Climate change is a global crisis. If China is going to help solve the problem, we should celebrate their efforts.

And if the US’s domestic auto sector can’t keep up, and American voters care about that, then subsidize them until they can, I guess.

Aha. Does that mean they will be ineligible for a rebate?

I hope this thing comes out soon – it could be an ideal vehicle for me if it’s equally affordable and practical.

1. Take the Bolt
2. Make it DCFC faster
3. Do nothing else
4. Profit

Is this that much smaller than a Bolt?

I bought a car in 2008. When the dealership found out that I was paying them cash rather than financing, their entire approach changed. It was fascinating to watch, since they realized they couldn’t hide the sticker price from me anymore; it would be the number that I would have to write on my check.

I bought the car I’m driving now in 2008. I was a graduate student then,and had plenty of time; I was haggling with the guy at the Toyota dealership who was getting antsy because it was past closing time and he wanted to go home and have dinner.

He mentioned something about this, and I said “we can both go home right now if you’ll tell me how much this car actually costs.”

That’s quite interesting since the places where range matters most is on highways. I am not all that interested in how far I can go in city traffic; I care about highway range. (I’m American.)

Do you have any more info about the engineering reasons why this is?

I think a lot of folks don’t realize just how violent the stuff that happens in an ICE is. It’s a triumph of engineering that Toyota can make a few thousand explosions a minute happen under the hood for years without anything going that wrong.

Still, going to be happy when I can get rid of my gas car.

This is good to see. None of those things except (6) and (7) bother me much.

In my current car the blind spot alert is a mirror and turning my head. There’s no phantom braking because there is no cruise control. There’s no rear wiper either.

So I’m not bothered by the lack of techno-fancy; “minimum viable product” is in fact what I want to buy.

As a near-future likely EV buyer who wants a M3-style car but is a bit wary of Tesla because it’s run by a loony – what are the “failure modes” of getting musked? What goes wrong?

If you stay with ICE’s you have the problem of climate change.

Dealing with either limited range or heavier vehicles is a lot easier than dealing with climate change.

Everyone is subsidizing ICE cars – through enduring the damage they do to the environment without compensation.

I imagine KDE will work fine, too, and what I intend to run (I’m batch 9…)

As a New Yorker who wants to buy an EV soon this means absolutely nothing.

There is a high power DCFC charger in a reasonably convenient place, but no option for Level 2 (or even Level 1) at my apartment or at work. Fix that, please.

I wish the US would let me buy one…

Same here. I don’t want a SUV, big or little.

My g/f and I have different tastes – she wants Prius-sized or slightly bigger to carry around her bike in the trunk. I want something small (by American standards) – Yaris or Bolt sized. To me a Camry is too big. (My mom, too – she recently sold her Camry since it was too big for her and bought a Prius, which she loves.)

They could sell me an electric Focus or Fiesta if they’d make one. I have no interest in a truck or SUV.

Gates is a scumbag, but he’s not trying to destroy democracy in the same way Musk is. (And people do care – I haven’t run Windows in years and have never bought an Apple product.)

Is Tesla doing an Apple and making sure that nobody but them can fix their cars?

I wouldn’t put it past them.

other cars have been utilizing a “centralized” instrument cluster for a while now > save manufacturing/assembly cost for LHD vs RHD - like the prius - but these center instrument clusters are set much further ahead on the dashboard, closer to the windshield than to the driver

Oh, is this why?

I have an old Toyota Yaris (crank windows, stickshift, manual locks). Absolutely great car. It’s the first car that I saw with a central instrument cluster and I fell in love with that; it means that I can look at the road without anything else in my vision, and that when I want to look at the instruments, I look sideways rather than down.

Tesla’s bad idea misses this – their touchscreen requires you to look down.