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For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

Automotive industry is one of the biggest scams on planet earth. One of my favorite cases recently is how Suzuki Jimny is banned in Europe and US because of emission standards allegedly, so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km oh and surprise surprise Mercedes are going to release a smaller more affordable G-Class [1].

[1] - https://www.motortrend.com/news/2026-mercedes-benz-baby-g-wa...

Manufacturers must hit a level of CO2 emissions on average across their whole fleet. As such, Suzuki is choosing to discontinue the Jimny because of the tougher fleet average targets starting in 2025. Overall you’re right that it’s a bit of a fix; Mercedes ‘pools’ its emissions with other manufacturers/brands. It currently pools with Smart, but may also pool with Volvo/Polestar? [0] It’s such an obvious approach to ‘game’ the targets, it’s a wonder the EU didn’t see it coming when they introduced the scheme. [0] https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...

This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

Just like code, regulation isn't intrinsically valuable - it's a means to an end, and piling lots of poorly-written stuff on top of each other has disasterous consequences for society. We have to make sure that the code and law that we write is carefully thought out and crafted to achieve its desired effect with minimal complexity, and formally verify and test it when possible.

(an example of testing law may be to get a few clever people into a room and red-team possible exploits in the proposed bill or regulation)

> This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

It seems that the goal is to pressure automakers to improve the efficiency across their entire line instead of simply banning low-efficiency models altogether.

If an automaker discontinues a low-efficient model in order to have access to a market, isn't this an example of regulation working well?

Did you read the parent comment?

> so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km

This is an example of a manufacturer discontinuing a more efficient vehicle while continuing to sell a larger vehicle that is significantly less efficient.

That's the opposite of what you want. So, no, this is not an example of regulation working well.

This refers to two different manufacturers, with two different approaches.

To meet the overall tougher targets (95g/km average) Suzuki is discontinuing certain models which release higher levels of CO2 to reduce their average. This is presumably the intention of the regulation - to drive manufacturer behaviour.

Mercedes is, OOTH, pooling with other manufacturers who presumably have emissions to spare, and likely paying them royally for it[0]. They're not alone in this approach, but some would argue it's against the spirit of the regulation, even if it ultimately complies with the letter.

[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/747225/tesla-earns-1billion-sell... - note that Tesla doesn't pool with Mercedes; this is just an example of the value

If we Zoom out and look at the net-net efficiency, is there a Steelman argument? I’m wondering if this is a locally based optimization that provides manufacturers with more flexibility to optimize across their fleet.

I don't quite understand. Even if the intent was to to provide manufacturers more flexibility, the fact that a much more efficient line was discontinued as a result of the regulations implies that the result was less efficiency.

Maybe I misunderstood. Could you explain your idea in more detail?

Is there an interpretation where people credibly thought it was better to aggregate at the fleet grain rather than individual levels? Ie is there a good faith argument?

Not saying it was a great argument. But for the Meta-signal.

Ie on tariffs there is a reasonable explanation possible. It requires one to completely disregard almost all economic theory and history… but it does seem possible that a sufficiently economically naive person might reach this conclusion.

> Is there an interpretation where people credibly thought it was better to aggregate at the fleet grain rather than individual levels? Ie is there a good faith argument?

"Good faith argument" implies that I think that the regulators were acting in bad faith. I don't! I believe they had the best intentions - sorry if I made it seem otherwise.

I'm just using the fact that the outcomes were negative to make the point that, even with the best intentions, if you're not careful with how you act, your actions can have negative results.

I totally get the logic of "it was better to aggregate at the fleet grain rather than individual levels" - I think a naive person would have done something similar - but it didn't work out, and it shows that you need to apply way more thought, effort, and analysis than you might naively assume.

I don’t see the issue in that though. If the target was to keep the average emission down across the entire country and if inefficient brand A decided to merge with efficient brand B to keep the average down that seems like it still adheres to the spirit of the law

Seems more like it meets the letter of the law.

The spirit was surely be too accelerate efficiency by ensuring all manufacturers improve. That has been negated; reducing the necessary efficiency for some manufacturers just because others are doing well.

It's like if you allowed multiple people to mix blood samples for a DUI check. Sure, there'd have to be less drinking over all, but some would still be drunk af and the effectiveness of the law would be greatly reduced.

Not a great analogy. CO2 emissions are a global phenomenon, so the average emission level is exactly what matters. Drunkenness is not.

Reasonable criticism of the analogy, but the point was/is that this chicanery weakened the effect of the legislation allowing more CO² than would otherwise have been the case. Thus, the spirit of the law was not respected.

Yeah it's not really "gaming" anything.

A last effort to extend the many favors granted to the dying german auto industry

They likely saw it coming… and deliberately did it this way.

All local industry distorts their relevant politics. There’s lobbyists in the EU too.

The EU economy has a lot of car manufacturing, so cars are probably a big deal in Brussels.

Especially in Germany, which has several major manufacturers (Daimler-Benz, VW, BMW) that are important to the economy. Additionally, VW is part owned by the government of one of the states, which is why they are frequently favored by the government. Despite various scandals at VW, there are rarely any serious consequences for the company, because the government always finds a way to make trouble go away.

And Germany is fairly influential in the EU so they probably extend the protection of these companies to the EU level.

EU politics are basically French, German politics vs smaller countries now, I think. The triangle balance of France, Germany, UK has been replaced by a more centralised but also more diffuse model, although Poland seems to be becoming more important.

> The EU economy has a lot of car manufacturing, so cars are probably a big deal in Brussels.

Car manufacturing is a strategic component of a nation's defense infrastructure. It goes way beyond trade protectionism.

Is that weighted for individual car popularity? Because couldn’t you put three push cars in your lineup that you don’t realistically expect to sell and be fine?

AFAIK the average emissions are based on cars that were actually sold. So yeah, it's weighted for popularity in a way.

Link not working

Weird; it was truncated somehow.

https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...

I wonder if that's why Ford, Ram, and Nissan all at the same time decide to discontinue their mini cargo vans a year ago.

If you're talking about the ford transit (I'm just guessing) but maybe the tariff rules changed? IIUC The transit was shipped to the US from europe as a "bus" because it was configured with car seats on board and then they would strip the seats and ship them back to europe. Buses are exempt from tariffs otherwise municipal public transit would be even more in the drink.

This is the Ford Transit Connect. They're known as mini cargo vans and popular with trades and for city driving because they're slightly smaller than a mini van. The equivalent to the Transit Connect was the Ram ProMaster City and Nissan NV200. They all were discontinued within two years of each other.

>This is the Ford Transit Connect.

isnt that a VW made in Poland?

The Jimny is my favorite example of a cool little vehicle that would address a glaring hole in the U.S. market.

The situation here is pathetic. We can't have truly small trucks or sport-utes because of obviously incompetent or corrupt regulations.

Is it really banned in Europe? I've seen quite a few of them in Germany

The Jimny or similar Suzuki models would not be offered for sale in the U.S. because it’s basically the latest iteration of the Samuri, which died there after Consumer Reports falsely claimed that it was dangerously prone to rollover.

The Samuri, sold in India as the Gypsy and used extensively by Indian police, did rollover alarmingly often until the 1993 model when the track width was increased by 90mm.

Yeah but look at it. It's a tall vehicle. Of course it's more likely to roll over. It's tall so that it can go over things. It has a purpose. Don't drive it like a sports car and dont haul your family in it on the daily. People bought utility vehicles and used them as family haulers and then bitched when they rolled over. It's stupid. Drive a car.

It's like complaining that you bought a boat, but the water surrounding them is dangerous and you could drown in it. So we need to make it work on land so that you can take the kids to school in it without drowning.

After the mid 1980s, SUVs were consistently and explicitly marketed and sold to families as passengers vehicles.

I think the idea may have been that these would help with bad Indian roads — even our potholes have potholes — but the police neglected to account for having to participate in the odd car chase now and then.

I had rented a barebones Jimny last month when I was in Auckland for the week. Not saying it was prone to roll. But holy hell was it feeling like I could roll that bad boy on some curvy gravel roads. I also loved it.

I don't recognize it as being a Samurai descendent.

Related note: I just saw a Suzuki Sidekick on the road in L.A., in Geo Tracker trim... a rare sight nowadays. It sounded like shit, but with a robust platform a vehicle like that would be just what the U.S. market lacks: a burly SMALL sport-ute.

Example #5621 that a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have.

That's overly reductive.

1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

2. You can work around #1 by applying incentives for manufacturers to make more efficient cars should lead any carbon tax

3. If you just reward companies based on fleet-average fuel economy without regard to vehicle size, then it would be rather bad for US car companies (who employ unionized workers) that historically make larger cars than Asian and European companies.

4. So the first thing done was to have a separate standard for passenger vehicles and light-trucks, but this resulted in minivans and SUVs being made in such a way as to get the light-truck rating

5. We then ended up with the size-based calculation we have today, but the formula is (IMO) overly punitive on small vehicles. Given that the formula was forward looking, it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.

All carbon tax is inherently regressive but that's also trivially fixable. Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive, since on average richer people will spend more on fuel (and therefore the tax) even though it is likely a much smaller percentage of their spending.

Every single one of your ideas has problems that are solved by a carbon tax. Taxes are simple, they accomplish what you want, and they don't have loopholes. A carbon tax will _never_ have the unintended consequence of making emissions worse. Many of our current regulations, including the one I was responding to do exactly that because they actually cause people to buy larger trucks than they otherwise would with worse fuel efficiency.

A carbon tax might not on it's own be enough to solve the problem (especially if you set it to low), but no matter what level you set it, it will help. Thanks to unintended consequences, many of our current regulations are actively counter productive, while _also_ having negative economic and other costs.

All costs are regressive to people with less ability to bear them. By making them not regressive we don't change behavior! It doesn't matter if they're regressive if the objective is to get people to not drive or to burn less gas. Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon. There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones.

> Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon.

Shifting cost to the emitters is a better way to put it. If a factory can make 10m in upgrades over time to reduce their carbon tax burden by 15m over time, they are definitely going to do it. So I disagree: I say it does change behavior and it does reduce actual carbon.

> There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones

Whether that's true or not it does not mean a carbon tax would not 'reduce actual carbon'.

Drivers of ICE vehicles are the emitters.

An ICE vehicle sitting in a driveway with its engine off emits no pollution (that is, after the initial impact of manufacturing and delivering it).

The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.

However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.

It would change behaviour more, not less.

If you set the carbon tax at about $1/gallon of gasoline, the corresponding carbon rebate would be about $1000 per family per year.

That wouldn't affect rich people much; neither the $1/gallon nor the $1000 extra income is significant. But many rich people get rich by being penny-wise, so many would change behaviour, by buying an EV or similar.

But for poor people both $1/gallon and $1000 per year is significant. If gas was $1/gallon more expensive, poor people definitely would drive less.

The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000

The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.

The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.

That doesn’t really sound like the worst thing?

Someone has to buy them for full price before they show up on the used market 5-10 years later.

That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.

New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.

Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.

Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).

That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.

And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.

So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.

The context is about when cars reach the poor - your example of someone spending $60k is irrelevant.

A poorer person in NZ spends at most a few thousand on their car. The original retail price is nearly irrelevant by the time it gets to someone poorish (however maintenance/parts costs do matter for old cars).

The financial benefit of a discount mostly goes to the people that own the car while it depreciates as it trickles down.

Context: In New Zealand, the vast majority of people drive second hand cars (mostly imported second hand from Japan). A 20 year old car is regarded as newish in New Zealand. I am well off, so I have two second hand cars, my daily driver is 2006 I think, and I have a 1996 4WD for other stuff. New cars are only bought by the well off.

I hear you. The numbers I provided were manufactured to illustrate the math and support my argument, not to be representative of a typical price.

I thought about it some more but it is hard to explain.

I wonder if your mental model is that a $20k discount applies at all future prices - so that when the car is sold for $5k that it's "actual" worth is $25k.

My mental model is that when the car is sold at $5k it is worth $5k and the $20k discount has disappeared (the value captured by the early owners).

Background: I'm a top 5% earner but I have friends who are struggling financially.

My opinion is that the discounts is money paid for by our taxpayers into overseas pockets, that benefits a few well off people. Strangely enough the discounts were introduced by our more socialist party, and removed by the incoming less socialist party. I don't believe the discounts are an equitable use of government funds.

I am also extremely sceptical that there is enough environmental benefits: the policy appears green but perhaps it is not (greenwashed).

My original point is that any subsidy increases the number of cars that are sold, which downstream increases the number available on the used market.

Basic supply and demand. Increases supply keeps prices down

Road damage increases by the fourth power of axle weight. So up to a rounding error all road damage is caused by trucks.

The rebate can be paid out more frequently than annually.

Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.

The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.

The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.

The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.

Yes, carbon taxes are tricky, with loopholes and grifters etc.

But it's still substantially simpler, with fewer loopholes and grifters than any of the effective alternatives proposed.

Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.

Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.

At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.

They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.

Canada's implementation had two problems:

1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.

2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.

But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.

Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.

Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.

It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.

In official communications it was called the Canada Carbon Rebate or previously the Climate Action Incentive

Both of which were terrible marketing wise.

What makes "rebate" terrible but "dividend" good? They accomplish the same thing in my mind. In fact I think calling it a "dividend" would be a pretty unconventional and contrived usage of that word.

Rebate: focuses attention on the tax. Dividend: focuses attention on the income people receive.

Never heard of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend? Except that one enshrines CO2 emissions instead of curbing them.

The feds had it labeled, "Canada Carbon Rebate", and to even get that they had to fight the banks.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-pricing-rebates-land...

You can give the rebate based on prior year or estimated usage at the start of the year, and then repay at the end of the year if it was too much, like with healthcare subsidies.

The rebate is a fixed amount, no need for estimation.

Are you sure? Gas consumption is notoriously inelastic. West coast gasoline is already a dollar or more than it costs on the east coast. Do poor people drive less in California than in Florida?

Gas consumption is inelastic in the short term, but everything is elastic in the long term.

If you want proof of this, just look at what happens to sales of large vs small cars when the price of gas changes.

I don't know man, gas prices have been consistently pretty high for the last couple of years, meanwhile almost every small car has been discontinued- VW Beetle and Golf, Fiat 500, Honda Fit, Ford Fiesta and Focus, etc... this class of cars basically just doesn't exist anymore.

I think everyone drives less in California than in Florida. (Google says ~14,500 miles annually per licensed driver in Florida, versus ~12,500 miles in California.) Gas prices are a factor in this.

California law requires a special blend of gasoline, which is a lower volume market, which increases the cost. The remainder of the cost difference is transportation costs or taxes.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/fuels-enforcment-pr...

Yes, a number of reasons contribute to the additional cost. But that's irrelevant, we're discussing the impact of higher costs, not the cause of them.

> By making them not regressive we don't change behavior!

I'm poor. I could get just the $X back as my carbon tax dividend and continue with my current lifestyle. Or I could make choices that emit less carbon, which will cost less since they don't have a carbon tax cost to them, and save an additional $Y on top of the $X I'm already getting.

What do I do?

I mean, I assume that most people who are in a position of financial stress continue with their near-term need to commute to earn a living, and bear the cost of a tax that hurts them.

The government's job is to say that in aggregate, they people better off from the overall reduction in carbon emitted.

My opinion is that trying to make consumption taxes non-regressive is a fool's errand. If it needs to be progressive, figure out what the total dollar contribution needed and pick a rate that when scaled with incomes yields the outcome needed.

A revenue-neutral tax (like GP proposed) could, in theory, change behavior. I don't know enough about human behavior to say how it would work in practice.

Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.

The results would hit certain geographic areas much worse than others, and (if priced enough to change behavior) would also probably depress car sales, which are two reasons why the federal fuel tax has been flat for over 30 years.

Think about how much easier that is to game though.

The original suggestion could be collected at point-of-sale for carbon emitting products. Gasoline, airplane tickets (based on average for the flights), even electricity are easy to measure and charge at the point of sale.

In your example, the person has to prove how much they didn’t emit, which is way harder in practice, to get the credit.

Why tax the gasoline but then the airplane ticket and not the kerosene?

And similarly i would extrapolate to do we tax the buyer of electricity (which could be green sourced) or the manufacturer - the gas burner. Or maybe even at the first point of contact with the carbon source, the oil company.

I was making an analogy to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That is tax all of those things, but cut every taxpayer a refund for an equal share of the revenue. This is ultimately identical to paying people for having below-average use.

> Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.

So you're saying that the government should incentivize poorer people to sell one of the last bits of their functional autonomy for what would be trivial amounts? "We'll just hang onto to this for a bit until you decide to stop going anywhere or make friends at work".

You are correct that most consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive, but you can turn pretty much any consumption tax into a progressive one by simply taking the money and redistributing it at a flat amount per person.

I believe this would be more fair to children who are the ones who will be most impacted by climate change in the end.

I believe there are even some governments that use this approach, but many of them don't make it feel as significant as it should. You should get a big fat cheque in the mail every month as if you won the lottery.

It's hard to see any of this as "trivially fixable." Taxes are inherently political, politics are complicated, changing incentives on this scale are pretty much impossible in our political system.

"Taxes are simple... and they don't have loopholes" is not at all how taxes work in the US. Perhaps your imagined perfect carbon tax is simple, but a simple tax with no loopholes is not likely to happen. Everyone wants a break or exception, and many of the interested parties are powerful.

This is mixing two questions: whether a system can be elegantly designed and do the job without major market distortion, versus the question of whether various actors will stand in the way to prevent it.

You could say the same thing about zoning. Higher density is better for affordability, but faces opposition from landowning existing residents. Does that make it wrong, or not worth pursuing? No, and that particular movement seems to be getting traction despite the political opposition.

I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."

As we learned in the 90s with email, an elegant solution that doesn't take human nature into account isn't worth pursuing. There used to be a joke checklist we'd send to each other about this.

> I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."

The huge problem with this line of thinking is that it's easy to identify a half-dozen key players standing in the way of your elegant solution and it would be easier to remove them from the situation than change their minds. It's an attractive idea that can become a fixed idea.

^ In addition, I find it notable that the political party that is in favor of more regressive taxes is also against a carbon tax.

In an ideal world, I'd like the tax to be made more progressive, but I'll take anything!

I see the carbon tax as a 'stick' (to penalize undesired behaviour, in this case emitting carbon), but it needs to be coupled with a 'carrot' to encourage the desired behaviours.

I'd like to see a carbon tax coupled with massive investments to make public transit legitimately good. There are too many places where there is no viable alternative to driving, a carbon tax will unnecessarily punish those people without giving them a reasonable alternative.

The carrot is doing the things you want to do like getting from A to B or building a home.

Government ‘carrots’ are almost universally a terrible idea because they codify specific solutions. Instead you can get the same effect more efficiently with a carbon tax large enough for people to notice.

> Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive,

Unfortunately, poor people don't have the cash on hand to hold them over until they get their Carbon Stipend on April 15th.

It's going to hurt poor people to charge them more at the counter, even if you give them more later. The stipend is just going to end up paying for less than the interest the tax created on a credit card.

> since on average richer people will spend more on fuel

Why would you think so? People driving older cars, not being able to afford to fly - will certainly spend more money on fuel for their car.

Rich people use more energy. That’s been shown by loads of studies.

Maybe they drive a more efficient car, but they own much larger houses which are heated or cooled consistently, they travel a lot more, and they buy things with embodied carbon emissions.

Right, but now you're talking about adding the tax to the whole economy, not just car fuel?

That's close to impossible to implement. You'd need to track production and usage of everything in an extreme detail. Plus tracking all purchases (items + services) to a given person. So complete state surveillance of citizens. Globally.

We're talking about a carbon tax. By definition it is not on car fuel, but on carbon.

You don't need state surveillance or tracking purchases. You just need to get to the source of the problem. Hydrocarbons leaving the ground.

At the hydrocarbon level, it's much easier to track. Oil and gas is mostly extracted by very large corporations and transported by large infrastructure. You don't care what happens to it once you've produced it - but you do need to put a levy on the hydrocarbons before they're sold on. The people who use those hydrocarbons all have higher costs which pass on to customers.

The biggest problem is international borders. If another country isn't applying carbon tax, then you need to make an estimate of the embodied energy of a product at the point of import. Or encourage them to tax carbon. But neither of those require surveillance. Once the product has been imported, you don't care who buys or sells it because the tax is already paid.

> That's close to impossible to implement.

For a carbon tax, I think you only need to track imports, and domestic extraction of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

„Only” track imports?

I think customs already tracks this. Smuggling oil and coal into the US at any meaningful scale seems very unlikely.

Right, but how do you track carbon in imported goods?

You don't. We already outsource all kinds of things (pollution, human rights violations) now.

Tax all fuel. So those energy consumption of wealthy cost more?

Ok, let's assume you do. Let's tax all fuels 300% in the US. Now all manufacturing stops as your production costs are all over the roof. Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.

What problem was solved here? None.

> Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.

Finally a good use for tariffs!

Do you think flying evades the carbon tax?

Yes, if you apply the carbon tax only for the fuel at petrol stations. I am talking about realistic-to-implement solutions.

Aviation fuel is dispensed at a limited number of places; it would be easier (or just as easy) to implement a higher aviation fuel tax than a higher auto fuel tax.

It's trivial to implement auto fuel tax - it's already in place in most of developed countries.

There's an auto fuel tax in the US. Increasing that from $0.184/gallon for gasoline and $0.244/gallon for diesel to say $1.50/gallon and $2.00/gallon would ensure massive losses for that party in the next two or three election cycles.

Increasing the tax on aviation fuel to $2/gallon wouldn't produce massive shifts in the next several elections, therefore it's easier to implement.

Finally, some common sense!

I'll boil it down to:

    If you want less of something, tax it.

We already have a carbon tax, you pay it when you buy the carbon. 3 cents per liter federally and an additional 18 cents per liter in California specifically.

Some European countries have total taxes to the tune of 90+ cents per liter (50-60% tax) with current gas prices, for reference. (~65ct/l for the energy/carbon tax, specifically)

I don’t think that level is sufficient to cover the externalities.

This tax is only assessed on road transportation. It ignores aviation, industry, or any one of the other sources of carbon.

> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

You give it back to poor as a income-phased out refundable tax credit. Crucially, base it not on how much they drive or consume, but on their income.

Name it something like the "Worker's Energy Credit". In the worst case, it cancels out the carbon tax spent by them commensurate with their lower income.

In the best case poor people who don't drive much actually come out ahead, and it's just a very progressive sales tax.

The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.

This is way too complicated. You just give it to everyone unconditionally and tax it as income. We already have progressive graduated income taxes with a huge exempt class, we don't need to layer anything on top of that.

Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars? Less weight - less pollution. Nobody needs a to drive a pickup, unless they run a farm or construction firm. A car weighing less than a ton would be perfectly enough for 99.9 % of drivers.

> Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars?

They do buy smaller cars. But they still spend a much greater percent of their income on gas. Worse, most of the auto industry has upsized their entire vehicle fleet. It's not as easy to find small used cars as it once was. They also are less likely to have jobs they can remote work, and can't afford to live close enough to the workplace to use transit.

Also many poor people need a larger car for their work. I'm not talking about a vanity pickup, but something more like a small pickup or a work van. Others may have many children to drive (maybe their own and others if they live in joint family situations).

Their solution is to buy a 3rd or 4th hand large vehicle.

Giving it back based on being alive on Dec 31 seems the best solution to me. (It’s very difficult to game and if you give 900 billionaires under a million bucks in total, it’s just not that big a deal…)

We manage to phase out ACA subsidies at 400% of the federal poverty level, so I don't see why we couldn't use a similar mechanism for an energy tax credit.

You can. It will cost political capital and erode the clarity of the messaging about the purpose of the tax. It also gives politicians one more thing to dick around with later.

Personally, I think it’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the 99+% perfect.

> The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.

Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.

I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.

I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt, with no loopholes or exceptions. Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.

> I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.

It depends what the exception is.

If the exceptions are "we treat a form of income received disproportionately by the rich a 'not income' and tax it at a lower rate, and on top of that we add an extra tax on top of income tax on labor income, and cap the larger part of that extra tax, too, to avoid burdening high earners", that helps the rich, sure. But there are plenty of exceptions possible that don't do that.

> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.

The tax would be on consumption, the credit would be based on income, so Larry still pays when he buys gas (if not for his cars, then for his planes).

> I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt

That would burn down the country. Tax policy and the economy are a ship that has to be gradually turned in the optimal direction, just like how for the last 40 years tax policy has been gradually redistributing growth/wealth upwards. Sudden changes (like we are seeing now with indiscriminate tariff policy) are what results in the most harm to the poor.

> Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.

Agreed, or just heavily tax borrowing against a portfolio above, say, $2M/year. That way you don't penalize working people borrowing against 401ks or taking home equity loans for home improvements.

> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.

Salary might be $1 but what is his effective income when he files his taxes? That is what he is taxed on, which includes things like dividends and selling of stocks.

There’s nothing wrong with borrowing against stock, the evil part is the step-up in cost basis when the billionaire dies that prevents them from paying any tax at all.

It would be a good deal for the country to let the billionaire use their skills to grow wealth without interrupting it and tax them all at death.

Carbon taxes become progressive with the simple step of returning the revenue to taxpayers as a dividend payment using the existing social security payment infrastructure. Richer people have such outsized carbon footprints that most people would get back more in dividends than they lost in higher costs.

If you want to reduce carbon emissions, if the tax is regressive or not does not matter as long as you tax emissions. If you want to mix too many things, you will not get a good solution for any.

> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

The idea that policy makers care about this in any meaningful sense is absurd given the EV mandates, as EV's radically change the lifecycle costs of cars in a way that is absolutely destructive to people who aren't wealthy.

EV's lower the 'fueling' cost but shift part of it into large cashflow crushing battery replacement costs.

Automobiles have been a significant engine in elevating less wealthy americans because you can buy a old junky car for very little and keep it limping along with use-proportional fuel costs and minor maintenance. Even if it's an inefficient car, you use it to go to work, so you're making money to pay for the fuel. Less work, less work fuel required.

EV's significantly break the model and will push many more less wealthy people onto predatory financing which they'll never escape. Yet policy makers refuse to even discuss the life-cycle cashflow difference of EVs, and continue to more forward with policies to eventually mandate their use.

> it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.

It's been broken all along. We've had decades to fix it.

Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.

This is a common trope, but is incorrect, at least for the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...

> Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.

Not correct. Fuel for private aviation is taxed, including jet fuel and avgas. However, there are very few "private" jets, most are operated by some company, and therefore not private. Jet-A1 for a truely privately operated C172 with a diesel engine is taxed.

Which is bonkers. If ever there was a thing that should be taxed it's jet fuel for private jets. 300% tax on private jet fuel would be reasonable.

The emissions just to shuttle rich people from one side of the country to the next (For some, multiple times per day) is insane. You should need to be a billionaire just to afford flying private jets and it should still eat a significant portion of your income if that's what you choose to do.

And for what? Like, we live in the modern era, why does anyone need to travel from NY to Florida to Texas to California in a day?

I have a suspicion the reason why super wealthy people like say Musk but he isn't the only one hate subways and high speed rail is because they fly everywhere. You might like if you could get on the subway in Glen Park and be at lands end in half an hour. You might like getting on a high speed rail and being in LA in 4 hours.

These guy will never ride a subway or take a train anywhere.

LOL on an e-bike I can beat BART to SFO from Glen Park unless you time both to start at just the moment BART arrives instead of at a random moment. If you want a Glen Park to Lands End to take under 30 minutes, the cost would rival the Iraq War.

Looks like the trains are running every 30 minutes.

A super easy solution that doesn't cost the iraq war is adding new trains and running them every 15 minutes.

You'd have to deal with lower occupancy trains as a result, which means it's not as cost efficient.

Many politicians campaigning for green energy (aka AOC) also fly on private jets everywhere so that they can fight the oligarchy - this behavior isn't restricted to wealthy businessmen alone.

Maybe you shouldn't base your assumptions of the world on politically charged clickbait headlines... Did her and Bernie use a private jet? Quite possibly. Does that mean they fly "everywhere" on private jets? Certifiably false.

Depressingly, I think that's why a law to stop this behavior won't pass in the US. Wealthy and powerful people love their private flights.

Doesn't mean that anyone engaging in this behavior should get a pass nor that we shouldn't keep advocating for such a tax.

I'm no Musk fanboy, but it is funny you mention him not liking subways or high speed rail because didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?

>didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?

_for cars_

The hyperloop was a shit idea from day one and thus far no one has been able to make it work. It's also entirely possible that Elon Musk floated this as a distraction to stop the development of "regular" high speed rain in California[1].

The Las Vegas "loop"[2], on the other hand, is basically a parody of a subway - with a fraction of the capacity.

> In July 2021, the peak passenger flow was recorded at 1,355 passengers per hour.

As a comparison Toronto's subway can handle 28,000 passengers per hour[3] per direction or more.

[1] https://www.jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Convention_Center_Lo...

[3] https://dailyhive.com/toronto/ttc-toronto-subway-station-rid...

Did I say it was a good idea? I was merely pointing out that there's evidence that he is not the best example for people that hate high-speed rails and subways.

>Stop the development of high speed rail in California

I thought that got funded, what happened?

You'll note to two things that ties the hyper loop and the Las Vegas Loop together is private cars.

Don't discount that these guys find ordinary people to be scary and disgusting.

What makes a jet private? Should Trump's Boegin 757 count as one? What if an airline is flying a jet with no passengers? Cargo jets?

The same thing that differentiate a private car from public transportation or freight, I would think. This distinction isn't a particularly novel problem.

We don't differentiate these in any significant way. Do buses in your country pay different rate for fuel?

There are vans carrying 6 people on international routes in Europe, is this public transport? Private? Anyone can book it.

Well actually, lots of places have special fuel for farm vehicles that are exempt from certain taxes. It's dyed a certain colour so if you get caught with that colour of fuel in your vehicle you can get in trouble. So its not a crazy thing to suggest that we tax different fuel at different rates.

Ffs

Are you saying used car sales would have a carbon tax? I've never heard anyone suggest anything like that. It's just a tax on new items.

Looks like as long as only positive change is allowed to touch the poor, there will be little change.

Going to let us burn because not doing so would be regressive.

TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.

TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.

The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.

A disincentive on a thing you don't want makes people choose another thing that you may or may not want.

The only way to avoid perversions is to incentivize the things you want.

Taxing cigarettes led to vaping. Maybe less bad but still a nuisance.

Are you agreeing with me, or did you drop a negative twice?

You're statement is not true.

Disincentives don't make people make good choices, they make them make different choices.

Incentives guide people to make a specific choice.

It is the role of a central planner to pick a particular outcome, and it's also the worst strategy of the modern era.

Everything which is not forbidden is allowed. Your belief that you should make the positive choice on behalf of others is the most dangerous philosophy of the 20th century.

Yeah that’s the truth. The mass of poor people are the predominant polluters. They produce little of value and pollute a lot. So the question then is whether you care about the environment or about the poor and most people would rather the latter.

This.

I think the best way is to tax fuel itself. This way worse mpg result in more tax.

Tax diesel more than gasoline, LNG less.

This is already done, in Europe most of the fuel costs are taxes.

Thereby penalising existing vehicle owners who can’t switch to a more efficient vehicle overnight.

We have to come up with a rigorous alternative that doesn’t disproportionately affect lower income folk, because people tend not to be overly concerned about nebulous concepts like the climate impacts on unborn future generations, especially when my carbon impact at the margin is negligible when taken in context of global population.

If it is an issue - then option is to have less driving. Take a bus once in a while. Or bike.

Or switch to another old vehicle. Take old Golf instead of RAM, etc.

That makes sense, but there would be no incentive to switch to an engine that emits less carbon for the same fuel consumption (if such a thing exists)

You don't create carbon out of thin air, it's from the fuel, so burning the same quantity of fuel will result in the same quantity of carbon, no matter how the engine works. Therefore a tax on fuel is a tax on carbon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ethanol_fuel_mixtures#E...

Ethanol blends get worse MPG, and entail additional carbon emissions in creation. They do not reduce carbon emissions.

What is the point of the link?

Unless you play in the nuclear physics, Carbon in is Carbon out. Carbon in fuel is Carbon out of the engine.

Incomplete combustion is a big component of emissions, and it's exactly what you're saying doesn't exist

Yes but since incomplete combustion is inverse correlated with fuel efficiency (unburned fuel is wasted fuel), it's not really a trade off. What is a trade off is NO emissions vs fuel efficiency. Burning your fuel oxygen rich will burn of more fuel, but also makes more NO (due to higher temperatures if I remember correctly).

Those eventually degrade to CO2 so the increased warming from them compared to co2 by mass is temporary, like with methane.

By definition, more carbon is less efficiency. Efficiency is about how much of the hydrocarbon you turn into heat. Diesels often burn a little dirty. That's partly because diesel engines don't burn all the fuel

We already do in the US (but the money mostly goes to road maintenance)

Apparently not enough, as USA has quite cheap fuel. Add 100% carbon tax and people will start to pay attention to MPG ratings. With x2 price increase gasoline in USA is still cheaper than in Germany.

Isn't that what a carbon tax is? Adding a tax to the fossil fuel based on carbon content.

The purpose of the CAFE regulations is very explicitly to favor American automakers who make big trucks.

It wasn't the intended purpose. It turned out that way because the Detroit lobbyists were smarter and more motivated than the government policy people, and they bamboozled them.

The congress critters knew what they were doing and didn't do it for free.

That was one of several purposes.

This has been a known problem and could be changed if the political will to make common sense policy changes and corrections when needed was anywhere near existing. Unfortunately, we live in a [political] dystopia

> a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have

Doesn't this just punt the morass into the magic variable of one's carbon footprint?

How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)

> How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)

It's a good concept that is also ripe for abuse with anyone who has some amount of "fuck your rules" money. Same reason why fines that don't scale with income/earnings in some form often do nothing to deter "the rich".

I certainly like carrots more than sticks, but we need a couple of sticks as well.

Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior, at which point just make it illegal. Most fines are proportional to damages.

Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.

> Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior,

No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.

What does someone affluent care if they have to pay a $100 speeding ticket or a $20 parking ticket? That's just the cost of business for them.

>No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.

Because you want to... hard stop behavior. Parking violations cause harm, so the fine should be a function of damage to society, not some weird fetish to make people feel pain.

If behavior is so unacceptable that you want to prevent it altogether, criminalize it.

why can't we just tax the gas at the pump? this is, at least, what I'm used to in Europe.

We do. But it’s a super regressive tax. Lots of very poor people depend on a bad MPG car to get to work and live.

If you subsidize polluting life-styles, you'll get pollution.

You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear that subsidizing pollution from the poor will lead to worse outcomes for the planet.

What isn’t clear about the fact that increasing commuting costs for those living paycheck to paycheck leads to a worse outcome?

Because you're only considering first-order effects. Behaviors, markets, and systems will evolve around the new rules. Public transit could improve. People could trade in SUVs for hybrid sedans. People could carpool. People could bike. People could walk. Corner stores could re-open. People could demand zoning changes, instead of fighting every nearby development.

that's a different problem. US cities used to have good publhc transport, but the urvanization policies since 50s is car-centric. plus, because of the American cars having huge engines they have bad MPG. The current situation US is in is nothing to do with the tax regime.

I don’t think it would be possible to produce a carbon tax that’s simple

Tax the fuel. Gasoline now has a $X/gallon tax, as does propane, as does coal, whatever.

What is the difficulty with that?

Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps? Gray hydrogen? Wood pellets? Ammonia?

Electricity from unclear source?

Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.

Well, you don't need to tax the ethanol from corn or methane from waste dumps or wood pellets, or ammonia itself. You would tax the oil/gas/coal that came out of the ground that was used to fertilize the corn, process the corn, transport the corn, and distill the ethanol (otherwise it's double taxation). You don't need to tax the wood pellets or the stove they're burned in, or the electricity, just the carbon that is burned to make and transport them. So this is largely irrelevant.

A better question would be for imported items and services. How do you prevent tax shifting from carbon emission havens, which is no different from financial tax havens now. You tax them at entry using the most beautiful word, "tariffs". If an importing country doesn't tax carbon or carbon tariff their imports then you tariff them. Interestingly, it would then be a higher tariff for air transport than shipping. Where it actually get complicated is services, which people really don't like taxing. But if I run a LLM datacenter on coal in china or make bitcoin burning middle east oil, or consult on green projects on Indonesian gas those should be tariffed as well, and that's more difficult.

GP said it very clearly: tax the fuel. Taxing carbon atoms as they come from the ground is very different tax.

It is way harder because of reasons you mentioned. It also disincentives, e.g. composite materials with carbon in them. The materials of today and tomorrow, which would make us all richer and planet healthier, because of how much stronger carbon-nanotube reinforced concrete is.

It will disincentive fertiliser production, which can be net carbon-neutral or better.

It will disincentive carbon capture at power plants, since the tax was already paid. Graphite production.

This is my point: every policy is necessary complex. There is no "simple" and "just ..." when making policy

It’s extremely regressive. You’d need to also give a rebate based on income level.

Give everybody $1000 (or whatever) to offset that. Ends up being neutral for some folks, a net benefit to the poor, and a net cost to the rich. This is already how lots of jurisdictions handle regressive taxes.

That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.

The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.

Tax the poor for carbon emission. They'll adjust. People will walk, bike, take the bus, car pool, and buy used hybrids instead of mustangs.

PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.

> regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical

Turns out you are wrong.

Life-style should never be subsidized. God forbid that someone feels the repercussions of their life-style, which is the only feedback mechanism that will ever cause change.

My moral system will stop global warming and save the planet. Your moral system will destroy the planet and kill billions. Everyone needs to be responsible, including the poor. Tough.

You don’t know anything about my moral system. I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.

But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy, makes the price of food directly indexed to gasoline costs and then provides tax breaks to the rich who can afford to buy new electric vehicles while increasing the taxes on the poor who can’t is not 100% morally right.

There are lots of ways to introduce a gas tax that are ethically sound but they aren’t simple and the idea that _any_ use tax is morally just is idiotic.

>But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy

You're literally subsidizing this system by preventing use taxes on gasoline.

>provides tax breaks to the rich

42% of people pay no income tax, and 80% pay net zero or less. Poor people care how benefits are apportioned amongst the poor, not how taxes are apportioned amongst the rich.

>You don’t know anything about my moral system.

I know enough: you hate use taxes, because they are regressive (when the metric is % of income, not when it is magnitude).

But use taxes, like any price, provide critical feedback to the consumer to avoid failure modes like the tragedy of the commons.

In this particular case that feedback acts as a restoring force against the literal destruction of the planet's habitability. My moral system doesn't preclude use taxes on general principle, but your moral system does. Ergo, I'm offering a moral system that will save the planet, innumerable ecosystems, and possibly the human species, but you're offering a moral system that lets us feel warm and fuzzy, emphasis on warm.

>I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.

What an odd interpretation. I was clearly referring specifically to the regressive aspect of use taxes, not declaring the holiness of every particular use tax conceivable, historical, and existing.

A: "Breathing is 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical." B: "So you want everyone to smoke crack!"

A: "Income taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical." B: "So we should tax 120% of income!"

Of all the ways you could have interpreted my statement you chose the most absurd.

> you hate use taxes, because they are regressive

I think a gas use tax makes a ton of sense and is likely a requirement to get us off ice engines which is imperative.

I don’t think they are ‘simple’ as the op said because to make them both just and politically feasible they need to come with rebates and straight cash payouts. The negotiation of which is as complex as any other form of taxation.

But go ahead and keep believing it’s _me_ who did the absurd reading of comments if it keeps you going.

You want a gas tax, and then you want to refund the tax to the poor. That's a no-op with extra steps.

If interested in a case study, have a look at Canada's experiment with it.

Fuel is already taxed. What would a "carbon tax" add here?

And what you’re describing is exactly the reason Kei trucks aren’t a thing despite most farmers actually liking them for their utility.

You can’t import them unless they are old because we want to protect the automotive industry. But we can’t build them new either because they don’t meet the safety standards (FMVSS) and are penalized more for being fuel efficient because the standards are stricter for smaller vehicles.

To be fair, kei trucks are horrible in crashes too. That’s a big part of states starting to ban them.

Motorbikes are much worse in crashes than kei trucks, we are more than happy to make, sell and operate them. I don’t actually buy the “unsafe” reasoning. It’s also perfectly street legal to buy and drive cars and trucks from the 60s with abysmal safety ratings.

They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.

Fine print: The truck in the link is only $20K after government subsidies/rebates. So if the government gives my tax dollars to buyers of this truck, then it will cost $20K.

Electric vehicle tax credits are non-refundable tax credits meaning you can't get a credit for more than you owe. [1][2]

Which means no one is getting your tax dollars to buy vehicles (though there may be some infrastructure or manufacturing grants for companies).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12600

[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-credits-for-individuals-wha...

That's not really true.

If the taxes someone would otherwise pay are going to their electric vehicle instead, somebody else has to make up the difference.

So yes, other people are getting my tax dollars to buy electric vehicles. It just takes two steps rather than one, if you want to look at it that way.

Is the standard deduction giving people your tax dollars? Anyone who itemizes?

What if someone declines a promotion and thus doesn't increase their income and pay more taxes? Is that also taking your tax dollars?

Sure, yes, if the government doesn't follow PAYGO[1] (which they almost never do) and offset tax expenditures (tax incentives) with reduced direct spending and government debt increases then maybe, some day, some portion of your tax dollars may get indirectly spent on this.

But how do we really know? Do we know what other secondary effects will come from these tax incentives?

If electric cars catch on maybe the government will get more revenue somewhere else (there are North American manufacturing requirements to qualify after all) or have to spend less revenue on something else (surely burning oil must have some effect).

Or maybe the person getting the electric vehicle then uses it to make more money and pay more taxes than they would have before (unlikely but possible).

But, directly, they're getting back their own money. The real issue with the credit is that it disproportionately favors people who already make a lot of money (but taxes also disproportionately tax people who make more money so maybe that's fair).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL31943

> But, directly, they're getting back their own money.

It doesn't matter. Everyone else is now paying for all the federal government services they consume. Other people are paying for that. It's literally that simple.

Congress doesn't retroactively raise tax rates to make up the difference. If the government budget ends up in a deficit, which obviously it does, not just because of this but for many reasons, that is financed via debt. This isn't passed to the population as higher taxes, but as inflation, which affects everyone equally, including whoever got the tax credits in the first place.

First of all, you're wrong about how debt is financed. It's not via inflation, it's by taxes. Interest payments accounted for 13% of the federal budget last year. That's enormous. (Yes inflation reduces the value of debt over time, but debt carries interest which generally outweighs expected inflation.)

Second, Congress absolutely adjusts tax rates as well. Not precisely one-to-one to match spending each year, but over the long term it's all got to add up. Every dollar the government spends today is paid with people's taxes either today or their taxes tomorrow.

Third, the person who received the tax credits isn't being affected "equally". If 1% of people get the credit, but 100% of people pay for it, then the people who receive the credit end up hugely ahead in the end, while the other 99% lose out. So yes, for the 1% of people getting an electric vehicle tax credit, it is almost entirely paid for by the other 99% of people.

Goverment debt is reduced by increased taxes and/or reduction in services just as much as it is by "inflation". Further, inflation doesn't affect the person who got a $7,500 individual tax reduction as much as someone who didn't.

However instead of taking the credit yourself you can transfer it to the dealer at time of purchase to use toward the purchase. You can transfer the full $7500 credit regardless of how much tax you eventually end up owing for the year.

That's an important point that I missed in my research, though it does seem like there are limitations? [1]

If the buyer's previous-year adjusted gross income is too high they still don't qualify, and if the buyer's purchase-year adjusted gross income is too high they can end up owing money to the IRS.

And dealers/sellers have to qualify and register but...

> Advance payments received by the registered dealer are not treated as a tax credit to the dealer and may exceed the dealer’s regular tax liability. Advance payments received by the registered dealer are not included in the gross income of the dealer.

That does read as a direct subsidy equivalent to a refundable tax credit straight from the general fund.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/topic-h-frequently-asked-questi...

So, should I wish to purchase a vehicle this tax year, I tell my HR to adjust my income withholding such that I owe 7,500$ come tax time and then reap the rewards?

Or is there more to the incentive structure?

Withholding isn't relevant here. Non refundable means it can't cause the government to net pay you money: that is to say, it can't make your refund larger than your withholding.

Adjust my withholding to generate a debt to Th enticement that I claim the rebate on? I think you’re thinking the other direction.

What you have withheld is not part of the equation. It is your tax liability that matters.

I’m confused here, wouldn’t me underpaying on my income generate a liability that I can then claim this rebate on?

You can still get a refund with this tax credit, but it has to be a refund of taxes you paid through things like your payroll tax.

Non-refundable means that if the rebate drives your owed taxes below zero you don't get the negative tax debt back.

If you don't earn much money most of your paid taxes go to SS and medicare rather than income tax, so the rebate may not do anything for you. But if you make at least median income you should be able to fully use this rebate.

If you're retired and buy one of these trucks you'd be wise to realize $100k in investment gains in that year in order to fully exploit the tax credit.

Let's make up an example. Let's say you earn $75,000/year and the tax rate is 10%. So you owe $7,500 in taxes. That is your tax liability. It doesn't matter if you have your employer deducting $144 from your weekly paycheck or $0 from your weekly paycheck.

https://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/student/hows.jsp

The government still gives you back your money in a refund if you overpay them.

Though, of course, you don't earn interest on it while the government is holding it.

>Which means no one is getting your tax dollars to buy vehicles

Then who is making up the difference between the tax that would have been paid, and the credit reduction?

Even finer print: the $7,500 federal incentive is a tax rebate. If you don't have a $7,500 tax liability, you won't get the full amount. (this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale). I mean, money is fungible and all, but your particular tax dollars aren't going to people who buy EVs, they are just paying less in taxes.

>this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale

No, it does not. See Q4 at the following link:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/topic-h-frequently-asked-questi...

My understanding is that the dealer has to have the tax liability. IANATL, YMMV.

>money is fungible

And then you contradicted yourself 2 phrases over.

It's ~28k without them, particularly when considering recent inflation it's an attractive price... inflation corrected it's in the vague ballpark of other small IC trucks when they were still available.

E.g. a early 2000's Nissan frontier base model was $23k in today's money. It was a somewhat better speced (e.g. more hauling capacity) and much better range, but this new car likely has significantly lower operating costs that would easily justify a 5k uplift.

So I think it ought to be perfectly viable without the subsidy, especially so long as the absurd CAFE standards continue to exist giving EV's a monopoly on this truck size.

Yes, and you will benefit, because the role of the state is to advance the collective and common good.

That's why we have TeH gOvErNmEnT.

As opposed to other prices that are not the product of a political economy?

[dead]

My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.

Later they made a one off version for Goodwood that has a V8 stuffed under the hood.

> My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.

Maybe that's a good thing. It compelled Aston Martin to provide their customers with a fuel-efficient option.

Nobody looking for a fuel efficient car would look at Aston, and nobody looking at Aston would go for a fuel efficient car.

Which was borne by its sales: sold for nearly 3 times the price you'd have paid Toyota for an iQ, it sold all of 600 units in two years before being cancelled, Aston's second shortest production run. The shortest was the Virage which sold more than 1000 units in a year.

At some point they offered a free Cygnet if you bought one of their other models.

Rebadging doesn't add any meaningful consumer choice.

I have a small(*) twenty year old i4 pickup and I regularly get cash offers for it while out and about. There is a lot of demand for the small inexpensive and relatively fuel efficient utility vehicles that the government currently prohibits manufacturing.

(*Ironically, though small it has a considerably longer bed than many currently produced larger and less fuel efficient trucks... I'm mystified by trucks that can't even contain a bike without removing a wheel or hanging one over a gate. Looks like the bed on this EV is a bit short too, but a short bed on a small truck is more excusable than a short bed on a huge truck)

This is largely why all the vehicles around us have become supersized. It's completely idiotic.

It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist. The vast majority of new vehicles are crossovers or _light trucks_, which aren't held to the same emission/efficiency standards.

> It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist.

Consumer demand is still an important factor.

Sedans and compact cars are still out there, sitting on dealer lots with reasonable prices.

Yeah but the only way to protect myself if hit by a freight train is to also drive a freight train.

Consumer demand is driven by marketing.

Anybody know how it got to this point? It can't be because of regulatory capture, right? I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.

> I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.

The famous 67MPG requirement was for a hypothetical 2026 model year car

But Honda discontinued the Fit in the United States in 2020, long before the hypothetical 2026 target.

The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them. There are thousands of lightly used Honda Fits on the used market for reasonable prices, but they're not moving.

Yes, the regulations are flawed, but that doesn't change the lack of consumer demand.

> The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them.

I think this over-simplifies things. Strict milage standards force a set of compromises on ICE car design that make them both shittier and more expensive[1]. Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?

[1] Some examples: turbochargers, CVTs, start/stop systems. All of these increase both the cost and complexity of building as well as repairing the car. And with higher complexity comes higher chances for something to fail as well so reliability suffers.

> Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?

Isn't this just a circular way of admitting that people actually wanted SUVs?

This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.

> [1] Some examples: turbochargers,

Have to disagree. These are a great way to downsize the engine and maintain the same torque output. Yes it's more parts, but modern OEM turbochargers are very reliable. If you can reduce the number of cylinders from 6 to 4 or 3, that's a net win in moving parts, consumables, and repair costs.

> This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.

Is it really? Just to check I looked at carmax and found this kind of price:

2016 Honda Fit LX $16,998* 26K mi

You can get cheaper ones in the $11k range with like 110k+ miles on them, is this really a meaningul price difference?

But they only wanted SUVs because government nerfed sedans.

> both shittier and more expensive

> Some examples: turbochargers

I disagree that turbochargers are shittier. For most people, hell even for a large subset of people that only want to race their cars on a track, turbochargers provide huge benefits. Yes, they add complexity and cost; they also vastly improve fuel efficiency, create the best torque curve possible on an ICE vehicle, and substantially improve power output. Sometimes you actually need more complexity to build a better system. I think turbochargers are a marvel of modern engineering.

And while it's subjective and admittedly more enthusiasts prefer naturally aspirated to turbocharged, I personally prefer the character of a turbocharged engine. I'd rather hear turbo whistles than a whining V10.

If what you want is a reliable commuter, because knowing you can get yourself to work is more important than even fuel efficiency, then turbochargers are a clear net negative. I think most people view their car as a tool first and foremost, and don't have the luxury to view it as a toy.

> V10

Lmao what

Turbocharged cars have been reliable for a while now. There was a time when people said the same thing about fuel injection - because it is objectively more complicated than carbureted engines. But as time went on and they became more reliable and cheaper the only people that care about carburetors now are enthusiasts because they have so many drawbacks. It's the same thing with turbo engines today, except they're already reliable and better to drive (assuming you ever want to merge onto a highway). If you consider the higher RPM typical for NA vehicles they're arguably less reliable over time. If you include rising fuel costs turbocharged is arguably cheaper over the lifespan of the vehicle.

Buy whatever you want. But most people's perceptions of 'reliable' for cars is based entirely on rumors and hearsay and has nothing to do with data. Most awards for reliability are marketing gimmicks and aren't based on useful data.

What I know for sure is anybody talking about V10 engines is obviously utterly divorced from normal person reality, and I can't take any of their suggestions seriously.

Performance does not matter to the majority of car buyers. Reliability and capability are what matters. Whether you can count on the car doing what you need it to do. Even fuel economy is second to those. Anybody talking about the sound of turbochargers, performance and V10 engined (seriously, WTF) is totally out of touch.

I am happy with my 1.6L EcoBoost Ford Mondeo. It gets good fuel efficiency and has plenty of power to climb hills.

The Honda Fit had none of these. It was just a tiny car with a tiny engine.

It's just that Americans do not buy tiny cars or tiny engines.

“Reasonable prices” open to some debate. There’s such a premium to the Honda nameplate that the prices that “lightly used” ones go for make them a tough proposition over buying new. (Which of course, is no longer an option for the Fit.) From a look at prices in Canada, used 5-year-old 2020 model Fits are going for more than they did new.

Repealing these Obama era rules would go a long way to restoring automotive affordability. Can't undo cash for clunkers though

It's worth noting that CAFE standards have been in effect since the 70's, and disincentivized small vehicles since long before the 2011 updates.

> since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

... and this is why American cars got so huge, if anyone was curious.

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 prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.

BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.

BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.

Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BYD_Auto_vehicles

I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.

Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.

I mean, that's one way to get Indians!

Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.

Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.

Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.

Agreed, and this is a somewhat recent phenomenon (see wtf happened in 1971)

For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.

The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.

If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.

> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.

I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.

This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.

Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.

I would push on how well GDP measures "economic might".

If I were to tell you a country over five years grew its GDP 5% in 1900, that would mean houses and roads and factories and mines and a whole range of things were built.

In 2020, 5% real GDP growth could be an increase in the value of various services. In fact, you might not need to change the physical world at all to achieve that growth.

GDP made sense in 1900, back when it took so much labor to keep us all alive and well that we could think of any economic activity as a proxy for progress towards that goal--a goal we could all agree was good. Our concept of value was mostly aligned with our values, so more = better.

Nowadays we're more in conflict, partly just because we can afford to be without risking immediate starvation. Billions get spent on swaying an election this way, more billions get spent on swaying it that way. Dollars spent in both directions count as GDP even though each one has another dollar on the other side pushing in the opposite direction. And it's not just elections, everywhere we're building moats instead of solving problems. It's a very busy way to not go anywhere.

We need to move from scalars to vectors--progress towards some goal--otherwise we're just patting ourselves on the back for working hard to no effect.

Services are all basically a proxy for the physical world though. Other than things like art and media that people value for their own sake.

Google and Facebook?

I'm not entirely sure what your question is - are you asking how Google/Facebook are proxies for physical thing?

Google, at its core, provides a service that helps you do physical things more quickly. If I need to replace the cruise control buttons on my car, I could go to the library and source a manual, or I could just search Google.

Facebook marketplace increases the efficiency of trading physical goods.

The Facebook feed is probably most akin to cigarettes.

The problem is that things like houses and boats became political tokens and/or don't have the same profit scaling as software. Housing is mostly restricted by political opposition that made it very hard or even illegal to build much. Building ships is labor intensive which is expensive here, but AFAIK at least construction of navy ships has become a bargaining ship that gets moved around to support senators rather than being allocated to the most efficient place. In general it also seems like unions in the US are somehow more of a problem than in Europe or at least Germany where I grew up. They seem less powerful here but somehow less reasonable.

>we

Andrew Yang launched a presidential campaign based on this idea, he wrote a book:

“Smart People Should Build Things”

I think the bigger problem is we filter for conmen. You can become a billionaire for vaporware and are less likely to if you actually ship something.

There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.

I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.

I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.

There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.

Can you demonstrate that this misallocation is worse in the US than it is in other countries?

They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.

Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!

That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.

Because compensation?

- "BYD did it by"

Also the many systemic, industry-wide factors discussed last week in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692677 ("America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back (molsonhart.com)" — 1010 comments)

I agree with the gist of that piece; focusing on specific engineering choices (important as they are) is missing the forest for a particularly interesting tree. Any American EV maker is heavily disadvantaged right now, no matter how clever they are.

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 funds and then go on to pay execs tens of millions of dollars a year and fat bonuses. Guaranteed profits no matter what made them lazy and uncompetitive.

They’re all dying

> When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds

When this happens, I think it's only fair that the bailed-out company becomes publicly owned. If I'm forced to invest in a company with my tax dollars, then I damn well better be treated as an investor. Where are my shares? Where are my dividends?

When the USG bailed out banks via TARP during the 2008 financial crisis, it did so by buying shares in those companies. It later sold those shares for a $30.5 billion profit.

If GMC had been “publically owned” it would have been gutted for profits (kickbacks) by its bureaucracy and politicians and been long dead by at least a decade. Bureaucrats are not good at running companies and private companies should not be providing public services (prisons, toll roads). I don't know why Americans have become so unpragmatic and either all in on “government doing everything” or “private corps doing everything” when life is never ever that simple.

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.

There also is the chicken tax which has been protecting US automakers in the pickup truck space which has lead to then leaning much more into that. Together with absurd CAFE rules that benefit huge cars and more beneficial tax write-off rules for vehicles over 3.5t regulation has lead to US automakers focusing on cars that are absurd by international standards.

BYD's allowed to sell in Europe. They're not crushing the market here. They're not substantially cheaper, or better for what they offer for the price compared to other manufacturers.

Within only a few months I see more Chinese Electric cars than Tesla (or us cars generally) on swiss streets.

Depending on what you are looking for they are WAY cheaper than comparable cars.

No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire. Many videos of this happening inside China with one recent event in the West.

> No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire.

This matches reports from Tesla users. The cybertruck is specially prone to this sort of design problems.

Only cybertrucks I've heard about catching on fire where the ones purposely set on fire. While I'm sure it happens I doubt it's any higher than any other vehicle on the road

Why is that a common failure mode in a crash? I can't think of a reason or bug that would lead to the doors locking after a crash.

Fail-safe designs are more expensive because they require redundancies, fully manual linkages, or just non-centralized control.

The Cybertruck went with daisy chained PoE automotive Ethernet variant. The same cables delivering power to subcomponents handle data. Damage/problems in a single component can not only bring down the network but kill power to all the car's subsystems. It means less wiring in the Cybertruck (and lower production expense) at the cost of durability and fail-safety. Someone looked at TokenRing Ethernet and said "yes that is best".

I think it's a well intentioned safety feature that was never fully thought through. Locking the doors in a crash can prevent a passenger from being ejected from a vehicle. However, if there is no reliable way to unlock the door once the acceleration forces have subsided, you've created a death trap.

Most cars lock as you start driving, I assume the issue is they’re not unlocking when crashed.

There's a mechanical latch release handle integrated into the doors, but they are very much not meant to be used during normal operation and are designed to be inconspicuous. This seems to cause at least some people to fail to operate them during a fast-paced emergency situation.

Are there not similar videos of Tesla, or other electric cars doing the exact same thing?

Can you share some of those videos here please?

That sounds like some kind of tiktok scare lol

VW is selling more EVs in Europe than BYD.

VW is not an American car maker. There are way more European cars in Switzerland than either Chinese or US. Obviously. Also more Japanese tho

EU import taxes designed to make them less cheap than local cars do that.

China has one of the least free trade regimes in the world, their currency controls alone amount to potentially more than Euro tariffs on cars and that’s just one part of their governmental stacking of the deck for their manufacturers.

I think it’s easy to look at the outputs of their industries and compare them extremely favorably to the outputs elsewhere, especially in EV.

But once you start comparing tariff adjusted pricing it gets much trickier much faster.

The EU has imposed tariffs and levies on BYD, totaling 27% [1].

[1] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/chinese-e...

BYD could slash european prices by quite a bit. They price them competitively to take advantage of the margin. The increase in price compared to their domestic MSRP is pretty wild, 2x in some cases. In a race to the bottom, they will win.

You're right, but comparing Switzerland to America... You need a car to live in 90% of the USA. That said, talking only about specs or prices is pretty reductionist. If anyone on this forum could forecast car sales based on pre-delivery marketing, you know, become a billionaire investor.

What went wrong is that the federal government didn't build or legislate a national charging infrastructure to match the scale of the interstate highway system.

They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.

They definitely tried... $7.5 Billion worth. It's on pause now :-(

https://www.govtech.com/transportation/federal-funding-for-e...

To the other commenters replying to you, and to you as well, the money is committed in a way that is difficult if not impossible to prevent from going out the door once projects are complete or hit specific milestones. Many projects are already underway but it takes time to select sites, developers, manufacture chargers, negotiate with utilities, and develop the sites. This work is underway and many more chargers will come online over the next few years. The new administration is preventing new projects, but horses have already left the barn.

I certainly hope so. But this[1] (not to mention other highly illegal "impoundment" type actions of this administration) gives me little succor. :-(

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/nevi/resources/state-pl...

I don't think they actually tried. They created a fund... and then did nothing to implement the intended result.

And how many stations did that yield?

[flagged]

> Yeah, because it was ineffective and the people running it, like most federal bureaucracy - extremely incompetent (to mind bending shocking levels).

I think this sort of statement should be revised. From an outsider's point of view, there is a political current within the US that pushes with a fundamentalist fervor the idea that state institutions cannot do any good or anything right. This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when they elect candidates that push these ideals, which have a vested interest in sabotaging, derailing, and shutting down projects.

It’s not just a perspective. Tesla was doing this just fine, building tons of chargers, profitably. The government attempts to stimulate more but at a much higher cost. I have yet to charge anywhere but a Tesla charger. I do think the NACS standard finally being widely adopted would have changed things but came a little too late.

Exactly this. It's not a left/right thing; I'm really tired of the charged partisan excuses (pun intended). What I'm saying is, where is all the charging infrastructure that my tax payer dollars payed for? Where the hell did the money go? If we can't get refunds for wasted taxpayer money, we need to start reevaluating if some of these programs should even exist.

Did you read the article? The program was just paused, and most of the money was never spent.

> Approval of funding does not necessarily mean the money has been dispersed. Only about $500 million of the $5 billion allotted for NEVI had been dispersed as of October, said Corey Harper, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, who has conducted research into the NEVI program

Good. But $500 million is still to much for 7 chargers. Where is the money? Where is it! Really. That's our money that was taken at the threat of gunpoint. Enough of this theft and grift. Shut it down, the entire thing and rebuilt from scratch if need-be.

Without going through everything with a fine tooth comb I imagine some of the money may have been spent upgrading the electric grid to support the chargers.

Fast chargers as I understand are more taxing to the electric grid and so are not simply able to be placed just anywhere there is electricity. Additionally a source paper in the govtech.com article also emphasizes looking at coverage rather than number of chargers. That is wanting to have chargers spread out such a way that people can complete longer trips.

https://cyberswitching.com/understanding-grid-connections-dc...

That program should be a textbook case-study in how not to run federal projects.

Here's a true statistic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/... ("Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years" (2024))

That's insane. Wild that people defend this because they hate Trump so much (yeah he's a bag-oh-farts, but that's a lot of damn money).

They didn’t spend most of that money yet.

This is a story about a program not getting off the ground in two years and then being cancelled by the political opposition. Is two years too slow? You could certainly argue that.

But this really isn’t a story about government incompetence wasting billions of dollars on a handful or charging stations. Money was allocated, but it never had the chance to be spent.

The $500 million that was wasted could have bought the taxpayer 10,000 electric cars. Just ponder on that. Where is the damn money?

You don’t get 1/10 the chargers for 1/10 the money, thats not how projects work. You need to hire people, make a plan, and execute on the plan, and all of that has upfront costs. The same in government as in business — why do you think startups need investors?

That money was wasted when the project was cancelled, not before.

Isn't this lack of forward thinking somewhat the general problem now?

From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.

Germany actively hampered it by promoting diesel as THE greeen fuel.

Yes, as I hinted at in the last sentence of my comment.

> They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.

Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.

> Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.

Investing on a nation-wide infrastructure grid that fundamentally changes the nation's energy independence is hardly a reason to mindlessly parrot state rights cliches.

The current issue is the president ignoring legal limits of his power and breaking laws right and left. While his party cheers on.

While useful parts of the federal goverment are destroyed, because they dont serve ultra rich.

In a way, the current administration perfectly demonstrates the value of a strong federal government: a kakistocratic, kleptocratic regime wouldn't dismantle the "administrative state" if it weren't an impediment to their criminality, incompetence, and rapacity.

NATIONAL-scale projects are exactly what the federal government should do. I specifically referred to the Eisenhower interstate-highway system. Those are the kind of grand undertakings that transformed our country, and which the current administration can't even conceive... let alone articulate or propose.

Read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

The Chevy Spark EV is an incredible vehicle and has been my around town go kart for the past 7 years. Cost me $11k (!!) as an off lease purchase.

I adored my Spark EV til it sadly died (fairly scarily, on a highway access road) one day. Chevy was never able to repair it and ultimately gave me a nice payout after paying for a rental for me for nearly a year.

But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.

It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!

>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

They had to in order to build the manufacturing capacity without literally bankrupting themselves. As GM has shown, once they had the expertise and manufacturing capabilities, they could quickly move downmarket. By all accounts GM's entry into the space has been a raging success, moving downmarket with the Equinox being available for as low as $27,500.

They obviously aren't to Tesla level sales numbers yet, but they're growing rapidly and I would not count them out of the fight.

https://insideevs.com/news/746177/general-motors-record-2024...

> dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry.

That's because they plan to have a small number of huge factories to keep costs down.

But that means they need cheap ships, and can only sell to places with no car tariffs - which tends to be the countries without an auto industry.

In terms of BYD dominance, one needs to keep in mind the subsidy that the Chinese government is providing, such that they can sell cars below cost.

https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2024/27...

Just 2018 to 2022, BYD received $5.9B. And that doesn't include all the indirect subsidies that went to suppliers like the battery manufacturers.

It's a part of Chinese government strategy of "build it and they will come". Massively subsidize select industries, dominate the market.

Which is why the EU has put high tariff's on the cars.

That is not that much in terms of subsidy for a critical industry. I tried finding the awards for Tesla but the articles lump in government contracts and report the figure to be in tens of billions. I am sure they have received a comparable amount of funding. BYD has just been able to make better use of it I suppose.

I completely agree. It baffles me that there aren't more entry level EVs in the United States.

Two years ago, I decided I wanted an EV. I didn't want to spend a ton. There weren't many good options. I was disappointed by the Model 3. Ionic was promising. Ended up buying a Chevy Bolt EUV. I absolutely love it. The torque you get from even a modestly powerful electric vehicle is incredible, and one pedal driving is a real boon in city driving. Plus it's fun to drive past the gas station and just plug into the charger that Chevy paid to install at my house.

BYD buses are operating in the US.

You're probably right about BYD, most people only see price and whether it's reputation is at least "ok". I personally will never buy that big of a purchase from a Chinese company until CCP is no longer in charge.

> 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product

This is because the LITERALLY CAN'T make money of a non premium product.

And for Tesla is just because Musk is stupid and went ALL-IN on self driving. They literally believe that the market will drop by 80% because of self driving. That's why the only build robotaxi and no model 2. Against the advice of basically everybody in Tesla leadership.

They are doing a lot of advertisment and promo in Germany which has a active and kinda stable car Industrie.

Pretty sure they plan to disrupt any market

Exactly how will BYD's 400k vehicals "crush" the US auto industry? They could give them away for free and not even make a dent.

> 3) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train

Obviously an electric vehicle is so much simpler than one with a gasoline engine. We have seen it already with lawn mowers who shrank from huge tractors to nimble robots.

An in particular when you don't start from the Autobahn-eater type of cars.

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.

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You missed a big elephant in the room 4) China did a significant subsidies for BYD factories. If USA did similar % wise thing to Tesla then we would’ve have $20k teslas driving.

China subsidized EVs in the same way that America did (tax credits), and less aggressively so. Unless you mean incentives from Shenzhen and getting taxi companies to early adopt? They also added incentives in getting a car at all in cities like Beijing (EVs started out in a different lottery allocation for plates)?

It's more like BYD winning the race in China's auto industry. China has over a hundred automakers, most making low-end cars.[1] Some are state-owned, some are province-owned, some are privately owned. BYD is privately owned and doing well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...

Did you mean to say sodium batteries instead of lithium in your "BYD did it" sentence?

No. Five years ago BYD introduced their "blade battery", which is a lithium iron phosphate battery built up of plate-like "blades" in rectangular casings.[1] Wh/L is about the same as lithium ion, Wh/Kg is not as good, and Wh/$ is better. It will survive the "nail test" and does not not go into thermal runaway.

Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.

BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIt5z4wT9RE

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/02/17/byd-confirms-evs-all-solid-st...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWXx1KsvVY

> Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar".

I really did not expect to open this and have it be presented by Kryten! Fun surprise! :)

By 4) stealing patents and technology off of American companies

I was curious about this statement and did a search and could not find anything about it.

It appears that EV technology is new enough that it's Chinese companies that are the ones innovating, especially in battery technology.

I don't really see how any car company can "fall behind" in EV.

Fundamentally, IMO, EVs are such a simple concept mechanically that any company capable of building a conventional ICE vehicle can build an EV.

It's glib to say that - obviously there's a lot of unsaid complexity (battery back cooling, fitting into the frame, and so on), but the actual drivetrain component is just so simple. That EVs are still expensive is to me a sign that production hasn't ramped up yet. So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product - but I can't imagine that's going to continue for all that much longer with an increasing backlog of used EVs on the market and decreasing battery prices.

Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.

Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.

Are you serious? EVs have been the biggest disruption in the auto industry. It has created major corporations who made the attempts of traditional manufacturers seem obsolete.

VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.

>That EVs are still expensive

Look up what they cost in China.

>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product

Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.

The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.

I LOVE it! THIS is the kind of truck I'd be looking at to replace my 1998 Ford Ranger.

Here is what could be potential deal-breakers:

- Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

- Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

- Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

- Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

If anyone from Slate is reading this, this is how I'm looking at this truck. FYI, I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!

EDIT: Ughhh, according to the video that another user posted, it looks like there's an app, and yes, "updates" go through it :(

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

Yes to a simple battery system!

> - Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

Yes!

> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families. You really want a bench seat to at least stick a small child between the driver and passenger. Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.

The article mentions an SUV upgrade kit that will bolt onto the back of the truck. Ugh, OK I guess. Sad that that's the way it will probably have to go.

1: https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw

> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families.

What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

> Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.

Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have, and survivorship bias makes us default to thinking it was ok. As kids, we used to go barrelling down dirt roads in the back of pickups or played in the backs of station wagons. There's a reason automobile deaths have gone down.

> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

<Get off my lawn>

My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.

</Get off my lawn>

And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?

A physical holder for a personal pad device.

The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.

The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.

And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!

Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.

> The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.

Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago

Lol, yes we just throw a phone and a Tablet with headphones to the kids.

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I'm sure your screenless children are perfect :)

Aye. It's a staple of both failed and successful parents. In fact, using a screen in a car is wholly unrelated to, well, anything.

I mean, probably many assume that we drive around our kids everyday (which we dont) cause they can walk or bike to school. Then that on every small trip they get a phone or tablet (neither true). It is just for 1 hour or more trips which are once a month or less.

Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.

No OTA updates would be a killer.

What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?

OTA updates are considered bad? What?

OTA updates on my truck have vastly improved suspension response and cruise-control/ lane-assist features. My wife's car has had OTA updates that improve her cars charging curve, and have implemented recalls for stuff like brake light response when regen braking.

Sure one could say these things should have worked perfectly from the factory, but that's not realistic: not with my cars, not with your cars, and not with this new brand either.

The only alternative I see here is the old fashioned way of having to bring it to a dealership. I would rather have an entire foot of ingrown toenails over dealing with dealership service centers of any brand.

Patches and OTA updates just scream "We know ahead of time our product is defective." Arguably OK for software (but I'd argue not), but not even remotely OK for cars.

>"We know ahead of time our product is defective."

All products are defective. Full stop.

Cars are necessarily complex and have a lot of software to get the safety, comfortable, and reliability we expect today.

Most vehicles get some sort of recall; usually minor. I just checked the NHTSA recall website and every car I could think of owned by people I know (~30 vehicles) had some had some recall.

Cars should have an easy way to update. I’m generally against always connected cars (which are the norm today), but there must be some way to patch them.

I don’t like the idea of cars having cellular modems in them (my mind goes to nefarious implications), but having a way to securely update it without having to bring to a mechanic would be nice.

>All products are defective. Full stop.

Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:

Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.

This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.

There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.

If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.

I’m not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. The specs to which you refer are also specs which the component are _rated_ at. But that’s still only a (very high) % of components. Issues do arise with individual components. Unless it is wide spread, it is not a scandal. I have worked in the industry as well as do it as a hobby. You have a very rose colored view of it.

Lemon phones make it into the hands of consumers. I had one myself a few years ago where it overheated and shut down. One offs don’t make the news because you bring it in and it’s swapped out.

What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?

Yes, and no.

I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.

My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.

I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.

You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.

HD Radio tuning is built into the FM tuner, but was disabled in software. It's patents are still in effect, until 2030, so your wife's car manufacturer likely recently obtained a patent license to tune into HD Radio stations. Why they didn't negotiate a license from the get go may be a mystery, but there's no development reason it wasn't capable on day one.

Tesla, on the other hand, has promised capabilities that haven't been developed yet, something they wouldn't be able to do without OTA updates, which is a sensible reason to feel animosity toward their reliance on them.

Ok but this car doesn’t have an infotainment system and it doesn’t detect road signs.

> It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.

Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).

The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.

If you consider a fur baby a family! :)

I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.

If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.

> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...

The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.

Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.

Some interesting people find your examples interesting: perhaps native to their personality.

However I strongly believe we can cultivate fascination with the droll.

A gray worldview might possibly say more about you.

Is a gray grain of sand interesting? Blaming a local world for being boring seems overly negative.

I concede that the way much of the US looks from car windows might be bad for people's mental health, but I doubt any of the badness is prevented by playing music or listening to podcasts in the car.

The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.

And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.

They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/

Did they?

I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.

Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.

I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.

Citation needed.

Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.

Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.

I think you're projecting.

You... need a citation for that?

I don't think you're conversing in good faith here. And it's not helpful or appropriate on HN to accuse someone else of "projecting".

Boredom is not fatal. Bring it on.

So you're cool with living in extreme poverty because it's not "fatal"? "Bring it on"?

Lots of things that aren't fatal are still very undesirable.

Boredom is so essential to human mental health, that after we automated it away with the industrial revolution, we had to reinvent it (we call it "meditation" now) to stay sane.

Being alone with your thoughts for a few minutes is not in the same class as being unable to afford food or medicine. Get out, troll, this isn't Reddit.

>Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?

That was before smartphone and tablets were common

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Kids will return to imagining Sonic running along the car

you mean "finger-man running on the side of the road and jumping over buildings"?

we would've called it parkour if we had known what parkour was back then

I never heard it quite put that way, but yes, I did something very similar.

{insert Sonic ring sound in your head}

The alphabet game still works if you teach them to read.

I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.

Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.

My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.

Could you talk us through the over-the-air update concern?

Or read books!

Read books, and/or knock yourself out with dramamine.

Is written in the article that it can fit more seats. And if you click through the pics you will see it.

> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families

I believe I saw there are plans for some sort of SUV conversion.

> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

IF it could just get a bluetooth signal from an iDevice or some Android thing, that would probably suffice for a basic option. If the owner needs more than than, let them install (or have installed) some sort of third-party infotainment head of some sort.

Back in the old days, cars sometimes had a single speaker and that was plenty sufficient for listening to music.

Station wagons from the prehistoric era were family cars and had bench seats, and only had a Radio…

You had a radio?

I'd want the mobile app to be an auxiliary, not a requirement for operating the truck. Keep the dashboard simple.

I'd be worried that once an app got a foothold into the product, the company would be unable to resist the urge to spread the app's tentacles across the entire vehicle, adding connectivity and telemetry and DRM, integrating it into the other car's systems, adding remote-this and wireless-that, and then inevitably the product would end up just like the turd cars we have today.

I have a iron filter that works via app. All configs can be done with button presses on the valve but in a much more tedious process/workflow.

It connects via bluetooth and not WiFi. If the company goes belly up, I'd just need the APK and an android phone to continue using the app to configure the valve and see/download water usage data.

Fast forward 20 years when I can't install the APK on android v79, I'd need an older phone to run the APK.. but that seems to be pulling hairs.

Apps would be great, it's how you handle the backend to it that's the gotcha.

I also have a water softener with an app that no longer works that had it's backend shut down. It can still be configured via the valve head button presses, but none of the "smart" usage data is available. As an example of good design, this is a perfect dichotomy of one company doing it well and one company doing it un-well[sic].

Not only the backend, but what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore, or we're all on phones that are totally unlike the phones of today, or if we don't even have phones or apps? I would expect the car to still work after that long, and making it dependent on a technology that is specific to a particular decade risks premature obsolescence.

I'll be ecstatic if my iron filter lasts 40 years.

I saw in another post that a person said there's a difference between "device dependent" and "device augmented" that really resonated with me.

There's diminishing returns on everything, and just throwing your hands up on any subject as bad/good might be a disservice.

If I live through an era where phones are no longer a thing and APKs are a thing of the past.. then I either...

A. Don't use the iron filter like that anymore. (manual programing now) B. Get a new iron filter. (ewwwww) C. Keep a legacy-device for the purposes of programming the iron filter. (doesn't need any internet connection or subscriptions)

(C) would be my most liked solution.

> ...what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore...

40 years? How about, like, 3 to 5 years? Remember when Apple decided to kill all 32-bit iOS apps for new hardware? I have an old iPod and iPhone 4S with "landlocked" software I enjoy using but can't anymore because Apple.

Phone manufacturers have shown they don't give a damn about allowing old software to function. Physical devices tied to software is a terrible idea.

Fully agree. We may have to keep a 40 year old phone around in order to just use a 40 year old car's companion app.

Relying on a mobile app is relying mobile operating system compatibility over the years and is just asking for combinatorial methods of obsolescence via OS/app/library breaking changes, plus if your old phone breaks, etc. Open sourced mobile app with open sourced back end might be somewhat acceptable but otherwise it's just asking to be bricked as soon as one of the companies involved goes under as we have seen time and again just in past couple of years.

Not an app, but an API. And an app on top of that, if desired.

Also there are evergreen interfaces, so to say. An RS232 / RS485 connector that serves 115kbps 8N1 serial interface and runs a VT220-based TUI should still be serviceable 40 years from now (VT220 was released 42 years ago). A now-modern web-based GUI also has a great chance to be serviceable 40 years from now.

100% agree. I would be fine if they had an estimated time-to-fully-charged displayed on the screen. I don’t need to know the status of my vehicle, personally. I would imagine a third party system could be implemented to achieve most of what one would need.

Nice idea in theory. In practice, apps imply ongoing OTA connectivity, which means the truck will be updated to show ads or at the very least collect and sell all my driving information to any dirtbag that can rub two nickels together. Connected devices can alter the deal so they will, after all I've lost any leverage against them after I purchased the vehicle.

If the vehicle had an open interface (maybe via CAN bus over the OBD2 port?), then DIY and aftermarket apps become possibilities.

I think legally they would need to require using an app for their back view camera. All new cars in the United States after 2018 need one and I don't see how it would work without using the phone/tablet as a display.

The article says the rear camera feed will be displayed on a screen behind the steering wheel which doubles as the speedometer and charge display.

That seems like a clever and reasonable compromise to comply with a particularly bad regulation.

The regulation did exactly what it was designed to do: take the base-model Nissan Versa off the market and prevent any low-cost vehicles from competing in the US market. (Remember when brand-new cars were available for under $10,000? Inflation adjusted, that was still less than $15,000)

Sure, ultrasonic sensors have a better outcome than backup cameras in a cost-benefit analysis (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/nhtsa-2006-25579...) and allow you to simultaneously look out the windows and get feedback from the sensor, but allowing them would have allowed for the sale of cars too cheap to have infotainment systems, and that was not the goal of the regulators.

I don’t have a problem with the regulation. Slate is trying to build a safe, affordable, electric vehicle. Having one display for all information seems like a good way to save cost.

You need an app. You could make steering to the left only available in a 50 USD per month subscription but steering right is free or something like it.

> Noooooooooo! No apps, please!

I wish devices could have web servers and web-based UI rather than thick "apps" that end up rotting when device manufacturers arbitrarily decide that old software won't work anymore (cough, cough-- Apple-- cough, cough).

I know we can't because "security", no end-to-end over the Internet anymore, etc. >sigh<

It seems like we've engineered the networking and software ecosystem to promote disposable "smart" devices. It's almost like somebody profits from it. Hmm...

Why, we of course could if we cared. Let the car offer a wifi access point. WPA3 is secure enough, but you can of course have an extra layer of TLS inside it.

For the extra paranoid, a car could have a USB socket that pretends to be a wired network interface, offering DHCP.

Run a web server for car diagnostics and maintenance when connected to this interface. Do it from the comfort of your laptop, or anywhere anytime using your phone. Zero chance of remote exploits, if you set the things correctly on the car side. An ESP32-based system with $5 BOM would suffice to provide this.

Not with off the shelf protocols. Yes WPA3 is plenty secure, but any AP advertising the same SSID with the same key would allow the device to connect. So how do you know that you're connected to your car, and not to the black hat AP next to it?

From there, you can have as much TLS as you want, but that still won't give you server identity unless the server certificate is signed by someone you already trust. So a generic web browser would be screwed, because you either add SlateTruckCertificateAuthority to the globally trusted list, and then you still have to deal with revocations and certificate expiry, or you use some other CA that is willing to delegate. There's no good support for self-signed certificates or pinned certificates, and even if there were, the initial connection would be tough.

Unfortunately this really isn't a well-solved problem. Bluetooth can get you part of the way there, but it only offers really good security in theory (in practice it is constantly having issues) and it is intrinsically limited.

First of all, the SSID and password should be unique. Then, you can have a QR code printed in the owner's manual, and inside the glove compartment, or something. There's a standard for QR codes for connecting to wifi, so you don't have to type in the long and cryptic password.

But I don't see much incentive to produce a fake wifi AP for me to connect to with my car diagnostics. I'm not going to punch my bank account and password into it anyway. If I'm misled to alter the battery charging settings for someone else's car, or for a pretend mockup of the car controller, I don't see what the perpetrator could gain from it.

Then there must be a button on the car dashboard, or near, which I should press to activate the AC (it does not need to be up all the time), and press again to switch it off. This can serve as an easy way to check if there's doubt. The interface may have a function like headlights on / off as a simple way to check that the connection works.

A locally-hosted web interface would likely be easier to reach a given level of security than a centrally hosted interface, but obtaining and renewing SSL/TLS certificates is a requirement for HTTPS interfaces, and are designed around centralized and frequently updated centrally hosted systems, so it's only really doable with a different protocol.

It would still be easy to have a locally-hosted interface, over any other protocol, with an open-source client that could easily be ported to any future hardware and operating system.

A web server and UI is much “thicker” than a REST API. The problem is that the API used to talk to the app isn’t open to the owner.

> Yes to a simple battery system!

Battery balancing and conditioning does not need to be fancy, and does not need a fancy screen; a couple of LEDs should suffice.

But I'd like my batteries charged competently, recharged efficiently while braking, worn uniformly, and kept at reasonable temperature. It's not hard to do completely automatically and invisibly; a quality electric bike would have it.

> Yes to a simple battery system!

But you realize this will make cold-weather range suck and on-the-road charging suck, right?

Preheating the battery and cabin on "shore power" is something EV buyers just expect at this point because that can consume 2-3kWh of energy (equivalent to 6-10 miles or 10-16 km). That's almost 10% of Slate's range (see below).

Preheating the battery about 10-15 minutes before you arrive at a supercharger is another expected feature. It can increase charge acceptance rate by over 50% (reduce charge time by 1/3).

The 150 mile range is extremely optimistic given the size of the battery and shape of the truck. With just 5% top and bottom buffers, you'd need to achieve over 3.1 miles/kWh... which is the consumption expected of a small aerodynamic sedan. I would bet real money that highway range (at 75 mph) for the small battery is less than 120 miles from 100% to 0.

Highway speeds are worst case scenario so maybe you're right but I doubt it.

Your charge rate acceptance number is surprising to me, I've never seen anything like this in my years of experience designing EV batteries. Preconditioning helps extreme fast charging but isn't necessary for 1-2 C charges at all unless it's very cold out.

There's some caveats to this depending on the exact chemistry but if anything the newer semi solid state NMC cells are even less dependent on this and can charge down to -20C.

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.

Why should it lack that? That's a tiny piece of software in the charge controller, which on this vehicle ought to be some tiny microcontroller.

In car it requires liquid cooling and from conversations I've had with former Tesla engineers, exquisite control over power quality.

Just ask a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt owner.

EV battery engineer here. It's not hard. Battery management systems are often over engineered but the state of the art is fairly straightforward and will allow battery packs of sufficient size last 200k miles or more easily.

I dunno the PhD electrochemist that I know who spent a long time teasing out the conditions and requirements for megapack operation didn't think it was trivial. That's also the reason Tesla pays Jeff Dahn so much money. A million miles/20k cycles is the goal.

> exquisite control over power quality

So a... 16 bit microcontroller?

The electrochemical interface where lithium intercolates into the anode and cathode of the battery experiences microscopic electric field variations that, depending on the local surface geometry, lead to side reactions and battery degradation. The hardware that converts DC to DC and DC to AC must be designed to mitigate the voltage ripple and harmonics that exacerbate the localized electric field extremes that prematurely degrade electrode interfaces and battery electrolytes. State of the art BMS and rectifier components are much more difficult to build than you might think.

Correct me if I'm wrong but your comments do not suggest that the end result of this engineering cannot be very simple, elegant, and hopefully even inexpensive if built at scale. Instead, they suggest that the team who builds it needs to know what the heck they're doing.

No argument here. What are we even talking about?

I think we're generally talking about the same thing. A complex piece of power electronics and software.

> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

Take her car on those trips then. You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping? The product isn't trying to do everything. It's trying to be the minimum viable truck and be good at it. And just like the purpose built roadster you give up unrelated stuff, like family hauling.

> You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping?

Because 2-seat pickups used to function this way. It's okay to pine for functionality that has been lost, particularly when a new product like this comes along and gets your hopes up.

>Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!

What car is tied to your phone? A mustang mach-e, for instance, does not require your phone at all. It has a FOB for opening the doors and starting it, you can program the charging times from the in-car screen.

The app is optional, exactly as it should be. This car DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not. With no in-car screen you'll have absolutely no way to control charging which WILL come back to bite you.

>Yes to a simple battery system!

"simple" in this case will add cost. Nearly every EV has the battery as a part of the structural frame of the vehicle for a reason (there are some niche exceptions in China). Nothing is impossible, but I don't see them making the battery easily swappable, while also being structurally sound, and keeping the low price point.

> DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not

I don't own an EV. What for? Do you really need more than a button or two and some leds?

In addition to the sibling comment, you want to be able to check if the vehicle is charging and everything is fine remotely. EVs randomly stopping charging for various reasons is not rare at all. You want to get a notification.

You want to know when the vehicle finishes charging so you can vacate the public charger.

You want to be able to reduce the current when the charging is tripping breakers wherever you are.

On my EV that is very rare. Has never happened to me.

Controlling your charging. You shouldn’t be charging more than 80% for daily driving unless you want to destroy your battery.

You will almost assuredly also want to be able to precondition if you live in a cold climate.

Again, why do you consider those things as better done via a smartphone and an app, versus using the already built-in screen (the one behind the wheel)?

As I’ve already stated, I consider it better done by both. I don’t think forcing one or the other is a good user experience.

Every preview I’ve seen has stated that display is for the speedometer and backup camera, and that’s it. It’s not an input device.

I absolutely agree with you on the NO APP thing. I too just want air conditioning knobs and that's it. A truck from 1980 that is an EV that can haul lumber to build a house.

I think you're assuming a mobile app would mean that the car is dependent on your phone. Just because an app can be connected to your car doesn't mean the app controls your car.

Bench seats are almost certainly not coming back in modern low cost vehicles due to side impact safety regulations. They aren't _illegal_ but its extremely difficult to meet those standards with a bench configuration and ironically probably why a budget pickup is less likely to have them. Cutting those corners by not having a bench at all is an easy way to save money in the design.

The hauling and towing is another one. Unfortunately batteries are much heavier than a combustion engine and take away from the total capacity of the vehicle. It's curb weight is 500lbs more than the 1998 Ford Ranger. Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.

The problem with bench seating is not side impact but accidental steering wheel input during hard cornering. In the typical 10 and 2 hand position having your butt move makes your shoulders move, the shoulders make the hands move, and now you’re understeering. Understeering on a mountain road likely means death, and on other roads a ditch or hitting a phone pole.

Steering position has been taught as 9 and 3 for a long time now… but still fair point. You can add a bit of alcantara to the seat to help you stay in place though. My RDX has it for the sporty-ish trim and it helps.

It’s never 9 and 3 in a turn though is it. It’s more like 8 and 1. Or just 1.

It's actually more like 8 and 4 or even 7 and 5 to keep your hands and arms out of the way of the airbag

And then your problem is oversteering which puts you into oncoming traffic.

Skill issue. 100k miles on bench seats in full size sedans to full size pickups, including mountain roads, and nary a problem.

Literally survivor bias.

So you agree: skill issue.

> understeering

Is that even possible in cars with ESC?

I had no idea bench seats had such an impact to side impact safety regulations. Thanks for that insight!

It also makes sense that the total capacity of the vehicle would diminish, but at the same time, and engine isn't weightless (though neither is an electric motor). If I had 1,500 pounds capacity, then I should be good to go.

The rear seats of almost all new cars are bench seats though. Is side impact safety requirements the same or apply the whole side of the car?

I believe airbag requirements prevent this because the middle seat would require a console mounted airbag where infotainment systems normally live

I suspect GP is misremembering why bench seating went away. Bench seats for the driver can lead to steering errors which can result in crashes.

There are other reasons too.

1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.

The only one alternative is a column manual shifter which is horrible to use.

You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.

There are dash mounted shifters but would probably hit the middle person's knees. Not sure since these are rare and usually European (fiat multipla) /Japanese

2. At a point a US safety requirement was all front passengers needed either an airbag or a automatic shoulder seatbelt, basically it ran along the door with a motor when the door closed.

Automatic shoulder belts were cheaper than airbags so manf usually picked that option but don't work with middle seats since they need a door/column for the rails.

3. Minor, but, additional side safety rules increased door thickness. Both sides pushed in more making it uncomfortable. Fine in rear but front, as you mentioned, is a danger to steering.

4. Smaller import cars due to gas crisis in 70s that US companies (eventually) copied that combined with reason (3) made the middle seat basically useless

> 1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.

Maybe in cars, but even when trucks still had a manual option, the S10/Sonoma as well as the full size GMT400 had a bench seat in the 90s/00s and a floor manual shifter, and it all worked pretty well. None of them shift like a Porsche, but especially in the full size trucks the center of the bench wasn't too bad if you weren't a large person, and they're generally pretty pleasant to drive.

You're right though that a truck could offer a floor shifter manual or a column auto because it's an easy conversion.

European cars did have the 4 on the floor but that's dated and these didn't have an automatic for the US (afaik).

I'm looking at the period when bench seats died though. A major change in car sizes and the dominance of imports.

> You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.

I’ve been in one of those. And I may or may not have been the child stuck sitting there. Mercifully only a couple times, because I was horrified. It felt like a child had the power to get us into an accident. 0/10 would not recommend.

I had an experience travelling across Kyrgyzstan recently in the middle front seat. The gearstick was just to the side of my leg, but changing gears invariably meant hitting my leg with it. It was a long 10 hours.

Hah, I was thinking of the fond memories I have of sitting in the middle seat and my dad letting me operate the shifter for him.

You're 100% right, they are used in semi trucks where it's not usually an issue.

It's also a horrible shifter experience even for regular commuter cars where performance isn't a priority. Considering how it's one of the three constantly used controls in a car it would likely hurt sales in a sedan.

> Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.

Leaf sprung solid axle is great for doing things on a budget.

But it's probably impossible to put one in a new vehicle because the hiring pool of the automotive industry is too indoctrinated against that sort of stuff at this point.

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

I get that cars have these, but my PHEV (which I don't often charge) lost its app when Ford pulled the plug as 3G was sunsetting and I don't think I'm missing anything. If there's anything wrong with the car, it can show the check engine light (or whatever it's called when there's no engine).

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.

Seems like a little early to declare this on a vaporware product? I don't think you need a screen or an app to have reasonable battery conditioning?

Anyway, I would love small trucks to return. I had a 2007 Ranger and I have a 2003 S-10, and there's nothing in the US new vehicle market that fits the small truck niche anymore. CAFE standards can't be met with a small footprint truck, so we only get large footprint trucks. But EV trucks don't have efficiency standards, so maybe we'll see the niche again. (I think you could maybe hit the CAFE standards with a single cab ranger and a hybrid drive train, but I also think automakers prefer to sell luxury trucks rather than base model trucks)

This is why it's so hard for companies to introduce stripped-down or small models of anything: People will tell you how much they want it, but as soon as they see it they realize they actually miss something from the models that are already out there.

It happens with small phones (iPhone mini) to laptops and cars. There are comments throughout this thread claiming that everyone would be buying small sedans if not for CAFE regulations, but we have plenty of small sedans on the market that aren't selling well.

It always comes down to market demand. The big companies have market demand figured out better than many give them credit for, even if it's not exactly the product you want.

I'm grateful they don't make truly stripped down models of cars anymore, because those were always what would end up in the rental car inventory. Every time I'd rent a car, it felt like I was taking a step back in time.

Now all rental cars actually have some reasonable set of features, without you having to pay for any up-sells.

You should try renting in New Zealand. It literally is a step back in time, lots of companies mostly rent very old (20 years plus) Japanese models. So cheap though.

So the rest of the economy should suffer to subsidize your rental.

Huh, lack of an app is a major plus in my book

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> Lack of a mobile app…

At the 6 mins and 40 seconds timestamp on this video (https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw?t=400) he shows the car app that will tell you current range, etc

I'd recommend folks watch the video – it's fascinating.

The truck gets OTA updates through your phone and not some LTE modem. It doesn't have one. They moved all car management including OBD-like functionality to the phone, too, which I think is awesome.

This is how I want the interior design philosophy of manual controls to be digitized – with digital control. I'd pay $10k more for physical buttons, though.

Only if the phone app is open source, or at least the api, alllll of it, is public so no one needs the default app nor is limited by it.

Alternatively, maybe the overall simplicity will mean that a 3rd party full computer replacement would be feasible even without any official help from the manufacturer.

I’d be good with no updates. Ie make it simple enough that there shouldn’t need to be updates.

And if there’s something major maybe you download it onto a thumb drive and plug it in.

I’m tired of my vehicle being changed without my consent.

I mean yes, but also this is a complex new prototype vehicle. I can assume that there may be mistakes/ non ideal things that they only catch post production.

As long as the fixes are a long the lines as bios updates (not required per say, but may fix bugs or edge cases) then that seems reasonable.

Oh sweet. Delicious. Very reassuring. Was really hoping this thing was going to be device agnostic.

My 2015 car had 3g "smart" features that no longer work since 3g has been sunset in the US. Awesome to see forward thinking of a smart feature-set that can be updated with a module you'll likley already have an upgrade path for.

> $10k more for physical buttons

No you wouldn't. 3rd party buttons on Tesla is $400.

Ugh. Yuck. Very disappointing. Was really hoping this thing wasn't going to be phone dependent.

There's a difference between phone-dependent and phone-augmented. I don't know the details of the truck, but I think a happy medium would be for an app to exist to augment the truck's abilities and allow at-home updates, but to not require the app or phone to just use the truck (even for long periods; i.e. you could go forever without using the app and the truck will just keep working in its current state).

1. Even though they aren't required to have OBDII, every electric vehicle has some kind of management interface, although manufacturers do often lock out users and third-party mechanics. Slate seems to show an interest in allowing third-part modifications and repairs, so I doubt that will be an issue. No matter what they do, I sure hope it doesn't require me to install their software on my phone or computer to access it, although I have no problem with them providing it.

2. Only very early first-gen electric cars, like the Nissan Leaf and Smart Fortwoo, were shipped without effective battery management. There's no reason any manufacturer would do that now, and I doubt any battery supplier would want to work with them, if they tried.

3. The Slate truck will be more capable. It has 201 hp and 195 lb-ft of torque, significantly outperforming the 117 hp and 149 lb-ft of torque in the standard-model 1998 Ranger. How they quantify hauling and towing capacity may have changed since the 90's, but you can rest assured that it is more powerful.

4. Designing an optional bench seat would be easy, but getting approval to sell them would be expensive, due to current safety regulations. This could likely only happen once sales volume is large enough to justify the long approval process for that variation.

Number four is likely the only holdup. If the SUV accessories are easy to install, it may still be worth considering, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a long process for their first generation. Most auto manufacturers can't design an easy-to-install hard-top, on their first try.

Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog.

Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.

Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.

This sounds like the feature creep tesla always struggled with.

also, no mobile app? that is a feature.

The appeal of this vehicle is that it IS like your 1998 ranger, not: mobile app = data collection = monetized vehicle = mobile upgrades = basically all the things that are bad with technology.

Honestly, all these "monetized experience" companies forget that (like matt ridley's rational optimist says) with trust, trade is unlimited.

You'd be surprised to learn that you can drive a Tesla without a mobile app.

> a cheap and easy to replace battery pack.

Battery expansion is a user installable option. It might not be as easy to replace the main battery, but the expansion battery will be, and will make it easier to install newer tech down the road, etc.

I think you are way off on the target demographics. The idea is to have a car that is minimalist in nature, which does mean:

- no app - no bells - no whistles

Slate.. I will add one more thing. If you will make it spy on me like all the other new cars now, its a nogo either. I might as well just get an old car from 90s... which amusingly will still work for what I need it to do ( move some stuff around ).

> I occasionally need the hauling capacity [of a] 1998 Ford Ranger

Then rent a suitable vehicle for the occasion.

- Your example Ford Ranger[1] seems to have towing capacity of 6,000lbs (~2700kg), and a payload capacity of 1,260lbs (~570kg).

- Compare that to the worst model Toyota Hilux[2], which has a payload of up to 1240kg, and can tow 2500kg. These can be rented for like $65 AUD per day (~$40 USD).

[1] https://www.kbb.com/ford/ranger/1998/specs/ [2] https://www.redbook.com.au/cars/details/2019-toyota-hilux-wo...

This truck has 150 miles of range at 100% charge with no weight. I like the idea of the truck, but you won’t be doing “glamping” with it and you probably won’t be using the battery for anything but driving

Same. Only thing missing for me is is a gas engine and manual stick shifter.

Same. Though this looks like the first EV I might actually consider.

Same, though the company trying to reuse the International Scout name got my attention. Physical controls and an on board gas generator.

I grew up with an (already old, and by the time we got rid of it years later, hilariously rusted-out and with tires containing more fix-a-flat than air) Scout and their announcement ad for the electric one hit a bullseye with me.

I don't really do new cars (too expensive) but damn... if I had enough cash to not give a fuck, they'd have been well on their way to selling me one just with that ad. Really well done.

Please no apps. Please no smart phone garbage.

I'm kind of excited by their App idea. They don't have an infotainment, speakers, etc. You can just use your phone + their app + bluetooth speaker.

It really depends. The model for a smartphone app is that the app is eventually abandoned, leaves behind old platforms, or just drops previously-owned functionality when the business needs to make a few more dollars. If you can do EVERYTHING outside of the app I suppose it's not so bad, but if you rely on the app for basic functionality you're absolutely setting yourself up for failure in the future.

> Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

Would be nice if they had a protocol locally for a 3rd party to step in an offer their own offerings here.

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

Wait, you actually want your car to upload all your data to someone else's cloud for them to sell?

They could offer an API kit or sdk so people could make open source apps for it.

Lack of a mobile app is the single BIGGEST reason I just reserved one. This is precisely the truck I've been wanting.

(Well, a PHEV would be even better, but I can deal with pure BEV.)

I also Love the direction of this truck. It would be nice if they installed speakers…two door and a small sub and just left a space in the dash for a standard radio of your choice. Or at the very least cut out the spaces and run wire so installing a proper stereo isn’t a nightmare. I don’t need “infotainment” but I do consider a radio with decent sound to enjoy the ride standard equipment.

Hopefully it comes with an OBD socket you can connect to as with all other cars.

That should provide basic diagnostics/stats. No need for "apps".

It's actually not required for EVs - Tesla has started to drop it from recent models. I bet these guys would omit it as well to save money.

Or use it because using an existing standard makes everything that needs to interface with it cheaper/easier.

> I still want an app to manage charging

Consumers with preferences like yours are the #2 reason (after new regulations) that modern cars are terrible

The subheading said Digital Detox. Means no App. For apps, get a Muskmobile .. the ones running with high beams on all the time.

From the FAQ:

Beginning in 2026, you’ll be able to find charging stations using the upcoming Slate App.

https://www.slate.auto/en/faq

it doesn't explicitly answer whether the app will satisfy your criteria, but there'll be something.

There is an app - see about halfway down this page https://www.slate.auto/en/charging

> Lack of a mobile app.

OVMS was originally developed for the Tesla Roadster and then adapted to the Leaf, ...

https://www.openvehicles.com

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

God, please, no. Why on Gods green earth would I want that? Stop doing this to stuff. It is an abomination. I am sure many others echoed this point but holy crap. No. I am all for technology. But I do not want some tracker in my car. Apps are anathema to my freedom.

The Maverick apparently has poor build quality but I'm hoping Toyota comes up with a pickup using the same small footprint + bare bones + hybrid drivetrain formula.

Toyota already has the Toyota Hilux Champ @ 12k USD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hNYwTVPUkQ

The Japanese companies have been making kei trucks for 70 years. They've never been sold directly in the US and never will.

They don't want our chicken

https://www.autoblog.com/news/why-the-chicken-tax-still-cont...

Holy crap! And it will have a manual option! Love.

There will be no way this will be sold in the states. You would have to live in some place like Thailand or Costa Rica.

I read that as comparing it to one of Ford's cheap cars from the 70's. Which would be a low bar to meet.

I just mean poor vs trucks from Honda or Toyota. I don't know if there's anything from a US brand that has comparable build quality and engineering these days.

I will add: power windows. We can hope that’s an upgrade. It’s been a long time since I hand rolled down a window.

That said, I preordered two. I love this.

> I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.

This truck might just steal the thunder from an EV Maverick, and Ford can't release that soon enough.

>Lack of a mobile app.

FFS, do you want your dishwasher tethered to the cloud too?

False equivalence, but yes, I do.

No, I [correctly] extrapolated with high confidence.

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Your passion is something that market researches for this company should salivate over, especiall from a curated forum like HN.

Unforuntatley, this company and this project are VC expenditure "throw away projects", made to fail.

No motor vehicle satisfying NHTSA can be made in america for below 20k cost of materiels, nevermind msrp. This article and the company are pitching that this is "realistic" due to cutting costs of paint, radios. Which...are pennies on the dollar compared to what satifys US road requiremnents for EV; safety, suspension, manufacturer support, parts availability, reparability. Are they skimping there too? will this 2025 electric vehicle have LEAF springs?

20k is the pre-production estimates. When in history has that not balloned especially for car platforms made in USA? What will a made in USA replacement lead acid accessory battery cost? 3k?

Once this goes over 40k (which, is guaranteed. A mazda miata which is as bare bones as it gets, old technology, is still 32k base, and thats made in a cheaper labor market.), the funding will back off, and all the R and D money wasted.

Please research these vehicles:

https://www.chevrolet.com/suvs/trax?evar25=Vanity_Trax_20170...

https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/crossovers-suvs/kicks.htm...

This is extremely refreshing. I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even. Cars and trucks are so over-engineered and come with tons of low value options intended to drive up the price.

For a case in point, consider that headlights that turn on and off automatically in response to darkness (or rain) are not a standard feature on many cars, yet they include a manual switch that costs more than a photosensor only because of the trim-level upgrades.

Cars could include a slot for a tablet but instead come with overpriced car stereos and infotainment systems that are always light years worse than the most amateurish apps on any mobile app store.

As should be very clear by now after the 2008 US auto industry bailouts and the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, the US auto industry is heavily protected and faces virtually no competition, which is why a common sense vehicle like the one in the article sounds revolutionary, though I imagine BYD could deliver something a lot more impressive for $10K if allowed to compete in the US without tariffs.

To be honest most of those accessories are actually incredibly cheap at manufacturing time and several have a direct impact on safety (e.g. ensuring people don't drive around with lights off). The cost usually comes as companies use them for pricing tiers where they market them as suggested extras to ratchet up profits.

Driving with your lights off at dusk or dark gets you (rightfully) pulled over by law enforcement in CA. It's well-correllated with driving under the influence.

I'm a huge fan of many car safety regulations, but this isn't one.

(Sign me up for car-hiding-in-blind-spot notification lights on side mirrors, though, those are great)

I don't understand what you're saying here - you think it's good to have your lights turned on - but you don't want them to automatically turn on?

Because of my ADHD I would constantly get pulled over if automatic lights were removed

You and I both!

I think they mean that it gives a clear signal to LEOs that the person driving is likely distracted/unfit.

Everyone makes mistakes. It's important to make it easy to do the right thing.

That doesn't make any sense. Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection, and automatic light sensors save lives.

It could make sense. We don't know the numbers.

Let's say net X lives are saved each year because of automatic lights turning on.

Let's say net Y lives would be saved each year without automatic lights, via more effective detection of drunk drivers and stopping them before they kill someone.

Is X > Y? We don't know.

> Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection

There are a lot of avenues to decrease DUI, among which one is effective detection combined with enforcement.

The EU has done lots of reach on road and car safety, there's lots of data out there - just perhaps not in the US as many American made cars have significantly lagged behind in terms of safety features.

I don't know if it's an EU rule, but in my (European) country cars are required to have their lights on at all times, even during the day. The lights switch on automatically when you start the car

I'm baffled that daytime running lights are not mandatory on all models of all cars in 2025. My 13 year old Grand Caravan has them, though I suspect it's because it comes from the Daimler Chrysler era.

I love to baselessly praise europe as much as the next idiot in the comments but most North American models that got DRLs before it was legally required got them because they've been required in Canada since the 90s

After I visited Iceland where it's mandatory, I liked the improved visibility so much I turn my lights on for every single trip. It was not a takeaway I was expecting to have from the trip.

It's a good idea in some places. An overcast winter's day in the North isn't that well lit by default.

The EU also is far more strict on DUIs.

Okay, let's compare it to: Let's not make auto-pilot mandatory in planes, because sometimes a copilot has found that a pilot was drunk when taking off manually.

Even if there was a drunken pilot epidemic that causes 10 plane crashes per year, and autopilot only prevents 1 plane crash per year, it would be ridiculous not to make the autopilot mandatory and rely on its absence to catch some of those drunken pilot crashes.

I don't agree. Why would that be ridiculous?

In the example you give, if the copilot catches the pilot more than 10% of the time, then the swap to mandatory autopilot kills more people than not doing it.

I hardly think it would be ridiculous to want to save more lives.

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There may be something like that that does make it counterintuitive. Usually those kind of Malcom Gladwell paradoxes end up overstated.

There would be other factors, like drunk people are probably safer with their lights on too. Lane keeping probably makes it harder to detect drunk drivers too but also may make them safer.

This is simply because police don’t do their jobs. It would be trivial to simply wait outside bars at 2AM and give out tons of DUIs but a significant percentage of the population are alcoholics and this would result in massive blowback against the police.

Go to any small town watering hole at 2AM to see this in effect. The police have no legal obligation to prevent crime or enforce laws. None.

I'll do you one better, car headlights should never be off while the motor is running. Just like motorcycles since the 70s (maybe 80s?).

No switch at all, ignition on, headlights on, period.

Niche counter example:

Parents who sit in their idling cars for (fucking) ages while their cars are facing the tennis courts thus blinding the player on the other side of the court for however long it takes them to either turn their car off, drive off, or someone to tell them turn their fucking headlights off.

How long have you been holding that one?

It's only been a recent thing, noticeably more frequent the last couple of years.

Before that I've not had to intervene at all, as far as I can remember.

There aren't that many courts where cars park facing them, but my home courts are one of them ;)

Along similar lines would be those people who constantly start up their cars in campgrounds after hours for whatever reason.

Simple solution: when the wheels start rolling, the lights come on.

I'd still prefer to override both on/off though.

Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.

When the oncoming cars do not have headlights on I find it easier to give them just enough attention to see that they are behaving normally leaving more attention to devote to things other than oncoming cars.

>Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.

Especially the cars with the projectors that bounce around.

I like this. Turns out a few countries require DRL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp

But what about for electric cars? Maybe whenever the car is in anything other than P, and for 5 minutes after P?

Canadian vehicles require this by law.

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 for free when windows phone were licensed and Samsung tyzen cost money to develop, then forced manufacturer to accept outrageous terms to ship Google play service in their phone when all competition was already dead, is now under scrutiny for antitrust.

China’s approach to funding BYD is meant to replace much of the capital it might raise in freer markets, providing subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential policies to offset limited access to liquid equity and debt markets.

This support, totaling $10-12 billion from 2018-2022 plus in-kind benefits, mirrors the role of U.S. automakers’ $160-220 billion in public market raises and $50-100 billion in private capital, but with less financial risk for BYD due to state backing.

I think what people are missing is that EVs can be dramatically simpler to manufacture than internal combustion vehicles. This leverages manufacturing advantages and so with or without subsidies, China has big advantages due to its advancements in manufacturing tech.

Recall when China started making hoverboards for a fraction of the price of a Segway? Making EVs at scale required largely the same manufacturing pipeline.

It is the foresight of China’s industrial policy, not the amount of subsidy that has created the manufacturing powerhouse China has become.

US attempts are crude (sledgehammer) methods that leave the market far less free with mostly downside for everyone and no industrial policy goals, only domestic incumbents being protected from reality.

The lack of freer markets is itself a response to the biggest subsidy the Chinese government provides its manufacturers, the currency controls.

RMB is undervalued by ~10-30%, with latter being extreme estimates, pegged to usd with small floating band. It's minor advantage vs executing competent industrial policy that durably drives production costs down fraction vs competitors. Add 10-30% to PRC EV production costs and western (especially US) producers still nowhere near.

That’s _just_ the peg. The other currency controls include the prevention of currency outflows by Chinese capital and the restriction on foreign holders of Chinese debt. All of that drives the costs down.

My personal opinion is that the Chinese EV would dominate in a completely free market, but we will never know.

My broader point is that it’s weird to say that the cash subsidies make up for the lack of freer markets capital, that’s double dipping.

Currency controls drive costs down (really loss/inefficiency) in the sense that it contains misallocation like illicit capital flight, i.e. stashing grafted funds meant for industrial programs abroad. That's less advantage than mitigating the disadvantage of legacy of PRC corruption - not double dipping, but ensuring sauce stays in the domestic bowl to be dipped at all. And ultimately "freely" competing with reserve USD privilege is a stacked game - the currency controls themselves aren't subsidies, they protect employment of subsidies, i.e. ensuring higher % of X gets directed properly to industry, rather than mansions in vancouver, it's not a multiplier like X*2.

If the argument is that currency controls gives PRC a more stable basis for financing industrial policy (deal with fluctuations and keep domestic captive bond buyers), then sure, but that layer is levelling the playing field. Ultimately it comes to productively using actual allocated $$$ for indy programs to develop durable competitive advantages that can be sustained in lieu of subsidies. VS printing more billions to bail out legacy auto as domestic job programs - which op was replying to, everyone protects domestic auto, even PRC also has to prop up some SEOs, but they also focus on indy programs that's just about hammering pure industrial competitiveness to eventually build comparable item for fraction of the cost.

IMO why this proposal is exciting. If US producer can figure out how to produce somethign that's only 50% more expensive then PRC versus 200%, then it's a huge win.

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

False

Not a terribly compelling argument

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 Sweden?).

Japanese, Korean, and European brands already make a lot of vehicles to get around tariffs, although it makes sense for some sedans to be made abroad given American lack of interest in them (so economy of scales doesn’t work out), and sedans typically not being tariffed as harshly as trucks.

  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 Sweden?).

> 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.

They're very popular in Australia.

They're selling ridiculous numbers in Brazil and Uruguay and are opening a factory there.

I think they're the number one brand by sales some months in Uruguay.

Chinese investment in the US is inherently risky. For example TikTok. BYD would be stomping GM and Ford. The next thing you know, they would need to sell their factory.

Companies spending money to navigate tariff regimes adds tremendous cost and inefficiency that makes everyone worse off.

Wouldn’t they still need to pay tariffs on all the parts they manufacture in china? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the tariffs but it sounds like Chinese companies would have to build completely separate supply chains to keep the US market

Before no, or at least not very high tariffs. Now I have no idea, Trump’s story changes daily. However lots of US made autos are using Chinese parts so they are all affected to some degree.

>I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even.

The closest this comes to is a Dacia spring. Which is not a great car. The dacia could not be made at US labor costs. 15k is an absurd price, Chinese companies can do it because they pay Chinese labor costs and have serious economies of scale. Unless you sell hundreds of thousands of these a year AND pay US workers like Chinese ones, 15k will not happen.

Dacia Spring launched in Romania at 6000$. Now it's 15-18000$ just because they can.

4 door Jimny are ~$15K in Dubai.

>heavily protected and faces virtually no competition

Huh? Out of the top 25 vehicles sold in the US in 2024, 16 of them are non-US automakers. Just because the US is actively blocking China from dumping heavily subsidized vehicles into the north american market, doesn't mean they "face no competition". Kia and Hyundai alone show that it's VERY possible to break into the US market if you have even a little bit of interest playing fair.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g60385784/bestselling-cars...

The only real way to break into the US market is to have factories in the US. Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

>Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.

And yet, that applies to everyone, including US automakers, which is why Ford had to do unnatural things to import the transit from Europe.

They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.

Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.

> they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of. > > Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.

Why should manufacturing jobs be well-paying? Human productivity has not kept up with business improvements at all. A contemporary robot can assemble car modules much faster than a robot from, say, the 60s. A human now works at the same speed as a human from the 60s.

I don't think this is true. Yes robot capabilities have increased but those business processes also make people more productive. I recently toured the F-150 assembly line and it is clear a lot has been done to improve worker productivity.

"Manufacturing jobs" doesn't mean doing the same job as in the 60s. Human productivity improves by offloading more to machines/tools/processes while having the humans manage other things. A human making cars now is not moving their limbs twice as fast as humans in the 60s, they're using tools that get the job done 3x faster than the person in the 60s. The jobs are actually quite different across time, but we colloquially call both "manufacturing jobs".

> They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.

"The US can't make anything" is an absurd delusion. We are the second most productive economy in the world.

> Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.

We are fully capable of meeting our defense needs already. If you really care about reinforcing our military-industrial capability the best way to do it is to arm Ukraine.

> in the US for under $15K even

People say stuff like this. When you buy a $1 USB cable from AliExpress that probably took 25 seconds to manufacture, okay, that makes some sense, from that narrow point of view. But then the courier is going to spend like 3 minutes futzing with delivering it to you. Someone is paying something, no? You have an incomplete picture of costs, and hopefully your answer to the example conundrum isn't, "Delivery drivers are underpaid."

It's more complicated than features leading to a bill of materials and time in a factory.

It costs at least $15,000 to replace a roof in San Francisco, and maybe closer to $60,000. It costs basically nothing to manufacture roof tiles, and the whole thing can be done in a day. If you could answer the question why, and persuasively, you know, run for mayor.

It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. Sounds like you can mount your own infotainment system. Just an electric motor, battery, and chassis, and the rest is up to you. Isn't this what we've been asking for?

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 started costing more than $9999 and I thought the world was coming to an end.

EDIT: Yep, I'm just old. Another commenter linked to a "10 cheapest new cars" list and there seems to be a price floor of around $20K. No major manufacturer seems capable of making one cheaper!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794523

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[1], $9999 in 1995 is equivalent to $21,275.25 today, so it's a pretty spot on price for a barebones car.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Not impressed.

>Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms.

Except with all the safety equipment, crumple zones, airbags, sensors, etc. I would expect an increase in price.

And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS have a hard job. Both options— a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up.

> moving to plastic for the body

Some of those $10k cars in the 90s had more plastic in the bodies than cars today, e.g. Saturn S-series, where all body panels below the belt-line were plastic.

It isn't necessarily the cost savings one might expect though, because steel panels can also be load bearing and part of the crash structure, which is not really practical with plastic panels.

Cost savings wasn't the reason for the Saturn plastic panels, IIRC -- they were intended to make the car more durable; they were hard to dent. Some Saturn salespeople would kick the side of the car, hard, to demonstrate their resilience.

Those cars always looked great on the used car lot because they never had any door dings.

With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to.

Steel panels can also be made to be replaceable. Plastic has to be because it can't be welded to the frame.

In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced.

If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.

Yes, bodywork is quite a mature discipline. I was presuming the parent commenter meant user-replaceable, i.e. bolted on.

> The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.

Often this is because the special high strength steels used in vehicles today depend on proper heat treating to attain their strength, and welding can compromise this. Many OEMs even specify panel bonding for repairing particular crash-critical parts of vehicles now because of this.

It's mostly because the factory welds are the result of someone running numbers until they find the bare minimum whereas the autobody guy would rather not risk it.

The OEMs have proper repair procedures that are the correct way to fix the vehicle, and if the autobody shop is reputable, they follow them. And the stated reason OEMs specify panel bonding instead of welding is:

1. because UHSS is sensitive to heat, and robots are much more accurate in how they heat than Jimmy with a tig torch, and they were programmed by a process engineer, where as Jimmy welds until 'it looks good'.

2. welding may compromise anti-corrosive treatments on the inside of inaccessible cavities, which can lead to corrosion issues

e.g. https://rts.i-car.com/crn-24.html

A crappy shop will certainly just weld panels in without any regard for materials engineering, but it results in a crappy repair.

The Pontiac Fiero has notoriously bad plastic panels.

Modern cars are almost universally safer and more fuel efficient than the older models. And in many cases faster.

In nearly all cases they're faster. 10+ second 0-60 times used to be pretty normal for "regular" cars. Now days, people will complain that a car is slow if they can't put down 7 second 0-60 times. And "quick" boring cars of today are as fast as sports cars of the past.

The 1996 Ferrari F355 Spider and the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N both have a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds.

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] These are the same manufacturers we have here, but lower cost models that are only sold in lower-income countries.

[0] https://compra.autofact.com.mx/blog/comprar-carro/mercado/au...

[1] https://techzle.com/the-cheapest-new-cars-of-2024

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.

I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car.

You're not even living in the past. Our 20 year old Scion xB cost us $20K out the door new (granted, that's with most of the paltry list of options added, $15K base). And that was a cheap car at the time, Toyota marketing to "the kids".

The last time $20K was "a high price" for a new car was probably before most HN folk were born.

For those price-comparing, it is $20K after the federal incentives. So, its real cost is around $27K which makes it way more expensive than what the article claims.

Keep in mind $20k in 2025 dollars is the equivalent of ~$10k in 1997 dollars, if that helps set your frame of reference

According to this, there is only one new car model of any kind selling for under $20K in the US these days

https://www.carfax.com/rankings/cheapest-cars

One would be wiser to based on annual depreciation in real $ plus time value of purchase price. I suspect out of new trucks a tacoma would be the cheapest since the depreciation is low to negative (IIRC recently a Tacoma was worth more 1 year old than new).

All new car brands/models will not have comps for several years. Even folks buying Rivians, etc have no idea how the resale value will play out so you’re always going to have to take a gamble

This article is missing at least the Mitsubishi Mirage - the 2024 model year still seems to be available for 17k in the base trim?

Isn't that the hydrogen fuel one? If so, that's the reason why it's only 17k..

> $20K still seems to be a high price for a car

Keep in mind this price is before the USA federal tax credit. So we're potentially talking about a $12,500 car. And consider inflation.

After federal tax credit, ergo $27K.

(Hat tip to @vaidhy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794867)

Well dang.

That's with federal incentive and likely before they factored in the tariffs. Those 500 parts aren't all coming from US. I wouldn't expect any usable version of it to be below 30k once it's actually available.

> It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform.

And it'll always be sold out.

I'm sure you can get on the waiting list (for a lead time of 3-40 years) or buy it from a reseller for $70k. Problem solved.

> buy it from a reseller for $70k.

Now there's the real price.

This is an $27k car, with $7.5k rebate, so much for the unfairly competing Chinese. The MG4 is £22500 in the UK before tax, which is about $30k in USD, and that's a full-featured 5 door car, with double the range.

I do applaud the philosphy of cheap and barebones, and easily moddable, but my two cents is that trim is not the thing that's making cars expensive to make.

Is it? They show speakers mounted in the front as a "soundbar". Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?

I just want some power ports and good mounting points, then I can put whatever I want there, and upgrade it. I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.

> I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.

I am hoping like hell this ends up being the case. Give me power, a place to put my own stuff and some details on the CAN bus and leave me to it.

I do not want to pay a premium for your slow, locked down, buggy / seldom-updated touch screen.

DIN format radios are still around. My recent-ish corolla's infotainment display is just a well integrated double-DIN. I'm surprised this car doesn't as far as I can tell, have a DIN slot for one.

Yes, they have a nice storage bin right behind where you put the optional tablet mount, but the only option I've seen for that bin is a speaker kit. I don't want a tablet mount or speakers in the bin. I want the left side of the bin (above the controls) to be a double DIN mount.

So mount speakers all around the vehicle? The idea is: customize it yourself.

> Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?

No, because they knew what they were getting into when they bought this truck. And I'm sure there will be a dozen DIY ways to add a more traditional sound system.

on long car trips, it seems like everyone in the car (except, me, the driver) has headphones on. no one will miss the lack of rear speakers.

Sounds very twenty-first century. No shared music recognition, no sing-alongs.

If passengers want to DJ, you can get one of those little FM transmitter thingies that plugs into a phone/table headphone port.

The interesting modern tools for passengers wanting to DJ are shared Spotify playlists and Apple SharePlay.

A lot of Bluetooth speakers today can fill a car with a sound wall better rear speakers used to. Apple says you just need two of their Bluetooth speakers to fill a room in a house with great stereo and reasonably good surround sound. The square footage of a car is generally smaller than the supported room size.

What phone still has a 3.5mm headphone jack? Sincere question, I'd like to buy one.