I was thinking more along the lines of Google Glass. At the time, some folks were genuinely concerned the concept might catch on and we'd have to deal with "glassholes" who constantly filmed everything.

All of these sorts of smart accessories seem to exist under some mistaken belief that people don't want to just use their smartphone to accomplish the same tasks.

I just don't do the whole get up at the ass crack of dawn and drive until your eyeballs are ready to fall out thing. If a trip is that far away, I'm taking a flight instead. Ironically, my EV's range doesn't even factor in, since it's generally cheaper to take an Uber to the airport rather than pay for parking.

Yeah, I know it's sometimes different for families. When I was a kid, my family would load up the minivan and take long ass trips where we spent more time on the road than we did at our destination. Personally, I don't feel much nostalgia for that and wish my folks had just budgeted for airline tickets instead.

TFS says the fines start at a grand. If it was up to me, the punishment would be mandatory community service instead of a fine, that way it still sends a message to wealthy folks that they're not above the law, and doesn't disproportionally harm some low-income person who picked the wrong way to celebrate the 4th.

Of course, here in Florida setting off "illegal fireworks" is like going 10 MPH over the limit on the highway - technically illegal but rarely enforced.

If your use case is to be hauling multiple jet skis or some big ass boat, it probably makes sense to at least have one ICE vehicle that's up to the task. The idea that EVs are the be-all and end-all of transportation misses the point that for some people, an EV will just never check all their boxes. If someone wants a gargantuan diesel pickup truck and runs it on biofuel, that option should still be available to them.

Course, I never said anything about it being cheap to do so.

This is highly dependent on usage patterns. Personally, I very, very, rarely take long road trips and even then, there isn't anywhere I'd want to drive that'd be an "impossible" trip in my EV.

Sure, if you cannonball run all over the USA there's "charging deserts" that might leave you plugged in to L1 charge at a Motel 6. But just because some people have "must be able to drive all over creation without even stopping for a piss break" as a requirement doesn't mean EVs can't work for the rest of us.

Public transportation is fine if you can live your life on its schedule and reside somewhere with decent transit infrastructure. If it works for you, great, I'm not going to piss in your Cheerios. However, having a car significantly expands both your options for housing and choices of employers, and in most cases you still come out ahead, even after factoring in the costs of car ownership.

Musk's idea for the poors was for them to take one of his cars-as-a-service robotaxis. Kinda makes our society seem more dystopian than China's, when you look at it that way.

Anecdotally, I'm convinced what has caused sluggish EV sales in the USA is peoples' general ignorance about how they work. My partner and I both have Chevy Bolts and between the two of us we've been asked:

"Does it use gas?"
No, it's entirely electric.

"Do you always need to find a parking space with a charger?"
No, we just park it in a regular parking spot like a gas car. It gets charged at night at home.

"Is it slow, like a golf cart?"
It has 200hp. It's not slow.

"Why does it make that weird noise?"
That's the pedestrian alert tone. It's legally required.

"How much range does it have?"
About 200 miles at highway speeds, if you don't drive like a maniac.

"Is your power bill really high with two EVs?"
Not really.

"What do you do if there's a power outage?"
If the car needs to be recharged, we go to a nearby Supercharger station.

"Is charging it at a charging station expensive?"
Compared to gas, yeah, but since we primarily charge at home it's not a big deal.

"Aren't you worried about it catching fire?"
No.

The "subsidy" is actually a tax credit. You're getting some of your own money back as an incentive to not just go out and purchase another gas guzzler. I used to think that yes, it was unfair that it was something only wealthier folks could take advantage of, but then the used EV credit was introduced. That finally closed the circle on incentivizing wealthier folks to buy new EVs, so there'd be more used ones eventually reaching the second-hand market.

I bought a used Bolt utilizing the credit myself. I've also seen one of my neighbors bought a used Model 3 a few months back (and I live in a relatively low-income area, so they must've gotten a good deal on it). You might not be excited about the idea of owning someone's sloppy seconds EV, but for folks on a budget who need reliable transportation for their daily commute, it's just what the doctor ordered.

He's making money for his family. Did you miss the stories about his memecoins and MVNO phone service?

None of this should be normal, but the GOP won't hold him accountable so here we are.

Did you seriously just admit that you weren't aware that Biden had dropped out?

Can't run a government on borrowed money forever. Either we'd have to do like the Nordic countries and start implementing a tax scheme that actually pays for everything we spend (which Musk and his ilk obviously aren't fans of), or get the spending under control (and as we've seen with this Big Ugly Bill, even with inhumane levels of spending cuts it still adds to the debt).

This was always the thing that tripped up Bernie, too. You can promise the moon and the stars, but at the end of the day, someone still has to pay for it. Musk is a greedy, selfish asshole, but he's not wrong to be pointing that out.

That may've been true in the days when your choices were a crazy expensive Model S or a Nissan Leaf that could barely make a trip for groceries. EVs with decent range are available within a price range of people who do watch their budgets, and the tax credit absolutely does factor in to their decision to make a purchase.

You're gonna be really surprised to find this out, but home EV charging can be installed on manufactured/mobile homes, too. No need to own a McMansion.

Not having home charging is also not entirely a dealbreaker for some people if the car is cheap enough. Hell, at the local Target, I regularly see some guy charging an old beater Nissan Leaf at the free ChargePoint L2 chargers. I'm assuming he lives at one of the nearby apartment complexes and just got a fantastic deal on the car (thanks to the used EV tax credit).

Which group gets scapegoated depends on the issue:

Jobs/the economy - Illegals
Crime - Illegals and brown people
School shootings, environmental disasters - God (I'm totally not joking, how else do you explain the thoughts and prayers?)
Kids "turning" gay/trans/etc., erosion of "family values" - LGBTQ+ community

The GOP really is just the "blame anybody but the oligarchs" party.

Well, Musk has been using his personal bullhorn lately to draw attention to the debt situation. There's no shortage of folks who figure if the world's richest man is on about an issue, maybe there's something to it. At any rate, that's been his entire beef with the bill, at least from what he's willing to admit publicly (I'm sure behind closed doors, he's at least a little miffed about the EV tax credits going *poof*, but since that doesn't fit his public persona as a libertarian...).