I have to wonder where the Japanese OEMs would be if they hadn’t wasted billions and a decade or more chasing hydrogen which at this point from the user refueling end combines the drawbacks of gas and electric with the advantages of neither.

A lot of fleet customers use them for fixed routes, package delivery or shuttle buses.

I keep saying it, all the automakers rushed into $50k midsize crossovers and $70k+ “lifestyle” pickups because of the profit-per-unit but they saturated those segments and pushed the focus on fast-charging because nobody’s going to spend that much on something that big and not have it be the household road-trip car.

Gotta say the latest Versa is actually appealing in an “if I absolutely had to buy a new car now under duress” sense. Would be nice to have a hatchback or at least a high-spec 6MT car but a big part of the appeal is that the cheapest manual Civic is almost 10 grand more…

FWIU pop-ups weren’t regulated out of existence, at least in America. They just fell out of fashion and any proposal to re-implement them gets nixed at the corporate level on grounds of cost and complexity.