Cars with no powertrain electrification at all no longer make any sense. Combustion cars only make sense in countries with lots of cheap fuel, except really they still don't make sense because AGW, but I'll go ahead and put that aside here. The performance and even reliability benefits of a hybrid are just too significant, and the cost continues to fall. The price is only an issue here in the USA, where we don't make the batteries or controller components at scale yet/anymore and it will take time to ramp up in the best case.

I don't honestly myself want a Chinese car, and I even see a national security argument against them, but don't know if that really merits banning them or just installing some auto-deploying pop-up bollards in places which really should have them already.

No one provided you with roads?

How many times have the US automakers been bailed out?

Worldwide sales of the S class plummeted when Lexus brought out the LS.

The idea that China is a communist country makes sense only until you read the definition of communism and find out there are numerous incompatibilities.

Not all cowards are Nazis, but the one modding me down is

Cowards are dumb as fuck, especially the cuck ones happy to see their country fucked

You are a coward. That is all you will ever be.

Karma on Slashdot has been rendered meaningless. Though I've probably done my bit to break the so-called karma system to the point I don't want to say how I deal with karma problems...

I still think the moderation approach is fundamentally borken [sic] in several ways, though the underlying philosophic idea was good. But it's the broken economic model that precludes fixing anything substantive here.

Trying to propagate the humor without the vacuous brain fart, but can't figure out how to work cabs or taxis or even robocars/robocabs into a more appropriate Subject...

However I actually had a more serious reaction to the joke because it wouldn't make much economic sense to only send your car out at night. Too much competition. Much more reasonable to adjust your own travel schedule to off-peak times and send your car out to make money because you don't need it at peak-demand times.

However the "stink" refers to my overall reaction to the story. All things Musk reek to my delicate nose. (There's a joke there if you've ever seen my iconic nose. I literally use it as my icon...) Just reading Regime Change by Haberman and Swan. Many points of sadness, though I also notice some mistakes. For example, they say Musk only "invested" $300 million in the YOB's campaign, but I think the Twitter cesspool should be included and that loss was more than $20 Billion with a Big B.

Ah, I finally figured out a joke. Musk picked Austin so he can blame the liberals if the immature technology fails. Or even worse, because he's sure the YOB's DoJ won't prosecute if some liberal gets killed? (The Texas DoJ is possibly even worse?)

Good Funny, but the story deserves more Funny. However I think SBF already tried 5 and it got attacked from some other zone. Not sure if it was an island, however. Been a while since I read Michael's entertaining book on the fiasco. And it may have been more of an EA zone than Tech Bro?

Quoted against the wanna-censor status, and even though the visibility is still high?

Anyway, the most answer to your question is Taiwan (per other replies), except I'm adding a proviso that I think the Chinese are too smart to start any warlike situation unless they are sure they have already won it. (There are some less obvious answers, but as far as I can imagine (right now and based on limited data) the risk-benefit ratios are too low for all of them.)

Having said that, I'm pretty sure the Chinese tactics would involve clouds of cheap drones and minimal actual attacks. I think it most likely that they would declare an embargo-not-embargo and merely require each ship going to or from Taiwan to visit China for complete inspection of the cargo. Certain things will get blocked or delayed, but they will do it in such a capricious way that it will be difficult to justify any interventions from outside, while the actual higher level strategy will basically be economic. After all they don't want to destroy the Taiwanese economy, but they will, if push comes to shove, seek to maximize interdependence-really-dependence with some kind of seasoning of threat control.

The Subject has become kind of confusing or even misleading, but still relevant, though I think for AI more than cars. I guess it depends on how much manufacturing goes to the robots?

Unions can't help people who were replaced by automation.

And that is why we will bail out the American automakers when they inevitably fail again

For example, making idiots think AI is an arms race and not a cold war