if they win they become God-Kings who's slightest whim is made real to the limits of human civilization.

If they lose they just go to their graves insanely wealthy.

There is a *very* small chance they get thrown out of a window or poisoned by a Stalin or a Mao, but it's very, very unlikely. They have their own private armies to protect them.

Oh, I think people will still be riding in plenty of cars - they'll just be Waymos, Tesla Robotaxis, etc. When people can't afford to buy, they rent.

We're probably never going back to truly affordable new cars in this country, because there's too much money to be made selling transportation as a service to those who can't afford a car.

This is what the Slate EV is supposed to be. Granted, it's a bit more spartan than even the smaller pickup trucks of the late 90s and even after adjusting for inflation will be slightly less affordable, as well.

And for better or worse, it's an EV, so that rules out some of the use cases where you might want to drive it out to the middle of BFE without worrying about charging infrastructure.

Pretty much if you buy anything made by Ford it should come with a backup vehicle. /s

With new car prices the way they are, a lot of people actually are taking more serious looks at e-bikes and e-scooters. Heck, Car and Driver Magazine even did an e-scooter review.

I live in a part of central Florida that's not particularly affluent and have noticed that these things have absolutely become the "poor man's Tesla".

Well, whatever we've currently been doing certainly hasn't incentivized domestic auto manufacturers to produce affordable cars. Or very many cars that are actually "cars" (as opposed to SUVs and pickup trucks), for that matter.

Technically Chevy is bringing the Bolt EUV back soon. They call it a compact SUV, but it's really just a small hatchback car with some adornments to make it look more SUV-ish. I've heard that they've scaled back production targets since the EV tax credit went *poof* though, so they're probably not planning on selling many of them.

That's not what's going to change. What's likely going to change is that domestic manufacturers can scale back production and sales targets of their EV models, since fleet efficiency numbers won't be as important, and they might tweak ICE vehicle software to have the start-stop systems default to being disabled.

There's not going to be any major retooling happening, because administrations change.

The 3 cylinder Geo Metro in the 1990s achieved over 40 miles per gallon. 30 years later you're telling me we lost that ability?

I fail to see how fuel economy legislation is responsible for rod bearing failures.

I like to say that gas is currently cheap because anywhere you'd want to drive to spend money has become too fucking expensive.

As for EVs reducing demand, ChatGPT estimated that if all of the roughly 4 million EVs in the USA were magically transformed into ICE vehicles, the price of gasoline would raise by about 1.3%, which is well within normal market fluctuations. So no, you don't really have to thank us EV drivers for cheaper gas.

At least now I know that my own individual contribution in lowering gas prices by owning an EV is roughly one-hundred-thousandth of a cent per gallon. You're welcome.

The weird thing about the USA is that inexpensive new cars don't sell well. Probably because if you've got decent credit you can just stretch the loan out until the heat death of the universe and get something fancier.

If you don't have good credit, even a cheap car quickly becomes too expensive once those awful interest rates do their thing.

They didn't give it to children, they gave it to the Trump administration on the promise they will give it to children. If Dell always wanted to give money to children there has been nothing stopping him at any point from doing any number of things. Why this?

Nah, we do it all the time. And please stop with the "won't somebody please think of the children" virtue signalling because again, this isn't charity, this is giving money to a political actor and political regime. Did Dell publically decry the Republicans stripping the expanded CTC which took away thousands of dollars more than this plan will ever give back and was lowering childhood poverty rates? No he didn't.

Have you ever sent money to a man who constantly brags about how rich he is?

A "much-needed move" would be to allow BYD cars to be sold here and let the free market economics (that conservatives ostensibly claim to love) sort everything out. But nope, gotta keep selling those high profit margin gas guzzlin' pickup trucks that over half of Americans can't actually afford.

The only solace I take from this is that Musk screwed himself by supporting this administration, because Tesla's sales are down, too.