Why are they worried when the government will just bail them out again?
Weird. Something in the US is becoming unaffordable. That’s wild.
I’ve been driving the same car for over 20 years and it was old before I bought it. If I ever replace it, it will be for something that doesn’t cost money to operate. I’m hoping Aptera pulls a win and changes the game for everyone.
“We build cars that are too expensive for most people to buy and we need that profit! What could we do?”
Even Henry Ford figured it out, a century ago.
MAYBE if they Fired MORE Workers and RAISE Prices of their Cars all those Unemployed People can Purchase their Vehicles? Have they tried THAT yet?
Stellantis will remember this.
Have they considered advocating for higher wages so people can afford their cars?
Two problems, US income distribution is pathetic and shareholder power.
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Corporations pay stagnant wages, raise prices, funnel money out of the economy to shareholders who hoard wealth, and then get worried when there’s no one left who can buy their products?
Tell me again why we think C-Suite folks are smart?
Right, because they’ll get bailed out again and stay rich. That’s why.
It’s a god damn disgrace.
I’m sure someone will come around and tell me how complicated economics is and why we should trust business and industry leaders who went to school for this sort of thing, like basic pattern recognition and common sense couldn’t have predicted that people who can barely afford groceries would stop buying cars…
Fuck.
Tell me again why we think C-Suite folks are smart?
Some weird fetiziation that financial accumen is somehow the ultimate mark of intelligence above all else.
Thanks the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993
Think you pretty much nailed it.
Its gonna get worse. This is start of second much worse dark age.
What makes things cheaper and more affordable, is mass production. As cars get too expensive, they’ll have to manufacture fewer of them. As they manufacture fewer of them, they will get more expensive.
In the dark ages, most had nothing, but kings had castles, and horses, and feasts, slaves and whores.
This time it might be a bit different since AI can provide labour, but their problem that will still remain, is that only the rich will be consumers.
So the overall wealth of the world will go down. Most will be poor with nothing, and the wealthy will also be limited, since they can no longer take advantage of economics of scale.
But they will still be the wealthiest and most powerful, which is ultimately what they care about most.
The world will regress. The second dark age will be far worse than the first, and far more widespread.
And its all because social media allowed fascists to lie, and stupid people believed them, and those that didnt couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.
Nah. There’s way too many literate people, and information is easy to access. This isn’t going to be a dark age dystopia. It’ll be closer to corporate owned life.
So let in the 10,000$ Toyota EV1 and the like.
Maybe it is time to switch to communities built not around cars?
Maybe we could have 4 days weeks and more work-at-home to save gas?
cries in walkable cities with public transportation
Life in general has been unaffordable for awhile now.
It’s all those blasted safety features! In my day we died every weekend, and we turned out fine!
There is a paradox with safety features that is really interesting: the safer you make roads, the more aggressive people drive. Better breaks led to people tailgating more aggressively. Better crumble zones has led to bigger and heavier cars. It’s almost like there is a threshold of risk that people naturally gravitate to and that maybe the best way to improve traffic safety is through education
Yes. People are much worse at driving now mostly due to phones, but so because they’ve never driven a miata on public highways.
A professor at my university wrote a book called Navigating Environmental Attitudes, and he titled a chapter, “Educating the Public… and Other Disasters”. TL; DR: It doesn’t work.
That’s why I advocate for a big, metal spike on the steering wheel, pointed at the driver’s chest. (Okay, or designing the roads so that they feel unsafe, so drivers naturally slow down and pay attention.)
That’s why I advocate for a big, metal spike on the steering wheel, pointed at the driver’s chest.
Go back to old enough cars and that spike use to be the steering column. We now have a few different ways so it doesn’t crush/impale you into the seat anymore in a front end collision.
I remember reading a study about speeding in neighborhoods. It’s not unusual to have people driving 50+ in a 25 MPH neighborhood.
Speed bumps actually caused people to drive faster between the bumps.
What worked was more curves and narrow roads. Essentially making it more dangerous.
So you’re not wrong.
I’ve done the experiments myself. The street that I live on is a rat-run, on which drivers speed through a residential neighborhood with lots of bicyclists, kids, people walking dogs, students walking to school, and the like. The street is ridiculously wide, enough for four vehicles to squeeze by.
So I sometimes park my vehicle on the street. (I bike to work, and most other places.) That visual narrowing of the street is enough to slow them down a bit. The best day was when the people across the street had contractors in, and they parked their trucks on the street while I parked my vehicle on my side. There was still room for two vehicles to squeeze by (and the bus drivers would YOLO it through), but it felt so narrow that most people would stop for oncoming traffic, and take turns through the cataract.
My parents live in a neighborhood with these methodologies at play. Winter makes it fun. They live on a horseshoe shaped street and the corners have cul-de-sac bulges in the them. When cars inevitably are going too fast and slide off there are trees strategically placed so they hit those instead of going into peoples living rooms when they can’t make the turn. Bunch of teenage drivers in that neighborhood so this typically happens multiple times each winter. The vertical part of the horseshoe isn’t perfectly straight either and has a very modest curve in it. My parent’s house is basically at the outside apex of that curve. When the roads are icy the amount of times their car has been hit parked on the street in front of their house is embarrassing. Since it was a company car at the time they didn’t really care. Once they hit the front wheel basically square on which shoved the front axle straight into the transmission shattering it…that was a 5 figure repair bill. They’re retired now, all the kids are out, so no need for street parking.
I will say they live where the weather can be truly atrocious in winter. It’s sometimes painful just to breathe without a face covering. I have some screenshots of weather apps where the high for the day is -18F with windchills of approx -50F(-28C and -45C for the rest of the world). That’s an exceptional example but temps in the sub 20’s(-7C) isn’t exactly rare weather.
I know people are probably thinking this is a failure of the city not salting the roads but in all honesty residential is the last place they get to and at those temps even with salting…it’s still ice. Salt lowers the freezing point but doesn’t remove it.
(Okay, or designing the roads so that they feel unsafe, so drivers naturally slow down and pay attention.)
This can be as simple as drawing disorienting lines on the road.
Or choosing a width and windiness to achieve desired speeds, fill the reclaimed space with bike lanes and parking or bus stops or gardens or playgrounds in the widest parts
So improve safety by replacing airbags with nail bombs?
I mean they basically tried that already…
The Takata airbag recall is the largest in U.S. history, involving over 67 million, and globally over 100 million, defective inflators that can explode, spraying metal fragments.
The auto industry is concerned about a problem of their own making? Shocking.
