Disney maintenance crashed our car at Epcot

They already build electric busses here in the US, so I imagine it's only a matter of time. We'll see how non-genuine American nationalism really is when everyone buys one regardless of what nation owns the company, because of price.

@Jeff pt. 1 - That ID Buzz is very interesting indeed. I suggest you take a slow roadtrip to Vegas to see Phish and Grateful Dead at The Sphere.

@Jeff pt. 2 - Half the trucks with "Buy American" stickers are built in Mexico and Canada. I laugh quietly to myself when I see that. I'm not going to tell them.

@Josh - "If you ever feel like your life is worthless and you have no purpose, remember somebody's job is to install turn signals on BMWs."

Twelve days later, for better or worse, Diana is in the new car. It's another Model Y long-range, so an improved twin of our other one. The only option we did this time was the white interior, which stays much cooler than the black. $27k in equity on the wrecked car, and this one was $3,500 cheaper than the Y we bought three years ago ($11k if you count the tax credit, which is applied at time of purchase). And this is our sixth EV in ten years.

Still kind of angry to have a car payment when I was so close to not having one, just because some dude wasn't paying attention. The old car at six showed no signs of its age. Battery was still around 290 max range, brakes were still essentially new... just tires, washer fluid and a replaced cabin filter.

A few of you mentioned BYD... an op-ed in the Times today says Detroit is screwed already if they can't figure out how to catch up and compete before they get here. I've been saying this for years, and take no pleasure in seeing it come true.

Jeff:

A few of you mentioned BYD... an op-ed in the Times today says Detroit is screwed already if they can't figure out how to catch up and compete before they get here. I've been saying this for years, and take no pleasure in seeing it come true.

I wonder if they ever get so far behind that they would just back out of the electric market and concentrate solely on gas powered vehicles? The linked story says there is still a very healthy market for gas powered big trucks and SUVs. IMO there is room for both types of vehicles and will be for a long time.

From the article:

Last year Ford lost more than $64,000 on every E.V. that it sold.

We will make it up in volume. LOL

Jeff:

to have a car payment

Dave Ramsey is not pleased with you at all right now

Dave Ramsey can kiss my ass. I'm pretty comfortable.

The_Orient_of_Express:

I wonder if they ever get so far behind that they would just back out of the electric market and concentrate solely on gas powered vehicles?

I mean, they could concentrate on horse trading too, but I think you know how that would turn out. The future is not internal combustion. The hockey stick growth is in EV's. The tactical error of GM and Ford was that they ramped up faster than the demand, which was served by one company (Tesla) just a few years ago, to everyone wanting a piece now. What's worse, you can't start at the high end, high margin cars, because Tesla did that with the early adopters almost a decade ago. To sell a lot of cars, you have to get the price down. Sure, GM is selling the Chevy Bolt for $30k, but good luck finding one (I see 7 within 50 miles of me).

I love the end of that opinion piece...

There’s no small amount of irony in the fact that all those involved here — Democrats, Republicans, major automakers — resent China for achieving what was once a goal of, well, hippies and environmentalists: making electric cars popular and cheap.

That NYT opinion piece is kind of ridiculous.

They present the issue as being that the Big Three don't know how to produce EVs at scale, which is, of course, absurd. There's nothing about manufacturing EVs that we need to learn from China. What we need here to be able to compete is what's allowed them to be "successful" in China - many tens of billions of dollars in subsidies that have enabled China's EV industry to ramp up so quickly to high-volume, low margin EVs. The relatively paltry amount of industry subsidy in the Inflation Reduction Act doesn't come remotely close to what China has poured into their EV industry.

Also, I found this line to be pretty telling of the author's pretty strong bias:

Perhaps the Big Three deserve destruction; after all, they hooked us on S.U.V.s in the first place and then fell behind in the E.V. race.

"Hooked us"? Good grief.

GoBucks89:

From the article:

Last year Ford lost more than $64,000 on every E.V. that it sold.

We will make it up in volume. LOL

Every vehicle "loses" money in the first months or years of production until the revenue has paid for the infrastructure required to build the vehicle, not to mention the development costs, etc. So, while I get the joke, they will make it up on volume. Eventually. :-)

Good you saw it as a joke. Sometimes that isn't a given around here. LOL

But that isn't how the accounting rules work. Maybe the loss numbers weren't GAAP. If so, not helpful at all. Big reason the GAAP rules on revenue and expense recognition were created was to allow for more meaningful reporting of financial results. .

djDaemon:

"Hooked us"? Good grief.

To be fair, let's discuss how it is near impossible to purchase a small car. If you are lucky enough to find a small hatch or small sedan on a dealer lot, chances are they will do nothing in the form of bargaining and likely have some form of dealer markup on the vehicle. They will claim it's due to demand, no it's because you have created a willful supply shortage that is forever ongoing. So most people then just buy the bigger vehicle, which the car manufacturers turn around and claim they can't sell the small vehicles.

Looking specifically at the big three, what cars/hatchbacks do they sell:

Ford: Nothing in the US. Pulled out a few years back

GM: Bolt, Malibu, CT4, CT5, Celestiq

Stellantis: 300 (Discontinued), Charger (Discontinued), Challenger (Discontinued), Giulia, 500

I skipped over Maserati because those are not really mass market vehicles, arguably the Cadillac offerings are not either, which would remove 3 of the 5 GM vehicles. If you want to go with the historical definition of the big three than Stellantis would have nothing in their list either since Chrysler offers nothing.

I wouldn't necessarily call it hooked 100%, there was certainly forced market manipulation at play. Manufacturers pushed bigger incentives on bigger vehicles, because bigger profit margins, and then pushed the whole of the market towards this trend to increase the bottom line.

If anyone hooked us on SUVs, it was ourselves. If we really wanted small cars, we’d have bought them. I think SUVs worked well because unlike minivans, they were able to serve the family market as well as the non-family market. Single or married with kids, SUVs worked for people.

Speaking from my end, my wife and I have a SUV purely for practicality reasons. When our kids are older and we’re not taking strollers everywhere, I could see us dropping it to a smaller car.

I also wonder if the US manufacturers focused so heavily on SUVs because foreign manufacturers did so much better on “standard” cars. Honda and Toyota in particular have been making phenomenal vehicles for decades that have far outclassed their US counterparts.

sirloindude:

If we really wanted small cars, we’d have bought them.

And parked them at the Great Adventure hotel.

sirloindude:

have a SUV purely for practicality reasons.

I am curious what the practical reasons are that you feel an SUV is better than a mini-van. Having owned three mini-vans since 1998, and having driven numerous SUVs throughout the years, namely for vacations and work, I would put a mini-van up against any SUV from a practicality stand-point. My experience is that a mini-van can fit more stuff in easier, and it can easily handle 7-8 people.

I was referring to the practical advantages of a SUV compared to a “standard” car, not a minivan. Apologies if my wording was unclear. I put it in the same category of practical as a minivan, but SUVs don’t have the stigma of being kid-carriers the way minivans did. It’s a function they can provide, but not a defining characteristic.

Love my Chevy Traverse. It’s a crossover SUV (truck body on a car frame) so it gets similar mileage to a minivan, but has AWD so can go down fun roads with ease. It’s gone down some pretty rough roads in the Rockies and in the Smokies.

I hate to be that guy, but, cars also have awd, and can fit strollers and kids along with luggage and stuff.

Does the perceived need for these large vehicles come from all the marketing convincing you that you need a large vehicle to be able to carry kids, or carry a stroller?

If you are one of the statistical anomalies that has 4 or 5 kids, then sure, a car isn’t suitable, but most people have one or two kids, and many SUV’s have no more, and often less storage space than sedans do.

Additionally, for those with kids, and if this applies to someone on here, why do you need so much stuff? I see so many parents with huge strollers, bags of stuff, they are like homeless carts going down the sidewalks. Is this also an effect of good marketing and manipulation?

I'll "that guy" you one further and say that, functionally, the old school station wagon got it done just as well as a mini-van or SUV. Actually, I'm not even sure why a regular car doesn't get it done. My kid is 14 now, and we never had an SUV or mini-van when he was little. (I guess technically one might consider the now defunct Prius V a short station wagon, but that might be a stretch, er, non-stretch.)

I like the stuff question, too. The amount of stuff I see people take to theme parks or on the cruise ships is staggering. And I say that as the parent of a kid who had/has trouble adapting to situations that are not entirely ideal. Maybe I'm a bad parent, but I don't want to suffer a -3 encumbrance penalty.

I’m tall, and have a lengthy torso. I do not enjoy contorting into a pretzel to get in regular cars nor the Sophie’s choice of having to choose having my head firmly hitting the roof (and slightly compressing my neck) or my chair being reclined at an angle better suited for an extended Lazy Boy chair while driving. Even minivans and most SUVs with sunroofs are too short and my head hits the ceiling.

Marques Brownlee's Auto Focus channel puts his 6'+ body in a lot of cars, and he tends to fit pretty well in most of them. Just another anecdote (and solid channel if you're a car guy interested in non-car guy observations).