Undoing the Covid-19 " vaccine/ 38 boosters " would take some advertising , But out of all the folks I know only 1 has an EV. A $ 96,000.00 Rivian pickup.
Most folks in rural area already know the Koolaid tastes funny.
EV thread
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Undoing the Covid-19 " vaccine/ 38 boosters " would take some advertising , But out of all the folks I know only 1 has an EV. A $ 96,000.00 Rivian pickup.
Most folks in rural area already know the Koolaid tastes funny.
I'm not sure there's enough air time in the broadcasting world to fix that coordinated effort...
Yes, I'm one of them fellers. I could smell the funk with that Koolaid from the next county.
The government has made it impossible to produce a basic car. "Safety standards" and CAFE standards drop those options off the table. It's the same reason Toyota doesn't sell a million Hilux trucks a year in the US.
If .gov regs go away, car costs would drop significantly and options would increase.
this, along with cutting regulations and obliterating multiple useless &/or redundant layers of bureaucracy across all spectrums, enter the DOGE, will all combine to bring the 'cost-of-living crisis' under control and benefit one and all, except of course the climate psychos who will naturally be butt-hurt, but with the construction boom of safe-spaces to store them all the trades will also benefit, so, win-win-win.
That was more political and government threat driven that actual market based decisions. The brilliant people at the top of these companies bent-the-knee to political threats and promises, now they're seeing what those political promises are worth, and they're being forced to face actual market conditions.
100%. I'm well aware of FMVSS, which are the standards to which you refer, having worked as an engineer in the industry for a good bit of time. I've even mentioned them, and how they cause vehicle prices to go up, on this forum before. However, there are a ton of features that are not government mandated (i.e., wifi in vehicle - who really needs that?) Those are not mandated, and they cost equally as much as what is mandated.
I'm not holding my breadth that Trump is going to be able to roll all that crap back. DC, and it's partners in Big Media, are a leviathan that is long past the critical mass point. I love that Trump got elected, but no matter how much success he has in four years, it won't be enough. The leviathan is too sophisticated to be defeated in one term. The only way to correct it is to dismantle the leviathan. It's been building for six or seven decades, and it'll take decades to turn the tide...
I disagree. It's a combination of many things, and response to the market, which is what I pointed out, is one of them. Those brilliant people with bent knees need stronger knees. The writing was on the wall, they just chose not to read it. Of course, with the administration that's about to be hit on the keester by the door on their way out, it's actually possible that you're right and I'm wrong. There's no telling what illegal and immoral threats those folks are capable of...
There's a few things going on there. One is that most of the people that want a basic car aren't buying new cars anyways, so they don't get a vote. If the government mandates were removed and cheap new cars were an option I bet you'd see plenty of demand for stripped-down models. You just don't see it at the $50k price point.
The data is already there for the most part, and what little human effort that is required is minimal by comparison to the enormous sums already in play. I know ALL about feeding databases, trust me. Sorry, I'm not buying. We'll have to agree to disagree. They were able to do this BY HAND in earlier decades, they certainly can do it now. They don't want to - its all about GREED.
Correct, but if you look back at statements made by these companies and CEOs over the last few years, you can easily see the political influence. The most recent that I can recall was made by the Dodge/Ram guy, when about a year ago now he said something to the effect of "they said we couldn't build V8s anymore, but they didn't say we couldn't make fast cars." The Ford guy had made a similar vague statement a few months before that. Now that political figures are backing out, you can see the EV thing falling apart.
JIC it's not evident, I'm not arguing against you, just I think politics & government were the dominant force behind the sudden EV craze.
I'd like to see a comparison of total number of option codes available today vs what they had in the days of line-item ordering. My gut says we probably get about the same number of choices overall, only now each choice has half a dozen options packaged together. and if that's the case, the whole argument is stupid because we have just as much choice as we did.
The bill of materials is there, sure, but within that BOM, humans have tagged every part with "pick rules" that identify which option codes they are used with. We're talking about throwing away all the current option codes and replacing them with what, 5 times? as many so all the pick rules would be different, there will be assemblies grouped differently which means their models and drawings and assembly part numbers will be different. Then there's the parts that interface with other affected parts, and now instead of two versions of that part we need 10 to make them compatible with every combination of line items instead of just being changed by one option code. All the extra versions of that part have to be designed and tested and sourced and procured and then each unit is more expensive because the supplier can't leverage the same economies of scale and it just snowballs. I'd bet changing a current, already launched model to line-item ordering would take 6 months with the same size of team they used to launch it. It would be less to do it that way to begin with, but it would still add weeks and again, I agree with the automotive companies marketing teams that there's not an ROI to be had in this. There's a reason development of a new model often takes 3 years. The devil is in the details. Automation is great for kicking out mass quantities of something and can handle configurability to an extent, but it's not as flexible as brute forcing it with manpower like days of olde.
Then for all that effort, what's the outcome? They sell a few small $ line items instead of the big expensive packages they used to? And what do you think the result of that will be, they just make less money? Hell no, they'll make the bottom line one way or another, and it probably looks like charging just as much for the line items as they were making with the packages, or adding the difference onto the base price, or cutting cost by outsourcing the powertrain to China. Maybe year 1 they get some extra sales by fooling people into thinking they're saving money with ol' fashion line item ordering but the other guys will catch on soon enough, even things out and then you'll have your utopian car market where everybody can order by line item but they still cost just as much and they're probably even shittier than they already are.
Today's ordering = truck, car, SUV in package A, package B, package C.
Interior color option of gray, tan, black. No worries - I didn't see it as an argument against. Just friendly banter, which I enjoy. I know most of the participants in this conversation are like-minded.
Complicating this matter is the fact that CEOs, by nature of the job, are also politicians, and as such, what they say ain't always true. "they said we couldn't build V8s anymore, but they didn't say we couldn't make fast cars." could actually mean "we decided the market was moving to EVs because they are influencing the market, and we don't want to be left behind, so rather than test the waters, we're going all in, and by the way, we'll still make fast cars"
What it would do - for minimal cost - would sell more vehicles. I'm not the only one who is refusing to participate in this nonsense. Look at the CableCos - they're struggling for survival because they still won't get onboard with an ala-cart model - consumers have voted with their wallets and have all fled to streaming services which don't force one to buy "packages" of crap they don't want. All it would take would be ONE CarCo to return to that model, and they'd eat everyone else's lunch.
Today's ordering = truck, car, SUV in package A, package B, package C.
Pretty much.
Great post, and there's one other big factor you didn't mention. JIT (Just In Time) manufacturing. There are multiple tiers to the supply chain, meaning complication compounds quickly because trucks deliver parts from tier company to tier company and ultimately to the assembly line all day long. The more options the assembly line has, the more complicated the line looks, and the more cluttered it gets with staged pallets of parts.
Also, with more and more options, you end up with single-quantity BOMs being built (a completely unique vehicle, options-wise.) There's only so much room around an assembly line. At some point, you get to a situation where, instead of a forklift driver setting a pallet of parts in the designated area, you'd have to have people, or small robots, delivering a single part to the production line for that unique vehicle that needs it. It's a heckuva lot more complicated to make a vehicle than some of you think.
Today's ordering = truck, car, SUV in package A, package B, package C.
eh, I just "built" a Mustang on the Ford site and the number of options were mind numbing. I think we have far more configurability now than we did back then. I think what Zorba is really upset about is the stuff that comes standard that he doesn't want.
Partially. But if I want A/C and Cruise Control, I have to buy a bunch of crap I don't want to get them. Fuck it - last time I bought a truck, I bought a stripper and added A/C and cruise to it myself. That's not even an option any more I don't think.
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