Teslas are the best, they're just expensive and proprietary. A 3rd party Tesla control box is quite attractive for anyone thinking about a conversion, because that control box is gonna be "yours" no doubt.

It's basically to a Tesla what a Holly Dominator is to an LS.

> DPF/DEF hell.

Great example of one-size-fits-none. In the city it's inadequate, in the country it's absurd.

Anyway, sorry I didn't complete my point... My point is that I think whatever emissions and safety standards the US has, they're basically rigged to make sure the only cars can get into the US are from countries that are "approved" by the ruling oligarchy.

Yeah, CAFE is one issue. Also you will notice that in America you can't buy a car from anywhere in the world except American colonies: Germany, Japan, Korea.

Volvo is an exception, and there are of course the oddball Italian supercars that make it in, but generally speaking anywhere that the US didn't fight a war, Americans can't buy cars.

I live in France and I occasionally see BYDs on the road here...

I think when they do that, they're not called a psychologist anymore

> ‘Israel’

Unions can do that, yes. Particularly in Illinois where it's all just mafia.

But I think America's problems go deeper than this. The Americans who are willing and able to do real work and care about customer needs have been systematically shut out of the workforce for political reasons. And those who remain have been trained not to care about efficiency and customer needs, but instead about social causes.

In China, hard work and customer focus are specifically promoted by the central government. They have their own corruption problems, and over the next 100 years, the US is probably going to do better, but right at the moment they're ahead...

Finally watched the video. They're subtweeting BYD pretty hard, I don't think that's proven yet at all.

I think companies like Ford and Chrysler are not being serious about serving their customers, so BYD's sub-10k offerings might be trash and they might be quite decent for the money.

Also the notion that the only reason these are cheap is China govt subsidies is not really true. Dacia sells sub-10k vehicles in Europe and they're not "good", but they're are decent enough that taxi companies use them.

The idea that a car starts at 30k is an American phenomenon.

Yeah, this is a real problem, and I'm not sure there's any real incentive to stop it.

IMO it's not specifically the fault of EVs, but rather that as reliability improves, people stop caring about repairability. Even back in the 80s when they started cramming everything under the hood, timing chains that are ~impossible to service, etc.

You might imagine that delivery companies, taxi companies, cop fleets, etc will insist on buying cars they can service - but even for them, if the vehicle lasts 10 years without trouble, they might just not care.

Problem is, new car buyers are stupid, and they trade in every 5 years or so, so reliability after the first decade is not their problem. Maybe if the used market commands 20% of the car's initial cost, that matters, but if the car company can cut cost by 20% by making it impossible to maintain, it's a wash. And the company could also buy back used cars to support the market - even though they're junk.

For the car culture this is hell. You can put together an LS rig, and you can put together a rig on top of a commodity electric chassis, but in either case this is something you have to completely build yourself. Seems like there's just nothing comparable to Fox Body or Camaro ecosystem anymore...

*F35

The problem is you could starve everyone in Tehran to death and it wouldn't stop the missiles, because the missiles aren't coming from Tehran, they're coming from the mountains, and the people in the mountains have food and water supplies stashed and they're in tunnels where you can't bomb.

The reason why they want ground troops is because that's the only way to get to the tunnels and try to clear them. Can't do that from the sky.

The other problem is that bombing has already become very difficult because there are no functioning air strips left in the region to launch from, and (it turns out) getting close with aircraft carriers doesn't work because hypersonics can hit those too...

The whole US military thesis was based on the assumption that an F36 is IMPOSSIBLE to hit, but the Iranian thesis is that if you take out all of the support infrastructure within a few hundred miles of the territory, you don't have to hit them.