Disney maintenance crashed our car at Epcot

Shades:

Lots of dumbness happening there.

Welcome to Florida.

Maybe it's a Florida driver, but the police cars are all Georgia State Patrol.

Definitely a Florida driver. Georgia drivers know how to stick the landing.

Rivian’s announcements from today are very relevant to this conversation. The R2 and R3/R3X (almost a hot hatch) are small SUVs with the Rivian utility features. The Internet is going crazy for the R3X but the R2 looks pretty great too.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But I look at those vehicles and think 70's Russia.

One of the things that drives me nuts about EVs is the lack of physical buttons/dials on the dash. It's a user-hostile design choice that in many cases makes the vehicle more dangerous to operate.

At least it's not just a touch screen mounted to the dash. There is some integration which I appreciate.

GoBucks89:

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

djDaemon:

lack of physical buttons/dials on the dash.

Absolutely agree (with any car). I want physical dials, knobs and switches. The less touch screens in use, the better. Agree with safety, as well, as at least you have the muscle memory to do what you need without having to look in most cases, compared to a touch screen or something you need to interact with.

Same. The only touchscreen I want in a vehicle is the radio (Apple CarPlay is the shiz), but it needs an analog volume knob at the least. The screens that integrate the HVAC controls and everything else are less than desirable unless there are also duplicate controls consisting of buttons and knobs.

eightdotthree:

Not only is Evel Knievel not paying enough attention but the tow truck driver just stopped over in the passing lane and hoped for the best.

The best part of that video is that it confirmed what I always wondered when I would pass one of those two trucks. Now I don't need to try it myself.

Uh oh…..

EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/0...in-us.html

Yeah, I saw that. Sad to see CNBC engaging in link bait. Nothing says impending doom like hockey stick growth.

Jeff:

Yeah, I saw that. Sad to see CNBC engaging in link bait. Nothing says impending doom like hockey stick growth.

Heh. Love how they use headline grabbing words like “EV Euphoria”.

Why are you quoting the previous post? No one needs to read it twice.

Why are you up at 4am? Wait, nevermind.

Late to the party as usual...

Yes, I drive a gigantic sedan. A gigantic rear-wheel-drive 6-adult-passenger sedan, with a trunk. It gets surprisingly good gas mileage (21-24 mpg) for its size, weight, and age (19 years) and is especially comfortable to drive. It's my daily driver, but then I don't make those long many-hours-of-driving trips once a year, for me it's more like 50 times a year. And I need to take good care of it because I can't buy a car like that anymore.

But has anyone thought about why the automakers have gone all-in on gigantic trucks and SUVs, or what killed the mini-van, or why they don't build sedans in any size anymore? Much of it, as I understand it, is the unintended consequences of Federal regulations, and because a certain amount of that is based on fuel economy requirements, EVs might be able to restore some sanity to the roads.

I'm no expert, but the minivan killed the station wagon. To begin with, automotive safety standards were tightening up, as were fuel economy standards, making it harder to build big wagons that complied with the new regulations. Especially CAFE standards which did not require automakers to reach a particular fuel mileage target for each vehicle, but an average for all the cars they sold. So the big station wagons were retired from the lineup, and replaced with minivans. Why does this help? Because minivans, unlike station wagons, are not cars. They're light trucks. Or at least they were. Until they became so popular that they weren't anymore. They were reclassified as passenger cars for regulatory purposes, which resulted in them being subject to the safety regulations for passenger cars, and put them back into the CAFE category for passenger cars.

The auto industry responded with the SUV, which is, once again, a truck, now with the definition of a truck defined in part by ground clearance. Enter the crossover, where a hatchback gets lifted enough (along with a few other details) that it magically becomes a truck. Oh, and apparently the fuel mileage rules for trucks right now are basically unattainable for what used to be normal size trucks. But as I understand it, the required fuel mileage for a truck is determined by a formula taking into consideration the vehicle's overall height and the size of its footprint. Which is perfect for SUVs: a vehicle with a larger footprint and a higher roofline is permitted a lower mileage rating. So to keep in compliance the manufacturers figured out they could make the vehicles taller, with a larger overall footprint to get an achievable mileage requirement, lift them to make sure that they are legally trucks, with the simplified safety standards and geometric fuel economy requirements, and you get a vehicle that reduces the costs of regulatory compliance while simultaneously having an entirely negative impact on all those things those regulations were supposed to achieve.

Presumably electric cars don't need to meet Federal mileage standards. So maybe those will allow us to get our sedans back.

/rant

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Part of the problem now though is that a whole new generation of kids raised in and learning to drive in their parents' CRVs and RAV4s all want to sit high up too. I'm sure this is why the majority of EVs priced for the masses all still maintain a Crossover profile.

Mileage standards are funny though, because it would be so much easier to hit the ever rising targets for ICEs with sedans instead of crossovers. Also, that time Chrysler classified the PT Cruiser as a truck in order to pad their CAFE numbers.

We have very different views on what constitutes "good" fuel efficiency, Dave.

American cars used to be mostly gigantic, then the small Japanese cars along with some "economy" American cars came along. I remember the Chevy Citation (a car named after the result of a traffic stop!) my parents bought, and how crazy smaller it was compared to the old station wagon. Smaller cars were normal around the turn of the century.

I still maintain the change was a result of chasing status, and a very American phenomenon at that. And I don't think performance matters. No one had AWD in Ohio in the 70's, and they still don't in Iceland where they get a lot more snow. People just don't care about efficiency.

Jeff:

No one had AWD in Ohio in the 70's

Cars in the 70s are not exactly known for being safe to drive. They also didn’t even have a choice. They were mostly all RWD with bald tires and sandbags in the trunk.

I remember my dad doing donuts in an empty parking lot in the 70s in a RWD car. Cars had studded snow tires back then (that one didn't at least not at the time). But I have only driven a RWD vehicle a handful of times and have never owned one (have owned 2 AWD cars both of which I still own but my daughter drives one of them).

Staggering to think of changes over the last 50 years. Often a fine line between need and want. And where its drawn varies by individual.