Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Fuck that.

I want the govt more OUT of my life, I dont want to give them more pathways into my life....

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What happens when all car manufacturers are displaying ads?

It's spreading...I just read something or maybe I saw it reported on YouTube...about Jeep doing this very same type thing....advertising something, I forgot exactly what it was...but was very similar to this.

For some things you don't even need ChatGPT. If you're having the flu, it would be really nice if you just call the doctor to get the prescription instead of having to pay a visit where the doctors says "Yeah here is the prescription, bye and come back if it doesn't get better". Sometimes you really don't need a long diagnosis.

What meds for the flu?

I mean, there is Tamiflu (sp?)...but that's really only effective if you catch it at the beginning.....but the best diagnosis is generally, treat the symptoms, plenty of fluids, rest and let it run its course...

Flu is viral....so NO ANTI-BIOTICS....no matter how much the patient bitches and asks for them....

In the USA car companies are bribing politicians to keep fuel economy standards low because they do not want to spend money on R&D. Meanwhile the Chinese car makers are designing dark factories that crank out electric cars that are better and less expensive than anything made in the USA. Ten years from now there are going to be Chinese factories in the USA cranking out amazing cars. And it is going to be a bloodbath for the companies that want to keep living in the past.

Those cheap Chinese EVs aren't going to do a damned bit of good for the at least 1/3+ of US citizens that have no way to charge at home.

Unless you live on one of the extremes coasts, there just is not sufficient public charging infrastructure......hence, there's not likely to be much more EV demand in the US than there is now for the most part.

People largely don't want them....the ones that do, have them already.

Sure, low cost will win a lot of people over, BUT that hits a brick wall when you can't charge the damned things at home and they don't fit within your lifestyle .....

You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

Just how many innocent mice were killed and autopsied for this "research", just so wags could make jokes on social media?

What are "wags"?

Hell, my thought was,...MAYBE, we'll see the same effects of blue and green hair dye....and pretty soon, all the wailing far leftist protesters and complainers on TikTok will just basically dye, pierce and tattoo themselves out of the gene pool and we can maybe get back to a bit more normal like the days I grew up in .....

They did this by restricting new house building to push the value of their homes up.

I don't get this where you and other post this......I see new houses and neighborhoods being built up ALL over the places I live and visit here in the US.

There is a fuck ton of land around and people are building houses in masses.....

the US is HUGE...maybe you need to get out a bit and travel outside your 20 mile circle you currently burrow down into.....?

just remember that fully one third of Americans do not have a license,

I have to seriously question this stat you put up....especially if you are talking about real American Citizens....

But even so, not having a license doesn't necessarily keep one from driving....

We have a LOT of folks in the US without a lot of proper documentation or licensing driving around these days....

This is a guess but it's based on how people were when I was in college. The market for these would be people who occasionally need a car for something where they cannot borrow one or where they cannot get a friend to provide a lift.

Strange...everyone I knew HAD their own cars in college.....??

I'm talking very much low to middle middle class folks.....and this was decades back too....

Which is why it is a priority for Republicans to lock in long term bans on regulation of AI. Damaging society has become their highest priority, almost as if they are controlled by our primary adversary.

You can't seriously , actually believe this....can you????

If so, you might wanna quit talking to the bot(s)....go outside and get some fresh air....log off awhile, get away from the TV and your echo chamber....

"Companies have one job in a capitalism - make money. Thatâ(TM)s their *only* societal responsibility..." This is false, it is merely a claim made by sociopaths. A companies "job" is to perform in the way its owners desire, in the past there were differing goals that companies would have (and that's still true of smaller companies). The "make money at any cost" approach comes from Wall Street, not capitalism, it is human nature.

With most any company of any decent size, the "owners" are the stockholders.

And with stockholders....pretty much the sole obligation the people working the company for the stockholders is to make money for the stockholders.

I mean, that's pretty much the ONLY reason anyone buys stock in a company.....why else would they do so if not to make a profit?

That's why I would never lock myself into a limited smart tv. Id rather grab an old laptop and use that.

Or just get a streaming "box" like FireTV or AppleTV....those generally seem work fine, have a remote and an easy to use interface.

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

I'll stick with them, as long as they aren't that iPhone17 orange abomination.

I'm with you on this one....WTF was up with that orange color???

That AND...no Space Grey or Black?!?!

That's pretty much one of the only things keeping me from upgrading my 12 pro max to the 17 pro max.

I'm hoping in a few months maybe they'll offer better colors....?