You know how German cares are known for precision engineering, but then they make it way more complex than they need to which leads to reliability issues? Well, at this point Mini is what happens when you keep the engineering, but you cut the complexity to hit a price point.

First, because I’ve found traditional ICE mileage estimations get progressive worse the lower you go under 100.

Second, because I grew up in Jersey, and still drive there regularly to visit family, and in Jersey you just never know if the gas station coming up at night is going to be open or not. Because all pumps are full service and you can’t pump your own gas, this is a real concern.

Third, because even in NY, the closest pump near me that’s guaranteed to be open after 9:30 is almost a half hour drive away.

Fourth, because my wife is terrible about not getting gas, and I’ve had days where I’ve left the car with a quarter tank, gotten in it the next day, and had 10-15 miles of range.

“More convenient” is very subjective. I find it very convenient to be able to pull into my garage with 10 miles of range left and then have a full tank the next morning. In an ICE, I would start getting anxious at about a hundred miles of range, and doesn’t panicked at 50.

It’s 2023 and somehow people somehow still don’t understand that a car salesman is hired for their ability to sell, not their ability to have 15 wank session with you about some obscure fact you read about the car.

They’re there to get people into the easiest thing to get financed and quickly as possible and move on. Not to provide in-depth insider commentary. Just like virtually every other sales position in every industry where the salesman doesn’t make at least high five figures on every deal.

They’re raising prices on everything, though. And just because they expect to lose money doesn’t mean they don’t want to lose less money.

They’re not saying that. That’s how it’s being reported. What the actual manufacturers are saying is “this is new tech and all the cost is in the up front, so we’re going to lose money per car until the R&D is sufficiently amortized.” Which is then being turned into click-bait headlines of “X Manufacturer is losing $500,000 per car!”

I love when conservatives incorrectly appropriate terms invented by liberals/progressives like a cargo cult. You should build some superchargers out of coconuts, that’ll definitely get you the approval you so desperately crave.

But to seriously address your point, of course it’s a protection racket, in that the union exists to protect their membership. Just like corporations exist to protect their investors. Just like the mafia existed to protect Italian immigrants who were being discriminated against. The issue with the mafia was never that they banded together to ensure the best possible outcomes for members; it was the use of violent, illegal, and antisocial actions to promote that cause (e.g. beating up rival workers and scabs, selling drugs and robbing stores for income, killing political and economic enemies, etc.)

The point of a union is to use all legal pathways to ensure the best possible outcome for union members. Period. That’s their job. They’re needed because the point of a corporation is to use all legal pathways to ensure the greatest possible returns for shareholders. This goal (of corporations) is often at odds with the needs of workers, and corporations have significant systemic advantages over individual workers - more capital to deploy, better legal representation, more amplification of their message, more ability to influence market wages, etc.

Most of the Tesla technicians working in Sweden belong to IF Metall. Most of those members voted to use the union to negotiate a CBA, and to then strike if those negotiations stall. Unions don’t just get to go in and decide to negotiate on behalf of workers who aren’t union membership. That’s not how any of this works.

Does that mean that every Tesla worker is for this union? Obviously not. Not all Tesla workers in Sweden belong to IF Metall, and the ones that don’t aren’t on strike. And it’s even possible that some IF Metall workers at Tesla aren’t in favor of striking, or that there are technicians working for Tesla that aren’t IF Metall members who don’t want a CBA or a strike. But unfortunately for them, the way representative democratic organizations like unions work is that a single individual or small group can’t override the will of the majority.

And as a side note, it’s telling that here in the US where our unions have largely been beaten and left for dead, all of the cases of individuals “standing up for their rights to not join a union” have been very narrowly made to ensure that the freerider assholes who don’t want to be in a union still benefit from union-negotiated collective bargaining agreements. All of our “right to work” laws make it explicitly illegal to provide lower pay or benefits to non-members not involved in the CBA. So really, it’s just a bunch of cheap assholes who want the benefits without paying the price.

If they have good work environments and pay better than competitors with CBAs already, why not simply formalize it in a CBA? An agreement is just a baseline. It doesn’t set a top, only a bottom, and if you’re already above the bottom then it won’t affect you as a company in the least.

No matter how much you defend him, I’m here to tell you that Elon Musk will not sleep with you.

This shouldn’t be remotely surprising to anyone who’s familiar with Ferrari. This has been a thing for basically every Ferrari ever made. It’s part of the charm — here’s this ludicrously expensive work of art that performed at a level few cars can match that was hand-built over hundreds of hours of artisans at the top of their game and… wait, is that part of a cigarette butt in the paint?

I suspect that you’re exactly the kind of person that system was built to protect everyone against, that you recognize this, and that your distaste for the system stems entirely from your newfound inability to make others miserable rather than any high-minded concerns about privacy and surveillance.

Sinclair owns something like 75% of all local broadcast affiliates.

I don’t actually think this changes anything, though. Mileage only really contributes to wear on a mechanical level, and everyone already knows that EVs have less mechanical wear than ICEs, regardless of where they were made. So what you have here is a car that’s in ok shape after two years. That’s not an endorsement — that’s the bare minimum.

Hell, American cars from the 80’s and 90’s would still look like this after two years of use.

This… is about how you would expect a car to hold up in 100,000 miles. That’s not a terribly high bar these days. My winter car is pushing towards 200,000 and I expect it to last another decade unless the frame rust sets in.

I don’t know what y’all are driving, but I wouldn’t expect even a modern Kia or Nissan to look any worse after two years and 100,000 miles. Sure, the brakes are great, but also not at all shocking in an EV that does most of the braking via regen.

Most people can’t afford any new car, so they’re not really a factor in what manufacturers are building.

Not according to the famous documentary series Mad Max.

Because BYD makes cars that are even more cheap than Vinfast, and we saw how well that launch went. And granted, those were being sold at a hilarious price, but again, BYD feels cheaper on the inside.

Turns out that people living in developed nations aren’t as keen on driving cars built to a developing nation standard.

On the flip side, given China’s disastrous economic trends, it’s just as likely that China as we know it doesn’t exist in three years.