No, but they sure as hell are trying to influence businesses to work against what they know sells to get their way, and LOL- it's failing here.

Nothing like wasting my tax dollars rewarding EV fans (who refuse to pay their fair share) and limiting my choices thru unreasonable legislation.

rjp

because half the country is simply reactionary to anything that might possibly be different than when they were coming of age and in there early 20s. thats why.



recently we adopted a new minnesota state flag. say what you want about the state flag, but second it changed, a bunch of people, who didnt give a rats ass about the state flag for decades, went out and bought the OLD flag, and suddenly a bunch of people decided to make this an outrage against their very soul.

just like ... who cares? we had a dumb flag, we got a slightly less dumb flag. yawn. move on in life.

these people only have one emotion, its outrage, and they make everything about it. because they dont have real lives or like, real problems. they have just chosen to be unhappy, via outrage that does not effect them in any way, ever. they are literally only making their own lives suck more by being pissed all the time. and they are impotent to trying to stop inevitable cultural and technological changes.

There are lots of reasons.

Some people just don't want to be told what to do. They'd be against free money if they were told they HAD to take it.

There are a lot of people who are invested in the status quo both financially and emotionally. I don't have an emotional attachment to the appliance I drive daily, but I love my old Porsches and if I thought EVs would result in me not being able to enjoy them, I'd be part of the anti-EV crowd myself. But it's not going to happen - not in my lifetime.

We have been told that the status quo is hunky dory and we don't need to change. We are told we have thousands of years worth of oil in the ground, but aren't told about the massive expense of turning it into fuel and the effect it will have on our economy, $20/gallon gas is not out of the question.

And then there are people who simply fear change. I think a lot of people are just afraid of an unknown future.


Probably not going to happen. I'm too lazy and my interest in cars is stuck in the 20th century. I will say the Crown is one of the fugliest cars I've ever seen. I don't think introducing new technology to a skeptical public by making cars that look radically different from the familiar is a good idea.


Yes it is, and I'm looking forward to it. It's a great time to be alive.

Mike, I think the economic value of each AI response has to exceed the cost of providing it (power, capital, etc) for the technology to sustainably grow. I’m not sure if the current trend of massive centralized AI clusters with water cooling and even their own mini nuclear power sources (if some are to be believed) running trillion-parameter models is the best way to go. I also think for a lot of business processes, traditional code is a lot more efficient (why do you need a huge LLM in a giant AI datacenter to do SAP?). I am interested in the potential to push AI processing to the client. 99% of the compute cycles of a typical PC are un-used, and starting with Apple all PC/phone makers will be integrating AI processing in the device. I think more efficient models and hardware are more interesting than mega DCs.

you mean like 80+ years of oil company subsidies? and car dealership laws that benefit no one besides useless middle men? whole car based industries that exist because of government manipulation? the chicken tax? mandatory parking lots that destroyed small towns, small businesses, downtowns, and the walkable city?

like the problem with this argument is the notion that there was ever a pure market. and it was never pure. it was just unpure in the way you wanted it to be, so you ignore it. all of sudden some money is going somewhere else and it all a big old problem.

like the world you are defending, wasnt derived by some kind of free market purity. winners and losers were already picked by big business and the government (and hint, you as the consumer were the loser). you are just mad that we are un-doing some of the biased, influenced, and subsidized things that you like. that have existed for decades.

I think the whole, self-driving/robo taxi concept it is a loser. I don't see the need for it, and I don't see how it has a future.

there is the whole technical infeasibility of it too.

full self driving is a silicon valley software engineers wet dream, not a reality anywhere else.

For folks like us, indeed the robo-taxi is indeed a non-starter. But I'm not so sure about people like my son and daughter who both live in urban centers and do not have drivers' licenses. They step on a bus or call a taxi. It is their lifestyle.

Best
Les

I didn't realize all of those places were mostly converted...
I have seen electric UPS and electric Amazon vans in/around Houston.

There is no such thing as free money. And anyone who can afford an EV, even in Europe, and especially in the US, where taxpayers are a near minority, would be a taxpayer and rightly pissed off that they're paying for this scheme.

Because there is a mandate EV crowd in charge.


^this^

Ahnold agrees with you.

<iframe width="1280" height="720" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eAkeZqAN_qU" title="Quaid Hails A Johnny Cab | Total Recall" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

LOL!

Clearly, if you need to haul a bunch of people and all of their luggage to/from the airport or grandmas house, Miata Is Always The Answer because they are small and lightweight.

You know, there are so many super light weight EVs out there...

:D

I look at it as a positive. About the time I really need to stop driving, they will have perfected self driving cars and my problem is solved. We already use Waymo about 50 times a year in Phoenix. It's an unusually calm experience and we've had a couple of unusual situations in them. Musk is so far behind the curve on this that I'm not sure he can stay sober and focused enough to catch up.

Yeah, like that.

Oil has a proven use. Countries go to war over it- we NEED oil, and we have a lot of it underneath us. An EV with dubious benefit and a virtue-signaling tool for leftists? not so much.

Let it die.

rjp

group911 mentioned Waymo. I was in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, it was interesting watching the modified Jaguars with cameras and sensors mounted all over it drive around.

We were in one yesterday that was navigating a strip mall parking lot when it drove us into an unfinished construction area. It took a couple of minutes for it to figure things out before backing up and moving on. In their defense, the construction zone was poorly marked. Naturally, all the gawkers whipped out their cameras because everyone loves to see something new fail . I'd love to see them program them for a track. In theory, they should be able to follow the perfect line right?

Someone said that no one is forcing anyone to buy EVs...

"California bans the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035"
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/25/california-bans-the-sale-of-new-gas-powered-cars-by-2035.html
Cali isn't going to ban all gas powered vehicles then
"The policy will not ban people from owning and driving conventional vehicles or from selling them on the used market."

but it is certainly a step in that direction. They are allowing a portion of vehicles at least up until 2035 to be hybrids. And after 2035, I guess hydrogen is allowed.
"But the rule does phase out such vehicles over time, requiring 35% of total new vehicle sales to be powered by batteries or hydrogen by 2026 and 68% by 2030."

I'm sure that there will be hold outs, and some folks will keep old vehicles running for years, but it's unlikely that Cali is going to end up like Cuba. As vehicles die, they'll have to be replaced, and the primary option seems most likely to be EVs.

There is a huge market for 'in-city' robo-taxies. People who love in urban centers and don't want/need to own a car, seniors who can't don't want to drive. The market is way too big to walk away from.

Max 30 MPH, max five mile trips, the market can be lucrative.

You might change your mind when you turn 75 or 80 and can't drive.

Most mandates are EV, or hybrids. And most are 'targets' or 'proposed'.

I'm not losing any sleep over it until it actually happens.

This topic is 'hot' because the tax rebates are obvious to everyone, unlike the hidden rebates/tax breaks for most other industries, including oil/gas.