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A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

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Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#941

Post by dwood_dev »

dublinben wrote: post #185
ryandrake wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, it's pretty exciting. I'd like to see how much more they could strip out to reduce the price and still have a viable commercial product. I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car. Then again, I haven't bought a car new since the 90s, so I'm probably just an old fart who hasn't grokked what things cost today. I still remember the day when the base-model Corolla start…

The average price of new cars sold in the US last year was nearly $50k. The manufacturers make more money from expensive cars than cheap cars, and people keep buying them, so that's what they sell. Before they canceled the Fit, Honda was selling almost 10 times as many of the larger CR-V each year. You can find numerous new cars for sale in Mexico for under $15k USD.[0] Even Europe has several new cars under €20k.[1]…

Most of those models are not real. They exist, but they don't make many of the base model and if you attempt to purchase one, it is a 4-18 month lead time.

I was in the market in Mexico last year, just looking for a cheap city car with a warranty for when I am there. I test drove half the cars on that list, the other half I immediately eliminated after sitting in the driver's seat for under a minute.

You can think of those base models like MSRP GPUs right now. They exist on paper, but good luck actually getting one for MSRP.

In the end, I didn't purchase any of those and got a two year old certified preowned vehicle with the top trim and comfortable seats from a dealer with a warranty for about $3000USD more than the cheapest actually available model of those linked in your post.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#942

Post by lvl155 »

Animats wrote: post #771

The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1] What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable pri…

Do you own a BYD? It’s not that great. Build quality is subpar. Problem with investing in China is that once tech transfer ends, there’s no promise that these companies are capable of continued innovations. It’s basically an ecosystem dependent on outside innovations that they can “transfer” and tweak. That’s the whole “communist” economy in nutshell.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#943

Post by zzzeek »

gosub100 wrote: post #917
le-mark wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.

The fact that so many "climate activists" and environmentalists turned on him confirms my suspicion that they didn't think so highly about the earth or climate change in the first place. They care about partisan politics and their tribe more than the planet.

He spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected, so that now the EPA is gutted, the closing of coal plants has been halted, and federal lands are set to be drilled and mined into oblivion. This is what climate activists correctly opposed and continue to oppose in opposing Musk.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#944

Post by fourside »

kurtis_reed wrote: post #922
aucisson_masque wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BYD is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government. If the us were not to fight back, the non subsidized industries would die, Chinese would stop subsidizing, rack up the price and competition would be too difficult to start again because of the monopoly on lithium and advance on technology. It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries. Most recently Google, who had been giving Android…

> It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries False

Not a terribly compelling argument

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#945

Post by tessierashpool »

mapt wrote: post #924
theshrike79 wrote: post #828

And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students. And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily. Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.

There's a question about his actual goals in government. He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like Orwell's 1984, of the Stasi having 1/3 of Berlin on the books as informants against the other 2/3, go away completely. We have more cameras than ever. Every person gets to enjoy the kind of…

If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.

of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.

*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#946

Post by tessierashpool »

skellera wrote: post #905
le-mark wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.

I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit. I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that m…

Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.

ok, you can get that with a Hyundai though.

higher-quality, too, yet the Tesla costs more.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#947

Post by cryptoegorophy »

theshrike79 wrote: post #828

And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students. And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily. Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.

I think we would’ve lived in a different world if Elon didn’t use twitter. We might have actually landed on Mars already.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#948

Post by seanmcdirmid »

worik wrote: post #655
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Swe…

> BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA Or concentrate on the 80% of the worldmarket that is not the USA

Ya, this only applies if they even want to sell passenger cars in the USA. They definitely don’t have to.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#949

Post by usrusr »

So basically they are doing the simple "BEV can be cheap if you don't try to size the battery for long distance driving" but leave out lots of other things that don't meaningfully contribute to the lower price, as a distraction.

That might be just the thing that had been missing for bootstrapping the market of short haul electric (think of all those trips that are done in a car because they are almost but not quite walkable/bikeable!). Reminds me of how the Tesla roadster and then S bootstrapped the market of luxury electric.

Re: A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

#950

Post by Animats »

testing22321 wrote: post #893
Animats wrote: post #771

The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1] What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable pri…

The US automakers lost the plot a long time ago, and have just been sucking out money without innovation or improvement since. When California and the EPA tried to legislate lower emissions 9 years into the future, the US automakers sued to block saying it was impossible. Japanese automakers were already selling vehicles that met those standards. When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public f…

GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and were partially bailed out, the CEOs were replaced and the Government took a stake in the companies, which eventually paid off.
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