I have acolytes! Who knew?! LOL.
Almost nobody said that back then, by the way. The society was mostly agrarian and broke coming out of the Great Depression, mostly.
Similar thoughts here. They need to make a GOOD AWD version of something as a plug-in hybrid first though. Roads are still dirt out here and none of these roller skate cars have the suspension to survive years of pounding on washboards.
LOL. He’s an ADD poster child.
Reaction to Tesla or just reasonable uses of electric tech? Tesla is probably going to become a boutique car maker. Electric tech has some useful applications but it’s not the fix for a majority of problems automakers attempt to fix for people. It does fix some. Especially for those living in overcrowded urban hell holes.
Shooting space junk into deep space holds little interest for me. Turning it into a car commercial even less so. But he needed a weight to put at the top of his rocket that he could blow up with a launch failure and Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t have to pay out on. So he used one of his first unprofitable cars.
Nope. No Internet forums.
But the real story was literally my grandfather’s. Farm kid. Bought first Model T used and broken. Replaced lower bearings with leather (!) and told anyone driving it not to push it too hard or they’d blow the engine right out of the thing. Someone eventually did. Nobody had money for fancy stuff like metal engine bearings.
Henry Ford’s real legacy. Cheap debt for the masses. He bankrolled it. Numerous powerful bankers and political lobbyists of the day were so jealous that he came up with it, they tried to get Congress to take his company from him. Said his lack of formal business training and education were a threat to the country.
Sound familiar in this thread?
Interestingly this entwined Henry Ford in telecommunications history. When asked by Congresscritters who made him come before Congress and explain why he should keep his own company... how he would run it without said “proper” education, the short version is, he said he’d installed a massive multi-line phone system in his office and he would call any expert on any topic he needed by simply picking up the phone.
The power brokers of the day were mighty annoyed that he was practical. They were really annoyed he made a profit.
Pretending Musk is Ford is laughable.
I wonder if Kent
@flyingcheesehead is still a buyer at $78,000. Ouch. Quite a bait and switch.
That’s more than a loaded Heavy Duty diesel pickup truck and those are heavily milked for profit margin.
Anyway, looks like Musk is setting up his narrative... the big auto makers killed him. Of course. It won’t play as well with Ford completely exiting his market space though. Ha. He’ll have to blame Korea.
Which tech is that? None of the tech for EVs has changed in well over a decade in batteries and that’s where their major problem lies. Toyota has been making the Prius for a “relatively” long time now.
Tesla came up with ways to manage and build a massive lithium pack, but none of it in the electronics world was particularly new. It’s standard 90s vintage tech driven (pun intended) by a false “green” movement.
It’s not an uncertainty. It’s a well known fact that these batteries die. It’s in the data sheet for the individual cells.
I pay cash. I even paid REAL cash and not electronic cash for the Dodge, mostly as a joke when the former owner said he wanted “$20s in unmarked bills”. He got $100s.
The Lincoln was a loan for three months. Did it so the poor sales guy got more commission. They wanted to sell it through Ford finance and Ford had a minimum pay off time for the small dealership to get their kickback. So we paid it off three months after buying it. Pretty sad that when the paperwork was slow the “threat” was that we’d write a check if they’d didn’t hurry up. LOL.
It helped that a storage facility across from the dealership literally blew up. Gave us something to do while we waited on the mountain of paperwork to get the “loan”.
It makes me actually pay attention to what I’m spending and why. Also forces a real budget.
No not really. In salty climates the vehicle will rust out from under you no matter how good your maintenance is. Not that I haven’t owned a van that I could see the road going by through the floorboards, but there’s limits to your assertion that a vehicle should last for “life”. 15 years, maybe 20 in those conditions. Longer here since we have little water.
There’s also the depreciation problem, spending more on a repair than the vehicle is worth is dumb unless there’s a specific reason to do so.
Owning an 18 year old Subaru, the problem with all of them is head and valve cover gaskets. There’s also a mandatory timing belt replacement cycle and they’re interference engines, so you don’t do that one “on condition” unless you like replacing engines.
My mechanic is on the way to work. If the vehicle is driveable I just drop it off and he hands me the keys to a first gen Honda CRV that has almost 300,000 miles on it and has been his loaner for ten years. If he can’t get your vehicle done by the end of the day, he doesn’t care if you drive the CRV to the boonies and back. Runs great.
