

I think you hit the nail on the head: LeMans, NASCAR and Formula One aren’t just R&D test beds, they pull double duty as advertisements as well. Formula E doesn’t have that clout, outside of a passionate niche, no one cares. And to spend that much money and get very little R&D, and almost no publicity is something…