pedalmore

How is a government subsidy "dumb capitalist nonsense"? The capitalist model would be for a single entity to buy all the small farms that can't stay in business during volatile market periods and monopolize the market entirely, with zero care to animal welfare, food safety, and customer prices (other than to maximize profits). Your comment is just just lazy "muh capitalism bad".

It's much more like a mustang than a bronco. Regardless, If Ford wants to call it a mustang, it's a mustang.

You're a quarter behind. Big drop 2024Q1, but you're right that the story has been growth - just slower growth than Tesla has promised, even with massive price cuts, and now we have a contraction. A lot of people dislike Elon because he's a fucking tool and this has to be a partial factor, we just don't really know how much.

Ultra marathons are an entirely different sport from the 10k, and even marathons. Obviously training matters, but we also don't have to pretend all humans are identical and only training and grit separate them.

How can you possibly think the US military, or any sovereign country, will magically spend an extra $165B a year on meat a year if all of the current consumers magically go vegetarian? Who exactly is going to eat a bunch of extra meat? There will just be fewer meat sales, period, ignoring a short term price drop if everyone magically goes vegetarian on the same day.

You're right that cold winters in northern latitudes present additional system constraints. But that doesn't mean the renewables + storage strategy is flawed, it means we need more transmission and more storage, and gas backup will linger longer in such areas than it does in warmer areas. We're still early in the transition and have a ton of low hanging fruit to capture before we need to really focus on the remaining 20%.

How does empowering working class people solve the consumption issue though?

Clearly EVs aren't there yet for the very bottom of the market. This market will buy used for another decade and then all the sudden will start buying cheap used EVs. Used EV prices are dropping and will continue to drop, but it takes time. In the meantime, wealthy people that were already planning on spending a lot of money on cars will increasingly buy expensive electric cars and prices will come down. Pretty much every manufacturer is targeting a $10k drop in price for the next generation.

And to answer your question about where are the affordable EVs - China.

It looks like 80% ioniq 5 and 20% old beetle to me. It was a nice surprise but I don't think they will age well.

Same, I'm a low mileage driver and when I do drive it's road trips and camping mostly. The economics of a new EV vs my long paid off outback are terrible when you drive 5k a year. Waiting for a native NACS plug is the obvious decision for us (along with the rest of the reasons to wait).

Right, but I also think there is room to talk about where public investments in charging should go. I am a huge EV proponent but also I love bikes and transit and car free spaces, and I'm cautious about further enshrining parking in our public spaces by building charging infrastructure. I don't think it's as simple as any and all charging infrastructure is good, there's room for that discussion here.

The reality is many new car buyers stretch their budgets a lot more than you and I would be comfortable doing. Lots of cultural conditioning, cars as a status symbol, etc mean lots of poor financial decisions.