Without doing a WC I think you used more words than I ... but - you are one of the apparently rare breed of US purchasers who currently wants small cars (context: my favorite car over the past few years was a New Beetle). You are absolutely correct that the big 3 are lobbying to avoid competition - they've lived in a walled garden since forever, and don't want anyone climbing those walls - but through whatever means you care to believe in, the US consumer has successfully been finagled into believing they need a 4WD truck with offroad suspension, to carry two bags of groceries and a 2yo kid 5 miles a day on paved roads. Sedans are MUCH less profitable - from everything I've read - than these big vehicles.

But if the underlying "sales" data are fabricated, how can these estimates be anything more than guesses?

Again: skewed. One of the big skewing factors in consumer purchases is the tax incentives that have been provided for EV purchases. Those incentives have been shrinking for various reasons. And, as my China example illustrates, the "number of cars purchased by consumers" may not even be a real number anyway, to meet government quotas.

There are MANY distortions in the market, and the chicken tax is just part of that. The part that's still hard for me to understand is why someone who commutes 5 miles to work and carries only their cellphone and a Dunkin Donuts coffee requires an F-250 to do it.

I think I forgot to write the paragraph about Europe ... :) Europe is an interesting case, because it is sort of structured like the USA (with country ~= state and each country/state having its own agenda and some autonomy and all the decisions rolling up under a couple of layers of voting) but not exactly. There are a few huge economic drivers in the EU, and DE FR and IT are the biggest, with I think DE being far the biggest of the big bananas. So what the DE politicians want to do really matters, and engineering - and the auto industry in particular - is a huge part of DE economics. But that isn't reflected in voting power in the EU Parliament. And - frankly - there is a lot of virtue signaling stuff in "EU" policy that is not really supported by economic lobbyists, but simply publicists. Behind closed doors, I suspect that EU discussions and sentiments (amongst the people in expensive suits) are not that far dissimilar from those in the US. But how it is presented to the public is quite different. In reality, I believe that what I said about the electrification wave having crested is just as applicable in the EU as it is here. Purchase numbers on cars are, for many reasons, not the best indicator of this - those statistics are skewed by so many forces. I believe there will be an overall retreat of the tide in the EU as in the US, most particularly reflected in either moving or abolishing hard deadlines. The deadlines matter a lot less than the marketing budget. The deadlines were supposed to force consumers to change - but they haven't "worked". The ideal scenario for electrification was always "make electric cars such a better choice that you'd be a fool to buy anything else". We may be reverting to that organic mode.

As the kids say, I'ma stop you right there, and I'm going to point you to this: https://www.theatlantic.com/in... - the article is probably paywalled (I subscribe) but here are some quotes:

In China, you can buy a heavily discounted “used” electric car that has never, in fact, been used. Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as “sold,” even though no actual customer has bought them. Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as “used,” often at low prices. The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it.

Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing’s meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.

Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China’s car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it “just hasn’t erupted yet.”

It's hard to respond to this without writing a long essay, because it's a complicated mille-feuille (word chosen advisedly) of consumer sentiment, infrastructure investment, lobbying, entrenched interests and so on which reaches very deeply into many expensive corners of the economy. And we have to separate Europe from the US because they are very different markets with very different governance, very different purported goals, and thought processes. They may converge someday, but they are very divergent today. Practically speaking, there was a crest to the electrification wave (policy wise) a few years ago and that crest has passed and we are in a slump. In the US, consumers largely remain skeptical about electric-first personal transportation, and in any case they prefer vehicles that are the worst candidates for electrification. (they don't NEED such vehicles, they just want them). On the political side, it has become apparent that the deadline for "promises we made for someone else to deal with in the future" has approached so closely that people today feel they might actually have to deal with the impact of it. After all, if we can make no more gasoline engines after 2035, when should we lay off the engineering staff? 2034 seems too late. Maybe 2026?

This is very much an oversimplification. First, to the US auto industry dollars are dollars. If they can make bank selling tiny cars, they will. They don't "care" what size of car they make. And the cars that they were "making" were often not even really their own product - for example look at GM basically reselling Daewoo tinycars here. But the US consumer market is not the same as Europe or even China - there is a strong predilection here for large vehicles (this was the case even when the "large vehicles" were passenger sedans decades ago). The perceived danger of China's entry to the market is not the small, cheap cars they can make - it is that they can use their supply chain capabilities and also a little government sponsoring to undermine the profitable market for large SUVs and pickups. US automakers are admittedly dinosauric - they are used to operating in a protected market, and they do not have the kind of logistics and supply chain capabilities that Chinese OEMs (of all stuff, not just cars) do. But this is NOT about "US customers want small cheap cars", because most of them don't, and even if they did such cars don't make the OEM much money.

The "move away from EVs" is not a unique US phenomenon. It's pretty much global - apart from some EV-hot pockets, enthusiasm for full electrification has absolutely waned. The current discussion that the EU 2035 ICE ban will be lifted is a good illustration of this. Of course, US automakers never got very far INTO electrification to begin with, which may have ramifications down the line.

While you're correct, this isn't the full picture. Automaking in China is complicated and there is a tangle of let's-call-them-subsidies and other weird perverse incentives that have led to Chinese manufacturers focusing on ICE exports https://www.reuters.com/invest... for example. The EV side of the equation is weird too, it's massively oversupplied and Strange Things are happening: https://insideevs.com/news/763... and also https://www.theatlantic.com/in... are fun reading - none of this is sustainable.

From a domestic "people getting paychecks" perspective I don't think there's a big difference between how Toyota operates here (basically 100% locally "manufactured" - remembering that lots of stuff like electronics isn't made here at all, no matter which automake you're talking) and some Chinese corporation like Geely coming in to do the same thing. If Geely was allowed to, and they announced they're opening a new assembly line in Michigan or Indiana or Kentucky that will employ 6,000 local people - don't you think the state governor would jump on that like a starving dog on a fresh McRib?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That works for US destinations, but Yandex won't show you the fleet of Lamborghinis at Putin's ski resort. In any case, moderately seriously - the raw images exist, and I am sure that for the right amount of BTC you could easily obtain them.

The 3% is not just "buildings we haven't mapped yet" but also "buildings we aren't allowed to map". Lots of satellite coverage is censored due to, say, not wanting Random McWebsurfer to be able to research exactly what anti-aircraft hardware is on top of the White House. Same/same for 3D building mapping I'm sure.

Erm.... doesn't Uber already integrate with Google Maps, and doesn't every driver use live navigation software of some kind (not necessarily GMaps)... in which case, this is already true - no?

I am replying to this simply because I can't mod it (already posted in the thread) and what you said is _exactly right_ to the degree that it requires Internet applause. I doff my hat to you, sir/ma'am.