The Car Thread

[BobbyPhil1781]

1 hour ago, Tugboat said:

Wonder if things have changed since this lol. Wasn't it like a year ago if not longer?

[Tugboat]

1 hour ago, BobbyPhil1781 said:

Wonder if things have changed since this lol. Wasn't it like a year ago if not longer?

Don't think so.  lol.  It's still just a 7,000lbs piece of vaporware as far as i can tell.  It's all staged events and press stunts (like the drag race thing which has ambiguous circumstances trying to puff itself up).

They've probably fixed the glass issue, or at least somewhat fixed.  Or just revised the "goalposts" on the whole thing like with that weird archery demonstration showing that it's "arrow proof" for whatever good that is.  But last i saw, the stupid brick was struggling massively to tackle basic offroading, while other normal 4x4s were having to go around it being stuck in the way.  😆

 

It's basically just a vanity project for Elon at this point.  He's dug in so deep on this, i don't think his ego will ever let him just step back take the L on anything (even if he just keeps taking them in the end anyway).  So it'll get made, eventually.  End up in the hands of a select bunch of tech bros who will use it to commute to and from work and stop off at the grocery store.  And call it all a "win".

 

 

But it's seems like one of his typical, "over promise, under deliver" pet projects.  Especially any time he actually gets directly involved in something, rather than just letting the actual engineers do their work in peace.

[Mr.UFO]

I can't afford any of these, but my favorite cars are McLarens, Duesenbergs, and 1960s era Corvettes.

[Tugboat]

I saw one of the new C8 Corvettes in a metallic green yesterday, and it honestly looked like a real life Hotweels car.

 

idk if that's good or bad even.

[adamq]

This seems pretty bad for ol' Elon. Shame

[Tugboat]

58 minutes ago, adamq said:

This seems pretty bad for ol' Elon. Shame

Couldn't have happened to a worse person.  lol.

 

 

Just built trains.  ****.

[elevators_rule]

On 12/1/2023 at 10:04 PM, Tugboat said:

Don't think so.  lol.  It's still just a 7,000lbs piece of vaporware as far as i can tell.  It's all staged events and press stunts (like the drag race thing which has ambiguous circumstances trying to puff itself up).

They've probably fixed the glass issue, or at least somewhat fixed.  Or just revised the "goalposts" on the whole thing like with that weird archery demonstration showing that it's "arrow proof" for whatever good that is.  But last i saw, the stupid brick was struggling massively to tackle basic offroading, while other normal 4x4s were having to go around it being stuck in the way.  😆

 

It's basically just a vanity project for Elon at this point.  He's dug in so deep on this, i don't think his ego will ever let him just step back take the L on anything (even if he just keeps taking them in the end anyway).  So it'll get made, eventually.  End up in the hands of a select bunch of tech bros who will use it to commute to and from work and stop off at the grocery store.  And call it all a "win".

 

 

But it's seems like one of his typical, "over promise, under deliver" pet projects.  Especially any time he actually gets directly involved in something, rather than just letting the actual engineers do their work in peace.

I saw the same video. Wasn't it just a problem of having the wrong tires? You can make any off-roading vehicle look out of place if the tires aren't right.

 

Quote

"over promise, under deliver"

I'm one of the few people that actually likes the Cybertruck visually, but I'd never buy one because of how this right here.

[Tugboat]

13 hours ago, elevators_rule said:

I saw the same video. Wasn't it just a problem of having the wrong tires? You can make any off-roading vehicle look out of place if the tires aren't right.

 

I'm one of the few people that actually likes the Cybertruck visually, but I'd never buy one because of how this right here.

 

I mean, part of it is probably just the "wrong tires".  But that's the crux of the whole issue with the thing.  It's just sort of compromised at pretty much everything.  Ie. It needs those sort of tires to do the various other things it'll actually end up used for.  Like getting groceries, cruising some silicon valley freeways.  And because it's so huge and bloated, weighs about a million pounds, which would just end up destroying those sort of knobbly offroad tires and compromising what limited handling, braking, or on-road comfort it has, to likely even more dangerous levels, as well as nuking the effective range even further.

So what are you going to do?  Haul around a separate set of wheels to swap over if you want to actually do a bit of offroading in your "big macho truck"?  That'd take up pretty much the entire lolzy small cargo/bed area, and then some.  lol.

 

It's just a fundamentally flawed concept on so many different levels.  It's effectively just an huge, expensive, dangerous, largely impactical and compromised aesthetic statement piece.  Like the Hummer EV...but with the "cult of Elon" stank on it.

[BobbyPhil1781]

On 12/14/2023 at 5:30 AM, elevators_rule said:

I'm one of the few people that actually likes the Cybertruck visually, but I'd never buy one because of how this right here.

I think it looks terrible but I like where the electric vehicle market is headed. I just purchased a car but my next might be electric. I just wanted to wait until we got a good amount of real use data before making the investment. 

Regardless of my opinion of it, the ability to beat a Porsche while towing one was funny to me. It's gimmicky but whatever.

[elevators_rule]

9 minutes ago, BobbyPhil1781 said:

I think it looks terrible but I like where the electric vehicle market is headed. I just purchased a car but my next might be electric. I just wanted to wait until we got a good amount of real use data before making the investment. 

Regardless of my opinion of it, the ability to beat a Porsche while towing one was funny to me. It's gimmicky but whatever.

Same. Feels like this is the twilight gen between electric/self-driving being beneficial and gasoline having utility. Bought a 2023 ICE Mazda and hoping for the 2030s vehicles having a use-case. Will likely buy a new vehicle around then.

[AFlaccoSeagulls]

General question about cars and leasing, not sure if I should put this in TAST or here, but here goes:

So my girlfriend and I currently have 2 cars: I have a car that's worth $50k right now that I owe nothing on, and she's got a car that she bought new last year that's now worth $28k and she owes $20k on. Her monthly payment right now is like $550 or something (which, to me, is outrageous for a car).

I was thinking that we don't really need 2 cars in our house. We both WFH, and generally speaking we both drive everywhere together. Very rarely do we need to use both cars at a time. So my thought was this:

What if we traded in both cars and leased a new car? I was running the numbers last night and we could lease a new car for roughly $150/month for 30 months if we applied my entire car towards the leas car. Now, my question is primarily, does this make financial sense? You're putting $50k towards a lease, but what happens at the end of the lease? Does the $50k you put towards the lease apply to buying that car OR apply to the next car you lease? I've never leased before so I don't know how this works, but I'm kind of liking the idea of just having a new car every 3 years and paying very little monthly for it while having all maintenance and stuff covered.

[Tugboat]

4 hours ago, AFlaccoSeagulls said:

General question about cars and leasing, not sure if I should put this in TAST or here, but here goes:

So my girlfriend and I currently have 2 cars: I have a car that's worth $50k right now that I owe nothing on, and she's got a car that she bought new last year that's now worth $28k and she owes $20k on. Her monthly payment right now is like $550 or something (which, to me, is outrageous for a car).

I was thinking that we don't really need 2 cars in our house. We both WFH, and generally speaking we both drive everywhere together. Very rarely do we need to use both cars at a time. So my thought was this:

What if we traded in both cars and leased a new car? I was running the numbers last night and we could lease a new car for roughly $150/month for 30 months if we applied my entire car towards the leas car. Now, my question is primarily, does this make financial sense? You're putting $50k towards a lease, but what happens at the end of the lease? Does the $50k you put towards the lease apply to buying that car OR apply to the next car you lease? I've never leased before so I don't know how this works, but I'm kind of liking the idea of just having a new car every 3 years and paying very little monthly for it while having all maintenance and stuff covered.

 

I'm not an expert, but it sounds like a really financially imprudent option to me.  Generally speaking, when you put money down on a lease...that money along with your payments can be converted to a lease buyout financing option.  But when you do that, you're going to get much cruddier terms and value than just financing the car to buy from the start - if that's the intention, rather than just rolling into eterntal leasing.  Brand new cars tend to get better financing terms than pre-owned (which is effectively what they'd be looking at that financing of a lease buyout as).  Plus you'll potentially get a weak valuation on your $50k trade-in depending on what that dealership thinks they can rip someone off for on it, due to desirability.

Especially if you actually already have a fully functional, fully paid off car that would suffice.  But it probably really depends on what sort of terms they'd give you on a lease swap like that on her $550/month deal.  But burning a $50k asset over it seems backward to me.  Especially with how jacked up the car market is these days, and how it's never recovered from Covid and other factors.  Where...half the time you'll see 2-year lease return Toyota Corollas asking more than the MSRP for a brand new one...simply because dealers can't get their hands on them or keep them in stock.

 

Kind of a weird situation though.

If the terms are super terrrible on her financing arrangement, it might even table out if you could trade her car in for something cheaper and older, cut your losses on the payments...then private sale the cheaper car (or find a dealership that will just buy it up as inventory).  But that's a lot of math and legwork and might also be completely wrong.  😆

[Malfatron]

Why havent we talked more about a bitchin camaro @Webmaster

[Tugboat]

7 hours ago, elevators_rule said:

Same. Feels like this is the twilight gen between electric/self-driving being beneficial and gasoline having utility. Bought a 2023 ICE Mazda and hoping for the 2030s vehicles having a use-case. Will likely buy a new vehicle around then.

I just really don't see it.  What i see, is a coming fustercluck of capability gap as ICE cars are phased out, leaving only insanely expensive pickup trucks and huge SUVs for people to buy.  Or...extremely limited or extremely expensive EVs.  With insanely inadequate infrastructure for it in most places.

 

It really depends on where you are.  If you're in a major metro area with short commutes and frequent charging stations?  Cool!

Where i'm at in the city, i could easily get by with a little EV citycar most of the time.  I drive somewhere maybe once every other week, sometimes even less, sometimes a little more.  But really not very much and rarely that far.  But wait...there's problems...

 

1)It leaves behind the rural population and complicates things for anyone who drives any distance.

For example...heading home for the holidays, my choices are either...drive home for ~8 hours and probably $70-80 bucks in gasoline depending on what the price is doing, plus be able to haul whatever luggage i want, etc.  Or buy an $800 plane ticket each way.

Now...even if i had a real high end Tesla EV with much better range than a Citycar EV...i would literally have to stop at one of the two charging areas along the highway.  Sit there and add time to my already stupidly long drive.  And that's if i happened to roll through at a time when those handful of EV fast charging stations were actually available (they're already getting crowded).  So i'd be spending $50-100k+ to upgrade to an EV that can get me to a situation that requires me to stop and wait to charge at limited spots along the one route that even has them (there are like 5 or 6 different routes but only 2 have convenient charging stations and one of those is like 13 hrs drive + National Park fees).  My parents even have things set up that they could eventually transition to a 240v charging setup in their garage because my dad had those put in for welding.  But that's hardly typical.

Anecdotal, yes...but still extremely typical and common for people who need to make rural commutes.  Across most of Canada, the US Midwest, etc.

 

2)The Infrastructure is simply not there.

My underground parkade has zero charging infrastructure for electric cars.  For the whole building.  Almost none of the buildings here are remotely equipped for it.  Even brand new builds.  Hugely expensive retrofit.  Not even limited to multifamily housing.  The majority of single detached housing stock here, especially a little bit older...requires a complete panel replacement and sometimes even literally trenching a new line to support that kind of electrical demand (particularly if they've got other more effective decarbonizing features like a heat pump).  It's kind of a mess.  And that's just in urban and relatively urban areas.  You into actually Rural areas and they'll be straight up depleting their EV range just driving into town to pickup the mail and some groceries and back, if they can even make it at all.

The other component of this is...the grid here is already way over-leveraged.  It's still relying extremely heavily on natural gas, coal, fossil fuel production to meet demand...and is well short, with sustainable options weak and slow to come online without the Nuclear option on the table.  Hydro is an option in some places, but has ****ed up enough things already with our rapidly diminishing watersheds...more isn't always a great option, or an option at all if you live somewhere topographically flat.  Short of massive ramp up of Nuclear power, there's practically no way to meet inherent demand...much less compensate for the immense increase in demand from a widespread transition to EVs.  And it's not just power generation capacity that's lacking.  Very little of the grid across North America is built to remotely handle the sort of increased demand a widespread shift to EVs would create.  It's massive infrastructure overhaul to keep the entire thing from collapsing.

 

3) That's the lie of EVs as a savior.

The reality is...the enormous stupid EV push is the product of the two biggest polluting industries and lobbies in North America coming together to realize a common interest.  Car companies realize...they need to look more "green".  And the alternative is that they start to get pushed out of the market altogether.  They want to continue selling cars at all costs.    To the consumer, the enviroment, geopolitics, whatever.  Don't care.  Sell More Cars.  They don't want to admit that there might be an alernative to "Cars Always".  They've also found out that EV platforms require basically zero engineering to just reskin with different "bodies" to make it look like twelve different models of car but it's all exactly the same.  That makes for huge potential profit margins, especially when they can sell EVs at a huge premium price...because they've succesfully lobbied government to provide incentives, and tax relief to the whole thing.

Petrochemical companies realize...things are turning on them, so they redirect that "green" energy into stupid EVs.  Because they realize...there's absolutely no possible way that North America is meeting electrical demands for all these EVs without somehow looping them in on the process of Electricity Generation.  Burning more fossil fuels.  It keeps them in the mix, while they get to act all green and proud and put on idiotic "Climate Conferences" where they talk about carbon neutrality and other such nonsense.  Buys them time to continue to pivot toward mining interests that they're also associated with, for battery materials.  Which is also a hugely environmentally destructive process.

 

 

 

I just really hope that at some point, the world wakes up and realizes EVs are the worst possible solution to a problem that cars created.  They're bad, stupid cars.  They introduce a whole host of new problems in addition to the existing problems that cars create in the amount of insane wasted space destroying the fabric of communities.  Also just killing like tons of children every year - more than pretty much anything else other than sometimes guns.

 

Any way that humanity survives this...is going to require massive, fundamental reconfiguration and rethinking of infrastructure.  Why not do it in a way that is actually efficient and community-focused?  Build trains.  Light rail, trams, high speed rail between hubs connecting it all.

Leave rural folks to their dinosaur burning machines because it's just never going to make sense to change that within our lifetimes.  The folks who could actually justify a pickup truck (and a diesel which is far more efficient at long commutes).

Tackle the problem in a proactive way.  Rather than trying to retrofit some faux green EV self-driving car tech to a problem that runs much much deeper.

 

It's like people don't realize there are cities out there running entire Light Rail networks off windfarms outside of town.  They're that much more efficient than thousands upon thousands of 7000lbs EV monstrosities driving around with one person in them.

[Tugboat]

Just now, Tugboat said:

I just really don't see it.  What i see, is a coming fustercluck of capability gap as ICE cars are phased out, leaving only insanely expensive pickup trucks and huge SUVs for people to buy.  Or...extremely limited or extremely expensive EVs.  With insanely inadequate infrastructure for it in most places.

 

It really depends on where you are.  If you're in a major metro area with short commutes and frequent charging stations?  Cool!

Where i'm at in the city, i could easily get by with a little EV citycar most of the time.  I drive somewhere maybe once every other week, sometimes even less, sometimes a little more.  But really not very much and rarely that far.  But wait...there's problems...

 

1)It leaves behind the rural population and complicates things for anyone who drives any distance.

For example...heading home for the holidays, my choices are either...drive home for ~8 hours and probably $70-80 bucks in gasoline depending on what the price is doing, plus be able to haul whatever luggage i want, etc.  Or buy an $800 plane ticket each way.

Now...even if i had a real high end Tesla EV with much better range than a Citycar EV...i would literally have to stop at one of the two charging areas along the highway.  Sit there and add time to my already stupidly long drive.  And that's if i happened to roll through at a time when those handful of EV fast charging stations were actually available (they're already getting crowded).  So i'd be spending $50-100k+ to upgrade to an EV that can get me to a situation that requires me to stop and wait to charge at limited spots along the one route that even has them (there are like 5 or 6 different routes but only 2 have convenient charging stations and one of those is like 13 hrs drive + National Park fees).  My parents even have things set up that they could eventually transition to a 240v charging setup in their garage because my dad had those put in for welding.  But that's hardly typical.

Anecdotal, yes...but still extremely typical and common for people who need to make rural commutes.  Across most of Canada, the US Midwest, etc.

 

2)The Infrastructure is simply not there.

My underground parkade has zero charging infrastructure for electric cars.  For the whole building.  Almost none of the buildings here are remotely equipped for it.  Even brand new builds.  Hugely expensive retrofit.  Not even limited to multifamily housing.  The majority of single detached housing stock here, especially a little bit older...requires a complete panel replacement and sometimes even literally trenching a new line to support that kind of electrical demand (particularly if they've got other more effective decarbonizing features like a heat pump).  It's kind of a mess.  And that's just in urban and relatively urban areas.  You into actually Rural areas and they'll be straight up depleting their EV range just driving into town to pickup the mail and some groceries and back, if they can even make it at all.

The other component of this is...the grid here is already way over-leveraged.  It's still relying extremely heavily on natural gas, coal, fossil fuel production to meet demand...and is well short, with sustainable options weak and slow to come online without the Nuclear option on the table.  Hydro is an option in some places, but has ****ed up enough things already with our rapidly diminishing watersheds...more isn't always a great option, or an option at all if you live somewhere topographically flat.  Short of massive ramp up of Nuclear power, there's practically no way to meet inherent demand...much less compensate for the immense increase in demand from a widespread transition to EVs.  And it's not just power generation capacity that's lacking.  Very little of the grid across North America is built to remotely handle the sort of increased demand a widespread shift to EVs would create.  It's massive infrastructure overhaul to keep the entire thing from collapsing.

 

3) That's the lie of EVs as a savior.

The reality is...the enormous stupid EV push is the product of the two biggest polluting industries and lobbies in North America coming together to realize a common interest.  Car companies realize...they need to look more "green".  And the alternative is that they start to get pushed out of the market altogether.  They want to continue selling cars at all costs.    To the consumer, the enviroment, geopolitics, whatever.  Don't care.  Sell More Cars.  They don't want to admit that there might be an alernative to "Cars Always".  They've also found out that EV platforms require basically zero engineering to just reskin with different "bodies" to make it look like twelve different models of car but it's all exactly the same.  That makes for huge potential profit margins, especially when they can sell EVs at a huge premium price...because they've succesfully lobbied government to provide incentives, and tax relief to the whole thing.

Petrochemical companies realize...things are turning on them, so they redirect that "green" energy into stupid EVs.  Because they realize...there's absolutely no possible way that North America is meeting electrical demands for all these EVs without somehow looping them in on the process of Electricity Generation.  Burning more fossil fuels.  It keeps them in the mix, while they get to act all green and proud and put on idiotic "Climate Conferences" where they talk about carbon neutrality and other such nonsense.  Buys them time to continue to pivot toward mining interests that they're also associated with, for battery materials.  Which is also a hugely environmentally destructive process.

 

 

 

I just really hope that at some point, the world wakes up and realizes EVs are the worst possible solution to a problem that cars created.  They're bad, stupid cars.  They introduce a whole host of new problems in addition to the existing problems that cars create in the amount of insane wasted space destroying the fabric of communities.  Also just killing like tons of children every year - more than pretty much anything else other than sometimes guns.

 

Any way that humanity survives this...is going to require massive, fundamental reconfiguration and rethinking of infrastructure.  Why not do it in a way that is actually efficient and community-focused?  Build trains.  Light rail, trams, high speed rail between hubs connecting it all.

Leave rural folks to their dinosaur burning machines because it's just never going to make sense to change that within our lifetimes.  The folks who could actually justify a pickup truck (and a diesel which is far more efficient at long commutes).

Tackle the problem in a proactive way.  Rather than trying to retrofit some faux green EV self-driving car tech to a problem that runs much much deeper.

 

It's like people don't realize there are cities out there running entire Light Rail networks off windfarms outside of town.  They're that much more efficient than thousands upon thousands of 7000lbs EV monstrosities driving around with one person in them.

 

Anyway, sorry and you're welcome.  I regret nothing.