News

What blows my mind is that he's sabotaging his own engineers by forcing them to only rely on cameras for self-driving. Let's excuse the consumer vehicle market for a moment since maybe the added cost of LIDAR and RADAR is too much. That doesn't explain why he also wants the robotaxis to only rely on cameras. Robotaxis would provide service to far more people per vehicle, so the per-vehicle cost shouldn't matter as much. Replacing a human driver alone recoups the cost of LIDAR and RADAR in a short amount of time.

And despite the Lemmy/Reddit circle jerk that "EVs are bad", BYD pass the notoriously strict Australian safety standards and sell well here. The BYD Seal seems to be everywhere of late

Does this mean BYD will be able to sell Mexican produced cars in America?

I'd honestly be surprised if they didn't update the laws to prevent Chinese competition no matter what the companies do. They've done it for the auto industry in the past, to countries they're not hostile towards, and they've done it to Chinese companies in other industries with substantial lobbying dollars, notably phones, IT infra, social media, and weapon manufacture.

So Biden blocked Chinese EV from entering the American market in order to keep automaker CEOs wealthy af? I feel like this is a silly question to bring up, but why is it that a car can be built in China, shipped to the other side of the planet, eat the cost of tariffs, and it's still either so good or so cheap that it is dangerous competition to American automakers? It kinda feels like we only encourage free market capitalism until old money gets challenged by innovation. It's frustrating. We want boring, basic sedans with limited features with EV tech slapped inside instead of ICE tech, and we want to pay under $25k for it. I'm all for phasing out ICE vehicles, but every EV is a luxury vehicle at a time when half the country is living paycheck to paycheck. We need uncool, cheap EVs to replace uncool, cheap gasoline cars. We need a Prius or Yaris of EVs. We need Civic and Accord EVs. Taurus, Impala, Neon, Escort, etc. Average Americans don't want and cannot afford a goddamn EV Escalade or whatever.

That’s what happens when the major incentive from subsidies and tax breaks is focused on SUV production. We need more regulation on safety and functionality as well as deeper incentives to cover the range of market needs instead of a single weight class.

How else would they be able to keep shaming poor people and telling them climate change is their fault?

It's dooming the majority of US car buyers to a used market where they will struggle to find an affordable EV whose battery isn't toast when there is a comparable ICE vehicle for just a little less than the EV.

Cue shifting the blame to poor people and increasing gas taxes on consumer vehicles.

Didn't something similar go down in France?

That math doesn't seem right. If you use $50k as an average price their cars sell for then $90,000,000 / $50,000 is 1800 cars. Tesla sold 1.8 million cars in 2023.

In fairness, tesla is not just a car company. Batteries and solar are a significant and growing part of their business.

Their plan was always to popularize evs and then sell batteries to Ford, Chevy, and all the others.

It's pretty simple. The market is not rational, and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is an idiot

Yeah those two words rarely belong in the same paragraph.