Honestly, it begins with things like a latch for the storage compartment on the passengers side (again, Tesla has reasons why they do it like they do, I just don't like it), adjusting the air stream for the vents (obviously not possible with Teslas design), a HUD (never buying a car without it anymore), a central instrument cluster behind the steering wheel (this can be replaced by a HUD in my eyes), heated front and back window controls (my car has both)...

It's funny that US car sizes have grown so much that what is now called a "sub-compact" in the US might now be classified as a mid-sized car in Europe..

I once got booked a car via my company, and they told me I will get a "sub-compact".. and I basically expected a Smart Car and complained. They laughed and gave me a car that was about the size of a BMW 3 series...

Ford is an interesting example, as there has been less commonality than difference across these markets. Ford of Europe and Ford USA were practically two different companies that had their own design teams that just shared some common parts between cars..

(And for the record, the Mondeo always was vastly superior to the Fusion anyway.. ;)

If you look outside the US, this is basically what happened.

Apple has a very high market share in the US, but that is an outlier in the global picture. Android is much more dominant globally.

I think globally, Apple/Android is something like Apple/Android/other 10%/85%/5% - and even in a rich country like Germany, the sales are still 1/4 Apple 3/4 Android.

Unfortunately, VW pretty much botched the Launch of the ID.3 - they should have given it 6 months more development until they put it out in the public.

But, the lineup ID lineup they have shown so far looks pretty good, and much better suited to the EU market than the S3XY Truck Lineup from Tesla, so I do think designing a car in Europe for the European market is a very good idea.

Tesla as a car manufacturer has many issues, but the biggest challenge to their supremacy will not come from other Automakers directly, but by Lawmakers working out a way to combine the thousands of independent and non-standardized ways to charge cars - the plug is the same, so why should you need 20 different cards to be able to pay, have wildly different prices based on which chargepoint you go to, etc.

As soon as charging an electric car is nearing the simplicity of filling up your gas car (not talking speed, but payment/finding spots), you'll see much more movement in the market.

Is Ford that bad in the US?

I know Ford in Europe had a lot of issues with steel quality when they built in eastern Europe, and your car basically rusted away after about 10 years (owned a 1992 and 1994 Ford, and they both exactly made it to 10 years until being uneconomical to maintain).

But - I own a German-built 2004 Ford that has been my daily driver for the last 10 years, that I have modified in more than one way, has had multiple parking dents, big deep scrapes and bends in almost all parts of the exterior due to accidents, but is still very much a good daily driver. Almost no rust after 16 years, engine purrs like a kitten, gearbox feels snappy as ever, no leakage whatsoever... needed a single change in break fluid in 10 years (I know people that change it every year on their cars..), and has been pretty much uneventful in the shop - almost everything that broke that was not a consumable I could trace to something "bad" I did/happened to me (accident/drove into a ditch to evade an oncoming ambulance/car tire blew due to FOD on the autobahn..).

Unfortunately, Ford of Europe pretty much botched their Cars after 2010 so that most models you can buy these days are not very competitive anymore, and they basically said they will stop making anything but SUVs anyway. Sad to see them go..

Beauty and uglyness can also be the interface design - and I dread when I am moving to my next car as it will inevitably have a touchscreen for important functions.

I'm a tech guy, I work in IT, but I think touchscreens in cars are one of the worst developments we had in the last 10 or so years.

I get the advantages it gives to tesla in the sense that they can add / change features after the fact, but numerous studies have shown that controlling a car via touchscreen for basic functions is a bad idea. And yes I know most people leave their wipers and lights on auto, there's voice control (that never works right for me) etc, but I just like the tactile feel of reaching blindly to my seat heater button, or the climate controls in my 2005 "dinosaur"..

I think the OP meant in the conventional automotive space.
And - Trump complained about this a while ago - he is right: No-one in their right mind buys American cars in Europe. They're absolutely not suited for the local market in almost all criterias you could apply (from design to energy efficiency to size)

Well, the thing is - I LIKE to be a basement dweller (old-school PnP player here) - it just is more fun if the other morlocks can come play. ;)

I do not know about you, but it does feel terrible to me - weekdays, weekends, public holidays - all muddles into a big pile of "I'm at home anyway, in front of a screen most likely", and that makes it meaningless. It makes it harder to disconnect from work, to relax etc. - it might be different if you have, say, a yard, a dog, or some other place to change the scenery once in a while, but for people like me, living in an apartment in the middle of a city, told to only leave the house if absolutely neccessary, only see people you absolutely have to see, it feels not good at all.

Anxiety, loss and fear for your future do not help either I presume.

Thank you for this story. it came alive in my mind while reading it... and it is, unfortunately, totally believable.

Honestly, "IT" will never go away. The job will just change with the times.

If you think that "going to the cloud" means "no IT" anymore, I think you're a bit delusional. There will still be a department that MANAGES your cloud - not the users themselves. Someone still has to understand what the cloud does, what options there are, make sense of the contracts and offerings, and do the actual booking and planning, as well as setting up the stuff to be usable by users in the end.

If we go by the paradigm "The cloud is just someone else's computer", 90% of the work stay the same. You might not deploy hardware anymore, but all the software setup, the decision making on what to deploy in the first place etc. .. all this will stay a function of a department that is "IT", even if not in name anymore.

Remember, IT just means "Information Technology", which is often translated to "anything with a cable" - all this stuff will not go away, even in a world of cloud VDI - in the end, there always needs to be something for the user to access the resources. And if people tout "BYOD" as the solution - well, I think that train has passed already for a lot of businesses. Not a single instance I have witnessed where "BYOD" became widespread turned out well, with the exception of places that could put 100% of their software on VDI or Web-Based solutions (and those users didn't need that much power).

My own business area? We have single users utilizing 32+ CPU cores and 256GB+ of Memory for themselves (on projects obviously), even when supported by a 4-digit core cluster with multiple terabytes of Memory.

Good luck putting these all on VDI... (we're currently piloting it for a specific subset of users, using nVDWS and VMWare Horizon - but this is far from cheap. Also, this is work that can't legally be put in the Cloud (and even if, would be about 3x more expensive in the long run, we got the quotes). Local IT will live for a long time. Our work will just adapt to the times.

sad thing about this is - as bad as the nazis were, they had a plan and kept to it - sometimes too well. trump on the other hand seems to do one random thing after the other...

Sorry, I meant the comparison to be with a normal bullet train, not the maglev in question..but still, that can't get up to full speed in that short distance either.

You forget one thing: The test track is not even a mile long, and the pod has to accelerate AND decelerate in that short span. Your comparison Maglev can't eaven rech 50mph in the same distance (and forget about stopping :) ... this is just a small scale test, in a very sub-length tube to test power and propulsion systems - if the pod had a length of say 10 miles, I'm sure they could reach the proposed 700mph. But that is far out, and the test track for that still has to be built.