I’ve managed to pack an absurd amounts of stuff into a sedan over the years (it often looks like the photos of your truck, jammed floor to ceiling) but there have been times when I really wished for an open bed for bulky items. This thing has more cargo space than my four-door and looks smaller overall which is a huge plus in city driving (even my sedan feels too big a lot of the time). Plus it’s cheap to buy, cheap to operate, probably cheap to insure because of its low speed. If they are frequently hauling cargo but less than you are, and need to drive and park in tight roads in the city (where it’s intended to be used) it seems like a better fit than a car (from someone who uses a car).

You have to open negotiations with a strong position you can afford to negotiate down from

Picturing that on some stockbroker’s desk

Reading his complaint I was thinking, combustion engines will still be around, after all I see people driving steam powered antique autos almost every summer. But that doesn’t mean we should stay dependent on old, damaging tech for basic tasks

Maybe they could make a mode where the electric vehicle UFO noise they make so you can hear them coming gets louder when you accelerate

This is exactly right - but whatever trick he used to win would also be a little hint that he’d figured out how you did it.

So you can steer it with a ps4 controller?

Hydrogen could/can be done greenly but there’s a reason the oil and gas companies push it as the green option of choice when they’re not trying to stop any transition at all: hydrogen keeps them relevant longer - most of it is obtained and transported through their systems. They’d love if we spun our wheels investing in a precarious energy transition into a new tech on the promise that the generation of hydrogen will eventually become green - they can draw that out for years.

Electrific cars are still basically the same thing for auto companies - keeping the car relevant, but there’s value in the comparative mechanical simplicity and the fact that the electric transition has already made significant progress and is hurting oil and gas sales now.

Full agree that public transit would be a significant improvement, especially improvements in coverage area

X Minus One is amazing! We have a lot of fun with that on long drives.

Also they weren’t singled out, other American companies producing small cars/fire traps did get sued. Ford caught actual criminal charges not because they had money but for the elements above when they came to light.

Their victory (bought with famous lawyers) helped set a precedent that ensured American corporations are an effective shield against liability and real consequences even in truly horrendous deliberate, documented harms.

It wasn’t unique in small American cars in those couple decades (notable for rushed designs with an indifference to safety across the board) but the numbers were a bit worse. They stood out for Ford’s extensive crash tests, and well-documented knowledge of the lethal design flaw, their early decision to pay out for deaths rather than make a quite inexpensive design change, and recall, and for the decade of expensive legal battles and PR campaigns where they lobbied against federal rear-end collision safety requirements which would have saved lives and identified the problem. They were happy to throw money at every aspect of the problem except for the part that kept burning their customers alive.

Also it wasn’t just the gas tank design but flaws with the frame and (essentially cosmetic bumper) which jammed every door even in minor rear end collisions.

This was half the problem with the Ford Pinto - the big name in burning people alive after minor collisions.

People already have hardware access to their own cars and make stupid modifications all the time. That’s what vehicle inspections are for. Heck, I know police aren’t generally popular on this instance but stopping vehicles with unsafe modifications they spot on the roads falls under their purview too. I’m from a state with inspections but have a friend who wasn’t and her stories about the beater cars they drove (missing floorboards, reach out the window and push on a metal rod to use the brake) tell me the system basically works. At least as well as it can while transportation infrastructure is arranged so cars are a basic necessity for huge swaths of the country.

Thanks! I’ll take a look and see what I can find

I quite recommend the Swindled podcast episode on the Pinto:

https://swindledpodcast.com/podcast/124-the-pinto/

Warnings for blunt descriptions of horrible injuries and tragic deaths. And incredible corporate malfeasance.

Especially right after an accident when they’re dazed or panicky. There’s a reason emergency exits are usually clearly marked and intuitive to use.

The important thing is that the orks trust it

That might be too much authenticity

They’ve all been making bigger cars with ‘luxury’ features included by default so they can charge more per car for years now. They’re focused on finding ever-better margins. Selling tons of cheap cars seem to be a far lower priority than selling a few expensive ones. And researching new designs and EVs in general cuts into profits.

The explanation I saw in another conversation was that certain settings (I think one-pedal driving?) for regenerative braking make it feel like you’re constantly switching between accelerating and braking with no in-between. Like as soon as you let off the accelerator the brakes come on, no ability to just glide along, so it feels very lurching. I love the idea of recovering power from regenerative braking so I guess if I get the chance to look for an electric car someday I’ll have to make sure it can be configured to just happen when I actually use the brake.