Automobiles

[jfish26]

I'm not sure Tesla's target market is "primarily environmentally friendly progressive types."

I think it's more like "primarily the type who virtue-signals being the environmentally friendly progressive type."

[KUTradition]

I'm not sure Tesla's target market is "primarily environmentally friendly progressive types."

I think it's more like "primarily the type who virtue-signals being the environmentally friendly progressive type."

they’ve supplanted the prius

[ousdahl]

I mean, most of being environmentally friendly IS the virtue signaling

[Shirley]

BP aims to buy Tesla supercharging sites for U.S. expansion - Bloomberg

BP's (NYSE:BP) electric vehicle charging business is eager to snap up Tesla (TSLA) Supercharer sites across the U.S., along with the workers behind them, and plans to spend $1B to expand its network, bp pulse Americas boss Sujay Sharma said Thursday in a Bloomberg interview.

BP (BP) is "aggressively looking to acquire real estate to scale our network, which is a heightened focus following the recent Tesla announcement," Sharma said, adding that the business expects to spend $1B by 2030, half of it within the next 2-3 years to install 3K-plus charging points across the U.S.

Tesla (TSLA) recently laid off most of its Supercharger team, seeking to grow its EV charging network at a slower pace, and Sharma said BP (BP) is "actively seeking good talent and real estate opportunities that allow us to help grow, despite whatever else is going on around us."

The company agreed last year to procure ~$100M of Tesla (TSLA) Supercharger hardware, with deployment expected to start later this year and early 2025, Sharma told Bloomberg.

[TDub]

auto insurance is such a scam.

my insurance climbed 18% last year, an additional 22% this year.

I called, they said it's company wife increases blah blah...

I said ok. Can I have a breakdown, itemized list of what exactly I'm paying for and qhat things can be cut.

I never got that, but magically I got a letter and a refund check and somehow my insurance premiums (for the same vehicles and same coverage) have no dropped 50%. So..for those keeping track, it's now like 18% less than what I was paying 2 years ago before these supposed nationwide increases.


If that doesn't tell you that all the numbers are a scam and not based in reality I don't know what does. They know everybody is required to have it and they just throw numbers at you and expect/know people will pay it.

[Sparko]

The company wife increases puzzled me, TDub. One per customer. The company wide stuff I do get. My daughter is with the industry. Bad year of weather and Kia Boys stuff. Glad they reduced your premium.

[jfish26]

Have You Seen A Cybertruck Yet?

https://defector.com/have-you-seen-a-cybertruck-yet

I have seen a Tesla Cybertruck with my own eyes.

The experience was not any less startling or unsettling for how ready I considered myself to be for it. I had read about the Cybertruck for some time, and watched numerous videos of Cybertrucks doing rudimentary four-wheel-drive shit with the sort of dexterity and confidence generally associated with concepts like "George C. Scott's first capoeira class" or "Robocop doing burpees." I have also been following Elon Musk's uncanny transformation into the single most unfortunate middle-aged outcome for the Butt-Head character from Beavis And Butt-Head. I knew that his pretty vile company had made him very rich, and I also knew that despite some duffed hagiography and thanks mostly to his world-historic dedication to showing his ass, Musk himself is now most famous as a wrecker and creep, and also that the cars he makes, the Cybertruck in particular, extremely do not work. I knew what he was like, and I knew that this dorky truck was his passion project. This would seem like pretty good preparation for seeing his latest vehicle, but I can tell you that it absolutely was not.

The long-gone version of me that once excitedly called out passing Datsuns and Oldsmobiles would have been unable to process at the most basic level what I saw. Some of this is by design. The Cybertruck was made to not look like other cars and trucks, which is a statement that would scan as a compliment if you had not seen a Cybertruck. The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in a version of Freejack in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.

And I knew all this, or thought I knew it. But I was not ready for how it would feel, how it would seem. I knew that this vehicle was a boondoggle—that Tesla can barely manage to manufacture it at all, let alone properly, and that it will power all the way down like a stressed-out C-3PO if run through a car wash and ages like brass if left out overnight in the rain. Through an episode of the What A Time To Be Alive podcast, I was caught up on the astonishingly grim Cybertruck Owners Club Forum, which is surely one of the best places on the internet to find adult men posting things like, "I just want to thank Mr. Musk for creating a car door that's both heavy and sharp enough to sever my leg below the knee, which mine did, and which was both entirely my fault and an experience for which I am very grateful." I have heard friends tell me about how stricken the Tech Alphas they'd seen driving one of the few Cybertrucks currently on the road—no less sympathetic a source than the Cybertruck Owners Club forum put that number under 4,000 last month—had seemed when they realized that the effect on observers was less Driving The Future and more Tentatively Doing Errands From Within A Super Nintendo. I can confirm all this, but I can also confirm that is insufficient.

What I can tell you is this: I saw my first Cybertruck stop at a red light near the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan on Sunday, and this car sucked in a way that had strangers on the sidewalk making Oh brother faces at each other. I could not have been better prepared to encounter this vehicle, and yet I was not prepared at all. It is one thing to have an image in your mind that roughly corresponds to "Albert Pyun's Homercar: 2049" and quite another to watch that actual vehicle turn, seemingly on drunken tiptoe, onto Columbus Avenue. It is an experience that everyone should have, I think. The stupid, tacky future that our culture's reigning mediocrities are making every day can feel abstract and almost poignant when encountered through a screen—a thing that no one but them wants, and which does not work very well, trying and failing to seem like progress. It is much more useful, I think, to see how ridiculous—how gaudy and cheap and patently unwantable—that future looks trying to navigate the world in which everyone else is trying to live.

[Sparko]

Well it serves less purpose than other cars named truck.

[Shirley]

I've seen a number of them here in Florida and they are, imo, very odd looking and unappealing.

I can't imagine why anyone would want one.

[KUTradition]

i’ve seen two in SLC, and can’t help but giggle when i do