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The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1]

What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.

BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.

BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.

Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BYD_Auto_vehicles

I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.

Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.

> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.

I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.

This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.

Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.

Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.

Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.

When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.

And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.

Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.

Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters don't and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.

> And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc.

Could he, though?

I mean, he might have the cash, but if you look at his history you don't see that much interest or respect for basic academic principles, or even any basic academic achievement whatsoever.

He conveys an image of someone who is mentally trapped in prepubescence, and who repeatedly does things that a prepubescent kid does to try to gather admiration. I meant who desperately tries to pass themselves off as elite gamers? How long will it take until he moves on to DJing? That's not someone who has any interest in founding education institutions.

The man does have an army of terminally online sycophants, which I now wonder whether they are astroturfed.

I think the point is he could if he was a different person.

> I think the point is he could if he was a different person.

That statement is pointless. The critical factor is not money, it's willingness. You do not even need to be the world's richest man to put together a school. There are pro athletes with a fraction of the wealth that already do meaningful investments in education.

He has two degrees. BA in Physics and BSc in Economics

> He has two degrees. BA in Physics and BSc in Economics

You should verify your claims

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/

From the article:

> Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career.

> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?

To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.

I mean, that's one way to get Indians!

Andrew Yang launched a presidential campaign based on this idea, he wrote a book:

“Smart People Should Build Things”

BYD's allowed to sell in Europe. They're not crushing the market here. They're not substantially cheaper, or better for what they offer for the price compared to other manufacturers.

Within only a few months I see more Chinese Electric cars than Tesla (or us cars generally) on swiss streets.

Depending on what you are looking for they are WAY cheaper than comparable cars.

VW is selling more EVs in Europe than BYD.

VW is not an American car maker. There are way more European cars in Switzerland than either Chinese or US. Obviously. Also more Japanese tho

No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire. Many videos of this happening inside China with one recent event in the West.

> No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire.

This matches reports from Tesla users. The cybertruck is specially prone to this sort of design problems.

Are there not similar videos of Tesla, or other electric cars doing the exact same thing?

That sounds like some kind of tiktok scare lol

The EU has imposed tariffs and levies on BYD, totaling 27% [1].

[1] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/chinese-e...

EU import taxes designed to make them less cheap than local cars do that.

- "BYD did it by"

Also the many systemic, industry-wide factors discussed last week in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692677 ("America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back (molsonhart.com)" — 1010 comments)

I agree with the gist of that piece; focusing on specific engineering choices (important as they are) is missing the forest for a particularly interesting tree. Any American EV maker is heavily disadvantaged right now, no matter how clever they are.

What went wrong is that the federal government didn't build or legislate a national charging infrastructure to match the scale of the interstate highway system.

They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.

They definitely tried... $7.5 Billion worth. It's on pause now :-(

https://www.govtech.com/transportation/federal-funding-for-e...

Yeah, because it was ineffective and the people running it, like most federal bureaucracy - extremely incompetent (to mind bending shocking levels). How many chargers got built for that vs other nations similar initiatives at that price tag? There’s just some things that the federal government should not be in charge of until they can prove that they are good stewards of our money.

That program should be a textbook case-study in how not to run federal projects.

Here's a true statistic:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/03/28/... ("Biden’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging has only produced 7 stations in two years" (2024))

> They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.

Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.

> Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.

Investing on a nation-wide infrastructure grid that fundamentally changes the nation's energy independence is hardly a reason to mindlessly parrot state rights cliches.

The current issue is the president ignoring legal limits of his power and breaking laws right and left. While his party cheers on.

While useful parts of the federal goverment are destroyed, because they dont serve ultra rich.

In a way, the current administration perfectly demonstrates the value of a strong federal government: a kakistocratic, kleptocratic regime wouldn't dismantle the "administrative state" if it weren't an impediment to their criminality, incompetence, and rapacity.

Isn't this lack of forward thinking somewhat the general problem now?

From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.

Germany actively hampered it by promoting diesel as THE greeen fuel.

The Chevy Spark EV is an incredible vehicle and has been my around town go kart for the past 7 years. Cost me $11k (!!) as an off lease purchase.

I adored my Spark EV til it sadly died (fairly scarily, on a highway access road) one day. Chevy was never able to repair it and ultimately gave me a nice payout after paying for a rental for me for nearly a year.

But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.

It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!

> dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry.

That's because they plan to have a small number of huge factories to keep costs down.

But that means they need cheap ships, and can only sell to places with no car tariffs - which tends to be the countries without an auto industry.

I don't really see how any car company can "fall behind" in EV.

Fundamentally, IMO, EVs are such a simple concept mechanically that any company capable of building a conventional ICE vehicle can build an EV.

It's glib to say that - obviously there's a lot of unsaid complexity (battery back cooling, fitting into the frame, and so on), but the actual drivetrain component is just so simple. That EVs are still expensive is to me a sign that production hasn't ramped up yet. So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product - but I can't imagine that's going to continue for all that much longer with an increasing backlog of used EVs on the market and decreasing battery prices.

Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.

Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.

Are you serious? EVs have been the biggest disruption in the auto industry. It has created major corporations who made the attempts of traditional manufacturers seem obsolete.

VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.

>That EVs are still expensive

Look up what they cost in China.

>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product

Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.

The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.

They are doing a lot of advertisment and promo in Germany which has a active and kinda stable car Industrie.

Pretty sure they plan to disrupt any market

BYD buses are operating in the US.

In terms of BYD dominance, one needs to keep in mind the subsidy that the Chinese government is providing, such that they can sell cars below cost.

https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2024/27...

Just 2018 to 2022, BYD received $5.9B. And that doesn't include all the indirect subsidies that went to suppliers like the battery manufacturers.

It's a part of Chinese government strategy of "build it and they will come". Massively subsidize select industries, dominate the market.

Which is why the EU has put high tariff's on the cars.

That is not that much in terms of subsidy for a critical industry. I tried finding the awards for Tesla but the articles lump in government contracts and report the figure to be in tens of billions. I am sure they have received a comparable amount of funding. BYD has just been able to make better use of it I suppose.

Did you mean to say sodium batteries instead of lithium in your "BYD did it" sentence?

No. Five years ago BYD introduced their "blade battery", which is a lithium iron phosphate battery built up of plate-like "blades" in rectangular casings.[1] Wh/L is about the same as lithium ion, Wh/Kg is not as good, and Wh/$ is better. It will survive the "nail test" and does not not go into thermal runaway.

Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.

BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIt5z4wT9RE

[2] https://electrek.co/2025/02/17/byd-confirms-evs-all-solid-st...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWXx1KsvVY

> Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar".

I really did not expect to open this and have it be presented by Kryten! Fun surprise! :)

For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

Automotive industry is one of the biggest scams on planet earth. One of my favorite cases recently is how Suzuki Jimny is banned in Europe and US because of emission standards allegedly, so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km oh and surprise surprise Mercedes are going to release a smaller more affordable G-Class [1].

[1] - https://www.motortrend.com/news/2026-mercedes-benz-baby-g-wa...

Manufacturers must hit a level of CO2 emissions on average across their whole fleet. As such, Suzuki is choosing to discontinue the Jimny because of the tougher fleet average targets starting in 2025. Overall you’re right that it’s a bit of a fix; Mercedes ‘pools’ its emissions with other manufacturers/brands. It currently pools with Smart, but may also pool with Volvo/Polestar? [0] It’s such an obvious approach to ‘game’ the targets, it’s a wonder the EU didn’t see it coming when they introduced the scheme. [0] https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...

This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

Just like code, regulation isn't intrinsically valuable - it's a means to an end, and piling lots of poorly-written stuff on top of each other has disasterous consequences for society. We have to make sure that the code and law that we write is carefully thought out and crafted to achieve its desired effect with minimal complexity, and formally verify and test it when possible.

(an example of testing law may be to get a few clever people into a room and red-team possible exploits in the proposed bill or regulation)

> This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

It seems that the goal is to pressure automakers to improve the efficiency across their entire line instead of simply banning low-efficiency models altogether.

If an automaker discontinues a low-efficient model in order to have access to a market, isn't this an example of regulation working well?

I don’t see the issue in that though. If the target was to keep the average emission down across the entire country and if inefficient brand A decided to merge with efficient brand B to keep the average down that seems like it still adheres to the spirit of the law

Seems more like it meets the letter of the law.

The spirit was surely be too accelerate efficiency by ensuring all manufacturers improve. That has been negated; reducing the necessary efficiency for some manufacturers just because others are doing well.

It's like if you allowed multiple people to mix blood samples for a DUI check. Sure, there'd have to be less drinking over all, but some would still be drunk af and the effectiveness of the law would be greatly reduced.

Yeah it's not really "gaming" anything.

A last effort to extend the many favors granted to the dying german auto industry

They likely saw it coming… and deliberately did it this way.

All local industry distorts their relevant politics. There’s lobbyists in the EU too.

The EU economy has a lot of car manufacturing, so cars are probably a big deal in Brussels.

> The EU economy has a lot of car manufacturing, so cars are probably a big deal in Brussels.

Car manufacturing is a strategic component of a nation's defense infrastructure. It goes way beyond trade protectionism.

Especially in Germany, which has several major manufacturers (Daimler-Benz, VW, BMW) that are important to the economy. Additionally, VW is part owned by the government of one of the states, which is why they are frequently favored by the government. Despite various scandals at VW, there are rarely any serious consequences for the company, because the government always finds a way to make trouble go away.

And Germany is fairly influential in the EU so they probably extend the protection of these companies to the EU level.

Link not working

Is that weighted for individual car popularity? Because couldn’t you put three push cars in your lineup that you don’t realistically expect to sell and be fine?

AFAIK the average emissions are based on cars that were actually sold. So yeah, it's weighted for popularity in a way.

I wonder if that's why Ford, Ram, and Nissan all at the same time decide to discontinue their mini cargo vans a year ago.

If you're talking about the ford transit (I'm just guessing) but maybe the tariff rules changed? IIUC The transit was shipped to the US from europe as a "bus" because it was configured with car seats on board and then they would strip the seats and ship them back to europe. Buses are exempt from tariffs otherwise municipal public transit would be even more in the drink.

This is the Ford Transit Connect. They're known as mini cargo vans and popular with trades and for city driving because they're slightly smaller than a mini van. The equivalent to the Transit Connect was the Ram ProMaster City and Nissan NV200. They all were discontinued within two years of each other.

>This is the Ford Transit Connect.

isnt that a VW made in Poland?

The Jimny is my favorite example of a cool little vehicle that would address a glaring hole in the U.S. market.

The situation here is pathetic. We can't have truly small trucks or sport-utes because of obviously incompetent or corrupt regulations.

The Jimny or similar Suzuki models would not be offered for sale in the U.S. because it’s basically the latest iteration of the Samuri, which died there after Consumer Reports falsely claimed that it was dangerously prone to rollover.

The Samuri, sold in India as the Gypsy and used extensively by Indian police, did rollover alarmingly often until the 1993 model when the track width was increased by 90mm.

Yeah but look at it. It's a tall vehicle. Of course it's more likely to roll over. It's tall so that it can go over things. It has a purpose. Don't drive it like a sports car and dont haul your family in it on the daily. People bought utility vehicles and used them as family haulers and then bitched when they rolled over. It's stupid. Drive a car.

It's like complaining that you bought a boat, but the water surrounding them is dangerous and you could drown in it. So we need to make it work on land so that you can take the kids to school in it without drowning.

I think the idea may have been that these would help with bad Indian roads — even our potholes have potholes — but the police neglected to account for having to participate in the odd car chase now and then.

I had rented a barebones Jimny last month when I was in Auckland for the week. Not saying it was prone to roll. But holy hell was it feeling like I could roll that bad boy on some curvy gravel roads. I also loved it.

I don't recognize it as being a Samurai descendent.

Related note: I just saw a Suzuki Sidekick on the road in L.A., in Geo Tracker trim... a rare sight nowadays. It sounded like shit, but with a robust platform a vehicle like that would be just what the U.S. market lacks: a burly SMALL sport-ute.

Example #5621 that a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have.

That's overly reductive.

1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

2. You can work around #1 by applying incentives for manufacturers to make more efficient cars should lead any carbon tax

3. If you just reward companies based on fleet-average fuel economy without regard to vehicle size, then it would be rather bad for US car companies (who employ unionized workers) that historically make larger cars than Asian and European companies.

4. So the first thing done was to have a separate standard for passenger vehicles and light-trucks, but this resulted in minivans and SUVs being made in such a way as to get the light-truck rating

5. We then ended up with the size-based calculation we have today, but the formula is (IMO) overly punitive on small vehicles. Given that the formula was forward looking, it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.

All carbon tax is inherently regressive but that's also trivially fixable. Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive, since on average richer people will spend more on fuel (and therefore the tax) even though it is likely a much smaller percentage of their spending.

Every single one of your ideas has problems that are solved by a carbon tax. Taxes are simple, they accomplish what you want, and they don't have loopholes. A carbon tax will _never_ have the unintended consequence of making emissions worse. Many of our current regulations, including the one I was responding to do exactly that because they actually cause people to buy larger trucks than they otherwise would with worse fuel efficiency.

A carbon tax might not on it's own be enough to solve the problem (especially if you set it to low), but no matter what level you set it, it will help. Thanks to unintended consequences, many of our current regulations are actively counter productive, while _also_ having negative economic and other costs.

All costs are regressive to people with less ability to bear them. By making them not regressive we don't change behavior! It doesn't matter if they're regressive if the objective is to get people to not drive or to burn less gas. Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon. There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones.

> Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon.

Shifting cost to the emitters is a better way to put it. If a factory can make 10m in upgrades over time to reduce their carbon tax burden by 15m over time, they are definitely going to do it. So I disagree: I say it does change behavior and it does reduce actual carbon.

> There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones

Whether that's true or not it does not mean a carbon tax would not 'reduce actual carbon'.

Drivers of ICE vehicles are the emitters.

An ICE vehicle sitting in a driveway with its engine off emits no pollution (that is, after the initial impact of manufacturing and delivering it).

The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.

However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.

It would change behaviour more, not less.

If you set the carbon tax at about $1/gallon of gasoline, the corresponding carbon rebate would be about $1000 per family per year.

That wouldn't affect rich people much; neither the $1/gallon nor the $1000 extra income is significant. But many rich people get rich by being penny-wise, so many would change behaviour, by buying an EV or similar.

But for poor people both $1/gallon and $1000 per year is significant. If gas was $1/gallon more expensive, poor people definitely would drive less.

The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000

The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.

The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.

That doesn’t really sound like the worst thing?

Someone has to buy them for full price before they show up on the used market 5-10 years later.

That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.

New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.

Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.

Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).

That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.

And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.

So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.

The rebate can be paid out more frequently than annually.

Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.

The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.

The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.

The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.

Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.

Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.

At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.

They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.

Canada's implementation had two problems:

1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.

2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.

But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.

Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.

Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.

It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.

In official communications it was called the Canada Carbon Rebate or previously the Climate Action Incentive

You can give the rebate based on prior year or estimated usage at the start of the year, and then repay at the end of the year if it was too much, like with healthcare subsidies.

The rebate is a fixed amount, no need for estimation.

Are you sure? Gas consumption is notoriously inelastic. West coast gasoline is already a dollar or more than it costs on the east coast. Do poor people drive less in California than in Florida?

Gas consumption is inelastic in the short term, but everything is elastic in the long term.

If you want proof of this, just look at what happens to sales of large vs small cars when the price of gas changes.

I think everyone drives less in California than in Florida. (Google says ~14,500 miles annually per licensed driver in Florida, versus ~12,500 miles in California.) Gas prices are a factor in this.

> By making them not regressive we don't change behavior!

I'm poor. I could get just the $X back as my carbon tax dividend and continue with my current lifestyle. Or I could make choices that emit less carbon, which will cost less since they don't have a carbon tax cost to them, and save an additional $Y on top of the $X I'm already getting.

What do I do?

A revenue-neutral tax (like GP proposed) could, in theory, change behavior. I don't know enough about human behavior to say how it would work in practice.

Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.

The results would hit certain geographic areas much worse than others, and (if priced enough to change behavior) would also probably depress car sales, which are two reasons why the federal fuel tax has been flat for over 30 years.

Think about how much easier that is to game though.

The original suggestion could be collected at point-of-sale for carbon emitting products. Gasoline, airplane tickets (based on average for the flights), even electricity are easy to measure and charge at the point of sale.

In your example, the person has to prove how much they didn’t emit, which is way harder in practice, to get the credit.

Why tax the gasoline but then the airplane ticket and not the kerosene?

And similarly i would extrapolate to do we tax the buyer of electricity (which could be green sourced) or the manufacturer - the gas burner. Or maybe even at the first point of contact with the carbon source, the oil company.

I was making an analogy to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That is tax all of those things, but cut every taxpayer a refund for an equal share of the revenue. This is ultimately identical to paying people for having below-average use.

> Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.

So you're saying that the government should incentivize poorer people to sell one of the last bits of their functional autonomy for what would be trivial amounts? "We'll just hang onto to this for a bit until you decide to stop going anywhere or make friends at work".

You are correct that most consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive, but you can turn pretty much any consumption tax into a progressive one by simply taking the money and redistributing it at a flat amount per person.

I believe this would be more fair to children who are the ones who will be most impacted by climate change in the end.

I believe there are even some governments that use this approach, but many of them don't make it feel as significant as it should. You should get a big fat cheque in the mail every month as if you won the lottery.

It's hard to see any of this as "trivially fixable." Taxes are inherently political, politics are complicated, changing incentives on this scale are pretty much impossible in our political system.

"Taxes are simple... and they don't have loopholes" is not at all how taxes work in the US. Perhaps your imagined perfect carbon tax is simple, but a simple tax with no loopholes is not likely to happen. Everyone wants a break or exception, and many of the interested parties are powerful.

This is mixing two questions: whether a system can be elegantly designed and do the job without major market distortion, versus the question of whether various actors will stand in the way to prevent it.

You could say the same thing about zoning. Higher density is better for affordability, but faces opposition from landowning existing residents. Does that make it wrong, or not worth pursuing? No, and that particular movement seems to be getting traction despite the political opposition.

I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."

As we learned in the 90s with email, an elegant solution that doesn't take human nature into account isn't worth pursuing. There used to be a joke checklist we'd send to each other about this.

> I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."

The huge problem with this line of thinking is that it's easy to identify a half-dozen key players standing in the way of your elegant solution and it would be easier to remove them from the situation than change their minds. It's an attractive idea that can become a fixed idea.

^ In addition, I find it notable that the political party that is in favor of more regressive taxes is also against a carbon tax.

In an ideal world, I'd like the tax to be made more progressive, but I'll take anything!

I see the carbon tax as a 'stick' (to penalize undesired behaviour, in this case emitting carbon), but it needs to be coupled with a 'carrot' to encourage the desired behaviours.

I'd like to see a carbon tax coupled with massive investments to make public transit legitimately good. There are too many places where there is no viable alternative to driving, a carbon tax will unnecessarily punish those people without giving them a reasonable alternative.

The carrot is doing the things you want to do like getting from A to B or building a home.

Government ‘carrots’ are almost universally a terrible idea because they codify specific solutions. Instead you can get the same effect more efficiently with a carbon tax large enough for people to notice.

Finally, some common sense!

I'll boil it down to:

    If you want less of something, tax it.

> since on average richer people will spend more on fuel

Why would you think so? People driving older cars, not being able to afford to fly - will certainly spend more money on fuel for their car.

Rich people use more energy. That’s been shown by loads of studies.

Maybe they drive a more efficient car, but they own much larger houses which are heated or cooled consistently, they travel a lot more, and they buy things with embodied carbon emissions.

Right, but now you're talking about adding the tax to the whole economy, not just car fuel?

That's close to impossible to implement. You'd need to track production and usage of everything in an extreme detail. Plus tracking all purchases (items + services) to a given person. So complete state surveillance of citizens. Globally.

> That's close to impossible to implement.

For a carbon tax, I think you only need to track imports, and domestic extraction of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

„Only” track imports?

I think customs already tracks this. Smuggling oil and coal into the US at any meaningful scale seems very unlikely.

Right, but how do you track carbon in imported goods?

You don't. We already outsource all kinds of things (pollution, human rights violations) now.

Tax all fuel. So those energy consumption of wealthy cost more?

Ok, let's assume you do. Let's tax all fuels 300% in the US. Now all manufacturing stops as your production costs are all over the roof. Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.

What problem was solved here? None.

> Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.

Finally a good use for tariffs!

Do you think flying evades the carbon tax?

Yes, if you apply the carbon tax only for the fuel at petrol stations. I am talking about realistic-to-implement solutions.

Aviation fuel is dispensed at a limited number of places; it would be easier (or just as easy) to implement a higher aviation fuel tax than a higher auto fuel tax.

It's trivial to implement auto fuel tax - it's already in place in most of developed countries.

We already have a carbon tax, you pay it when you buy the carbon. 3 cents per liter federally and an additional 18 cents per liter in California specifically.

This tax is only assessed on road transportation. It ignores aviation, industry, or any one of the other sources of carbon.

Some European countries have total taxes to the tune of 90+ cents per liter (50-60% tax) with current gas prices, for reference. (~65ct/l for the energy/carbon tax, specifically)

I don’t think that level is sufficient to cover the externalities.

> Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive,

Unfortunately, poor people don't have the cash on hand to hold them over until they get their Carbon Stipend on April 15th.

It's going to hurt poor people to charge them more at the counter, even if you give them more later. The stipend is just going to end up paying for less than the interest the tax created on a credit card.

> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

You give it back to poor as a income-phased out refundable tax credit. Crucially, base it not on how much they drive or consume, but on their income.

Name it something like the "Worker's Energy Credit". In the worst case, it cancels out the carbon tax spent by them commensurate with their lower income.

In the best case poor people who don't drive much actually come out ahead, and it's just a very progressive sales tax.

The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.

Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars? Less weight - less pollution. Nobody needs a to drive a pickup, unless they run a farm or construction firm. A car weighing less than a ton would be perfectly enough for 99.9 % of drivers.

This is way too complicated. You just give it to everyone unconditionally and tax it as income. We already have progressive graduated income taxes with a huge exempt class, we don't need to layer anything on top of that.

Giving it back based on being alive on Dec 31 seems the best solution to me. (It’s very difficult to game and if you give 900 billionaires under a million bucks in total, it’s just not that big a deal…)

We manage to phase out ACA subsidies at 400% of the federal poverty level, so I don't see why we couldn't use a similar mechanism for an energy tax credit.

You can. It will cost political capital and erode the clarity of the messaging about the purpose of the tax. It also gives politicians one more thing to dick around with later.

Personally, I think it’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the 99+% perfect.

> The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.

Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.

I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.

I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt, with no loopholes or exceptions. Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.

> I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.

It depends what the exception is.

If the exceptions are "we treat a form of income received disproportionately by the rich a 'not income' and tax it at a lower rate, and on top of that we add an extra tax on top of income tax on labor income, and cap the larger part of that extra tax, too, to avoid burdening high earners", that helps the rich, sure. But there are plenty of exceptions possible that don't do that.

> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.

The tax would be on consumption, the credit would be based on income, so Larry still pays when he buys gas (if not for his cars, then for his planes).

> I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt

That would burn down the country. Tax policy and the economy are a ship that has to be gradually turned in the optimal direction, just like how for the last 40 years tax policy has been gradually redistributing growth/wealth upwards. Sudden changes (like we are seeing now with indiscriminate tariff policy) are what results in the most harm to the poor.

> Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.

Agreed, or just heavily tax borrowing against a portfolio above, say, $2M/year. That way you don't penalize working people borrowing against 401ks or taking home equity loans for home improvements.

> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.

Salary might be $1 but what is his effective income when he files his taxes? That is what he is taxed on, which includes things like dividends and selling of stocks.

There’s nothing wrong with borrowing against stock, the evil part is the step-up in cost basis when the billionaire dies that prevents them from paying any tax at all.

It would be a good deal for the country to let the billionaire use their skills to grow wealth without interrupting it and tax them all at death.

Carbon taxes become progressive with the simple step of returning the revenue to taxpayers as a dividend payment using the existing social security payment infrastructure. Richer people have such outsized carbon footprints that most people would get back more in dividends than they lost in higher costs.

Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.

> Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.

Not correct. Fuel for private aviation is taxed, including jet fuel and avgas. However, there are very few "private" jets, most are operated by some company, and therefore not private. Jet-A1 for a truely privately operated C172 with a diesel engine is taxed.

This is a common trope, but is incorrect, at least for the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...

Which is bonkers. If ever there was a thing that should be taxed it's jet fuel for private jets. 300% tax on private jet fuel would be reasonable.

The emissions just to shuttle rich people from one side of the country to the next (For some, multiple times per day) is insane. You should need to be a billionaire just to afford flying private jets and it should still eat a significant portion of your income if that's what you choose to do.

And for what? Like, we live in the modern era, why does anyone need to travel from NY to Florida to Texas to California in a day?

I have a suspicion the reason why super wealthy people like say Musk but he isn't the only one hate subways and high speed rail is because they fly everywhere. You might like if you could get on the subway in Glen Park and be at lands end in half an hour. You might like getting on a high speed rail and being in LA in 4 hours.

These guy will never ride a subway or take a train anywhere.

LOL on an e-bike I can beat BART to SFO from Glen Park unless you time both to start at just the moment BART arrives instead of at a random moment. If you want a Glen Park to Lands End to take under 30 minutes, the cost would rival the Iraq War.

Looks like the trains are running every 30 minutes.

A super easy solution that doesn't cost the iraq war is adding new trains and running them every 15 minutes.

You'd have to deal with lower occupancy trains as a result, which means it's not as cost efficient.

Many politicians campaigning for green energy (aka AOC) also fly on private jets everywhere so that they can fight the oligarchy - this behavior isn't restricted to wealthy businessmen alone.

Maybe you shouldn't base your assumptions of the world on politically charged clickbait headlines... Did her and Bernie use a private jet? Quite possibly. Does that mean they fly "everywhere" on private jets? Certifiably false.

Depressingly, I think that's why a law to stop this behavior won't pass in the US. Wealthy and powerful people love their private flights.

Doesn't mean that anyone engaging in this behavior should get a pass nor that we shouldn't keep advocating for such a tax.

I'm no Musk fanboy, but it is funny you mention him not liking subways or high speed rail because didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?

>didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?

_for cars_

The hyperloop was a shit idea from day one and thus far no one has been able to make it work. It's also entirely possible that Elon Musk floated this as a distraction to stop the development of "regular" high speed rain in California[1].

The Las Vegas "loop"[2], on the other hand, is basically a parody of a subway - with a fraction of the capacity.

> In July 2021, the peak passenger flow was recorded at 1,355 passengers per hour.

As a comparison Toronto's subway can handle 28,000 passengers per hour[3] per direction or more.

[1] https://www.jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Convention_Center_Lo...

[3] https://dailyhive.com/toronto/ttc-toronto-subway-station-rid...

Did I say it was a good idea? I was merely pointing out that there's evidence that he is not the best example for people that hate high-speed rails and subways.

>Stop the development of high speed rail in California

I thought that got funded, what happened?

You'll note to two things that ties the hyper loop and the Las Vegas Loop together is private cars.

Don't discount that these guys find ordinary people to be scary and disgusting.

What makes a jet private? Should Trump's Boegin 757 count as one? What if an airline is flying a jet with no passengers? Cargo jets?

The same thing that differentiate a private car from public transportation or freight, I would think. This distinction isn't a particularly novel problem.

We don't differentiate these in any significant way. Do buses in your country pay different rate for fuel?

There are vans carrying 6 people on international routes in Europe, is this public transport? Private? Anyone can book it.

Ffs

TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.

TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.

The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.

A disincentive on a thing you don't want makes people choose another thing that you may or may not want.

The only way to avoid perversions is to incentivize the things you want.

Taxing cigarettes led to vaping. Maybe less bad but still a nuisance.

Looks like as long as only positive change is allowed to touch the poor, there will be little change.

Going to let us burn because not doing so would be regressive.

If you want to reduce carbon emissions, if the tax is regressive or not does not matter as long as you tax emissions. If you want to mix too many things, you will not get a good solution for any.

Are you saying used car sales would have a carbon tax? I've never heard anyone suggest anything like that. It's just a tax on new items.

> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

The idea that policy makers care about this in any meaningful sense is absurd given the EV mandates, as EV's radically change the lifecycle costs of cars in a way that is absolutely destructive to people who aren't wealthy.

EV's lower the 'fueling' cost but shift part of it into large cashflow crushing battery replacement costs.

Automobiles have been a significant engine in elevating less wealthy americans because you can buy a old junky car for very little and keep it limping along with use-proportional fuel costs and minor maintenance. Even if it's an inefficient car, you use it to go to work, so you're making money to pay for the fuel. Less work, less work fuel required.

EV's significantly break the model and will push many more less wealthy people onto predatory financing which they'll never escape. Yet policy makers refuse to even discuss the life-cycle cashflow difference of EVs, and continue to more forward with policies to eventually mandate their use.

> it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.

It's been broken all along. We've had decades to fix it.

This.

Yeah that’s the truth. The mass of poor people are the predominant polluters. They produce little of value and pollute a lot. So the question then is whether you care about the environment or about the poor and most people would rather the latter.

I think the best way is to tax fuel itself. This way worse mpg result in more tax.

Tax diesel more than gasoline, LNG less.

This is already done, in Europe most of the fuel costs are taxes.

Thereby penalising existing vehicle owners who can’t switch to a more efficient vehicle overnight.

We have to come up with a rigorous alternative that doesn’t disproportionately affect lower income folk, because people tend not to be overly concerned about nebulous concepts like the climate impacts on unborn future generations, especially when my carbon impact at the margin is negligible when taken in context of global population.

If it is an issue - then option is to have less driving. Take a bus once in a while. Or bike.

Or switch to another old vehicle. Take old Golf instead of RAM, etc.

That makes sense, but there would be no incentive to switch to an engine that emits less carbon for the same fuel consumption (if such a thing exists)

You don't create carbon out of thin air, it's from the fuel, so burning the same quantity of fuel will result in the same quantity of carbon, no matter how the engine works. Therefore a tax on fuel is a tax on carbon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ethanol_fuel_mixtures#E...

Ethanol blends get worse MPG, and entail additional carbon emissions in creation. They do not reduce carbon emissions.

What is the point of the link?

Unless you play in the nuclear physics, Carbon in is Carbon out. Carbon in fuel is Carbon out of the engine.

Incomplete combustion is a big component of emissions, and it's exactly what you're saying doesn't exist

Yes but since incomplete combustion is inverse correlated with fuel efficiency (unburned fuel is wasted fuel), it's not really a trade off. What is a trade off is NO emissions vs fuel efficiency. Burning your fuel oxygen rich will burn of more fuel, but also makes more NO (due to higher temperatures if I remember correctly).

Those eventually degrade to CO2 so the increased warming from them compared to co2 by mass is temporary, like with methane.

By definition, more carbon is less efficiency. Efficiency is about how much of the hydrocarbon you turn into heat. Diesels often burn a little dirty. That's partly because diesel engines don't burn all the fuel

We already do in the US (but the money mostly goes to road maintenance)

Apparently not enough, as USA has quite cheap fuel. Add 100% carbon tax and people will start to pay attention to MPG ratings. With x2 price increase gasoline in USA is still cheaper than in Germany.

Isn't that what a carbon tax is? Adding a tax to the fossil fuel based on carbon content.

The purpose of the CAFE regulations is very explicitly to favor American automakers who make big trucks.

It wasn't the intended purpose. It turned out that way because the Detroit lobbyists were smarter and more motivated than the government policy people, and they bamboozled them.

The congress critters knew what they were doing and didn't do it for free.

That was one of several purposes.

This has been a known problem and could be changed if the political will to make common sense policy changes and corrections when needed was anywhere near existing. Unfortunately, we live in a [political] dystopia

> a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have

Doesn't this just punt the morass into the magic variable of one's carbon footprint?

How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)

> How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)

It's a good concept that is also ripe for abuse with anyone who has some amount of "fuck your rules" money. Same reason why fines that don't scale with income/earnings in some form often do nothing to deter "the rich".

I certainly like carrots more than sticks, but we need a couple of sticks as well.

Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior, at which point just make it illegal. Most fines are proportional to damages.

Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.

why can't we just tax the gas at the pump? this is, at least, what I'm used to in Europe.

We do. But it’s a super regressive tax. Lots of very poor people depend on a bad MPG car to get to work and live.

If you subsidize polluting life-styles, you'll get pollution.

You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear that subsidizing pollution from the poor will lead to worse outcomes for the planet.

that's a different problem. US cities used to have good publhc transport, but the urvanization policies since 50s is car-centric. plus, because of the American cars having huge engines they have bad MPG. The current situation US is in is nothing to do with the tax regime.

I don’t think it would be possible to produce a carbon tax that’s simple

Tax the fuel. Gasoline now has a $X/gallon tax, as does propane, as does coal, whatever.

What is the difficulty with that?

Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps? Gray hydrogen? Wood pellets? Ammonia?

Electricity from unclear source?

Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.

It’s extremely regressive. You’d need to also give a rebate based on income level.

Give everybody $1000 (or whatever) to offset that. Ends up being neutral for some folks, a net benefit to the poor, and a net cost to the rich. This is already how lots of jurisdictions handle regressive taxes.

Tax the poor for carbon emission. They'll adjust. People will walk, bike, take the bus, car pool, and buy used hybrids instead of mustangs.

PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.

That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.

The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.

If interested in a case study, have a look at Canada's experiment with it.

Fuel is already taxed. What would a "carbon tax" add here?

And what you’re describing is exactly the reason Kei trucks aren’t a thing despite most farmers actually liking them for their utility.

You can’t import them unless they are old because we want to protect the automotive industry. But we can’t build them new either because they don’t meet the safety standards (FMVSS) and are penalized more for being fuel efficient because the standards are stricter for smaller vehicles.

To be fair, kei trucks are horrible in crashes too. That’s a big part of states starting to ban them.

They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.

Motorbikes are much worse in crashes than kei trucks, we are more than happy to make, sell and operate them. I don’t actually buy the “unsafe” reasoning. It’s also perfectly street legal to buy and drive cars and trucks from the 60s with abysmal safety ratings.

Fine print: The truck in the link is only $20K after government subsidies/rebates. So if the government gives my tax dollars to buyers of this truck, then it will cost $20K.

Even finer print: the $7,500 federal incentive is a tax rebate. If you don't have a $7,500 tax liability, you won't get the full amount. (this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale). I mean, money is fungible and all, but your particular tax dollars aren't going to people who buy EVs, they are just paying less in taxes.

>this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale

No, it does not. See Q4 at the following link:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/topic-h-frequently-asked-questi...

My understanding is that the dealer has to have the tax liability. IANATL, YMMV.

>money is fungible

And then you contradicted yourself 2 phrases over.

Electric vehicle tax credits are non-refundable tax credits meaning you can't get a credit for more than you owe. [1][2]

Which means no one is getting your tax dollars to buy vehicles (though there may be some infrastructure or manufacturing grants for companies).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12600

[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-credits-for-individuals-wha...

That's not really true.

If the taxes someone would otherwise pay are going to their electric vehicle instead, somebody else has to make up the difference.

So yes, other people are getting my tax dollars to buy electric vehicles. It just takes two steps rather than one, if you want to look at it that way.

Is the standard deduction giving people your tax dollars? Anyone who itemizes?

What if someone declines a promotion and thus doesn't increase their income and pay more taxes? Is that also taking your tax dollars?

Sure, yes, if the government doesn't follow PAYGO[1] (which they almost never do) and offset tax expenditures (tax incentives) with reduced direct spending and government debt increases then maybe, some day, some portion of your tax dollars may get indirectly spent on this.

But how do we really know? Do we know what other secondary effects will come from these tax incentives?

If electric cars catch on maybe the government will get more revenue somewhere else (there are North American manufacturing requirements to qualify after all) or have to spend less revenue on something else (surely burning oil must have some effect).

Or maybe the person getting the electric vehicle then uses it to make more money and pay more taxes than they would have before (unlikely but possible).

But, directly, they're getting back their own money. The real issue with the credit is that it disproportionately favors people who already make a lot of money (but taxes also disproportionately tax people who make more money so maybe that's fair).

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL31943

Congress doesn't retroactively raise tax rates to make up the difference. If the government budget ends up in a deficit, which obviously it does, not just because of this but for many reasons, that is financed via debt. This isn't passed to the population as higher taxes, but as inflation, which affects everyone equally, including whoever got the tax credits in the first place.

First of all, you're wrong about how debt is financed. It's not via inflation, it's by taxes. Interest payments accounted for 13% of the federal budget last year. That's enormous. (Yes inflation reduces the value of debt over time, but debt carries interest which generally outweighs expected inflation.)

Second, Congress absolutely adjusts tax rates as well. Not precisely one-to-one to match spending each year, but over the long term it's all got to add up. Every dollar the government spends today is paid with people's taxes either today or their taxes tomorrow.

Third, the person who received the tax credits isn't being affected "equally". If 1% of people get the credit, but 100% of people pay for it, then the people who receive the credit end up hugely ahead in the end, while the other 99% lose out. So yes, for the 1% of people getting an electric vehicle tax credit, it is almost entirely paid for by the other 99% of people.

Goverment debt is reduced by increased taxes and/or reduction in services just as much as it is by "inflation". Further, inflation doesn't affect the person who got a $7,500 individual tax reduction as much as someone who didn't.

However instead of taking the credit yourself you can transfer it to the dealer at time of purchase to use toward the purchase. You can transfer the full $7500 credit regardless of how much tax you eventually end up owing for the year.

So, should I wish to purchase a vehicle this tax year, I tell my HR to adjust my income withholding such that I owe 7,500$ come tax time and then reap the rewards?

Or is there more to the incentive structure?

Withholding isn't relevant here. Non refundable means it can't cause the government to net pay you money: that is to say, it can't make your refund larger than your withholding.

Adjust my withholding to generate a debt to Th enticement that I claim the rebate on? I think you’re thinking the other direction.

What you have withheld is not part of the equation. It is your tax liability that matters.

I’m confused here, wouldn’t me underpaying on my income generate a liability that I can then claim this rebate on?

Let's make up an example. Let's say you earn $75,000/year and the tax rate is 10%. So you owe $7,500 in taxes. That is your tax liability. It doesn't matter if you have your employer deducting $144 from your weekly paycheck or $0 from your weekly paycheck.

https://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/student/hows.jsp

You can still get a refund with this tax credit, but it has to be a refund of taxes you paid through things like your payroll tax.

Non-refundable means that if the rebate drives your owed taxes below zero you don't get the negative tax debt back.

If you don't earn much money most of your paid taxes go to SS and medicare rather than income tax, so the rebate may not do anything for you. But if you make at least median income you should be able to fully use this rebate.

If you're retired and buy one of these trucks you'd be wise to realize $100k in investment gains in that year in order to fully exploit the tax credit.

The government still gives you back your money in a refund if you overpay them.

Though, of course, you don't earn interest on it while the government is holding it.

>Which means no one is getting your tax dollars to buy vehicles

Then who is making up the difference between the tax that would have been paid, and the credit reduction?

As opposed to other prices that are not the product of a political economy?

It's ~28k without them, particularly when considering recent inflation it's an attractive price... inflation corrected it's in the vague ballpark of other small IC trucks when they were still available.

E.g. a early 2000's Nissan frontier base model was $23k in today's money. It was a somewhat better speced (e.g. more hauling capacity) and much better range, but this new car likely has significantly lower operating costs that would easily justify a 5k uplift.

So I think it ought to be perfectly viable without the subsidy, especially so long as the absurd CAFE standards continue to exist giving EV's a monopoly on this truck size.

Yes, and you will benefit, because the role of the state is to advance the collective and common good.

That's why we have TeH gOvErNmEnT.

[dead]

My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.

Later they made a one off version for Goodwood that has a V8 stuffed under the hood.

> My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.

Maybe that's a good thing. It compelled Aston Martin to provide their customers with a fuel-efficient option.

Nobody looking for a fuel efficient car would look at Aston, and nobody looking at Aston would go for a fuel efficient car.

Which was borne by its sales: sold for nearly 3 times the price you'd have paid Toyota for an iQ, it sold all of 600 units in two years before being cancelled, Aston's second shortest production run. The shortest was the Virage which sold more than 1000 units in a year.

Rebadging doesn't add any meaningful consumer choice.

Repealing these Obama era rules would go a long way to restoring automotive affordability. Can't undo cash for clunkers though

This is largely why all the vehicles around us have become supersized. It's completely idiotic.

It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist. The vast majority of new vehicles are crossovers or _light trucks_, which aren't held to the same emission/efficiency standards.

> It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist.

Consumer demand is still an important factor.

Sedans and compact cars are still out there, sitting on dealer lots with reasonable prices.

Yeah but the only way to protect myself if hit by a freight train is to also drive a freight train.

Consumer demand is driven by marketing.

Anybody know how it got to this point? It can't be because of regulatory capture, right? I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.

> I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.

The famous 67MPG requirement was for a hypothetical 2026 model year car

But Honda discontinued the Fit in the United States in 2020, long before the hypothetical 2026 target.

The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them. There are thousands of lightly used Honda Fits on the used market for reasonable prices, but they're not moving.

Yes, the regulations are flawed, but that doesn't change the lack of consumer demand.

> The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them.

I think this over-simplifies things. Strict milage standards force a set of compromises on ICE car design that make them both shittier and more expensive[1]. Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?

[1] Some examples: turbochargers, CVTs, start/stop systems. All of these increase both the cost and complexity of building as well as repairing the car. And with higher complexity comes higher chances for something to fail as well so reliability suffers.

> Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?

Isn't this just a circular way of admitting that people actually wanted SUVs?

This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.

> [1] Some examples: turbochargers,

Have to disagree. These are a great way to downsize the engine and maintain the same torque output. Yes it's more parts, but modern OEM turbochargers are very reliable. If you can reduce the number of cylinders from 6 to 4 or 3, that's a net win in moving parts, consumables, and repair costs.

> This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.

Is it really? Just to check I looked at carmax and found this kind of price:

2016 Honda Fit LX $16,998* 26K mi

You can get cheaper ones in the $11k range with like 110k+ miles on them, is this really a meaningul price difference?

But they only wanted SUVs because government nerfed sedans.

> both shittier and more expensive

> Some examples: turbochargers

I disagree that turbochargers are shittier. For most people, hell even for a large subset of people that only want to race their cars on a track, turbochargers provide huge benefits. Yes, they add complexity and cost; they also vastly improve fuel efficiency, create the best torque curve possible on an ICE vehicle, and substantially improve power output. Sometimes you actually need more complexity to build a better system. I think turbochargers are a marvel of modern engineering.

And while it's subjective and admittedly more enthusiasts prefer naturally aspirated to turbocharged, I personally prefer the character of a turbocharged engine. I'd rather hear turbo whistles than a whining V10.

If what you want is a reliable commuter, because knowing you can get yourself to work is more important than even fuel efficiency, then turbochargers are a clear net negative. I think most people view their car as a tool first and foremost, and don't have the luxury to view it as a toy.

> V10

Lmao what

Turbocharged cars have been reliable for a while now. There was a time when people said the same thing about fuel injection - because it is objectively more complicated than carbureted engines. But as time went on and they became more reliable and cheaper the only people that care about carburetors now are enthusiasts because they have so many drawbacks. It's the same thing with turbo engines today, except they're already reliable and better to drive (assuming you ever want to merge onto a highway). If you consider the higher RPM typical for NA vehicles they're arguably less reliable over time. If you include rising fuel costs turbocharged is arguably cheaper over the lifespan of the vehicle.

Buy whatever you want. But most people's perceptions of 'reliable' for cars is based entirely on rumors and hearsay and has nothing to do with data. Most awards for reliability are marketing gimmicks and aren't based on useful data.

I am happy with my 1.6L EcoBoost Ford Mondeo. It gets good fuel efficiency and has plenty of power to climb hills.

The Honda Fit had none of these. It was just a tiny car with a tiny engine.

It's just that Americans do not buy tiny cars or tiny engines.

I have a small(*) twenty year old i4 pickup and I regularly get cash offers for it while out and about. There is a lot of demand for the small inexpensive and relatively fuel efficient utility vehicles that the government currently prohibits manufacturing.

(*Ironically, though small it has a considerably longer bed than many currently produced larger and less fuel efficient trucks... I'm mystified by trucks that can't even contain a bike without removing a wheel or hanging one over a gate. Looks like the bed on this EV is a bit short too, but a short bed on a small truck is more excusable than a short bed on a huge truck)

> since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

... and this is why American cars got so huge, if anyone was curious.

This is extremely refreshing. I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even. Cars and trucks are so over-engineered and come with tons of low value options intended to drive up the price.

For a case in point, consider that headlights that turn on and off automatically in response to darkness (or rain) are not a standard feature on many cars, yet they include a manual switch that costs more than a photosensor only because of the trim-level upgrades.

Cars could include a slot for a tablet but instead come with overpriced car stereos and infotainment systems that are always light years worse than the most amateurish apps on any mobile app store.

As should be very clear by now after the 2008 US auto industry bailouts and the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, the US auto industry is heavily protected and faces virtually no competition, which is why a common sense vehicle like the one in the article sounds revolutionary, though I imagine BYD could deliver something a lot more impressive for $10K if allowed to compete in the US without tariffs.

BYD is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.

If the us were not to fight back, the non subsidized industries would die, Chinese would stop subsidizing, rack up the price and competition would be too difficult to start again because of the monopoly on lithium and advance on technology.

It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries.

Most recently Google, who had been giving Android for free when windows phone were licensed and Samsung tyzen cost money to develop, then forced manufacturer to accept outrageous terms to ship Google play service in their phone when all competition was already dead, is now under scrutiny for antitrust.

China’s approach to funding BYD is meant to replace much of the capital it might raise in freer markets, providing subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential policies to offset limited access to liquid equity and debt markets.

This support, totaling $10-12 billion from 2018-2022 plus in-kind benefits, mirrors the role of U.S. automakers’ $160-220 billion in public market raises and $50-100 billion in private capital, but with less financial risk for BYD due to state backing.

I think what people are missing is that EVs can be dramatically simpler to manufacture than internal combustion vehicles. This leverages manufacturing advantages and so with or without subsidies, China has big advantages due to its advancements in manufacturing tech.

Recall when China started making hoverboards for a fraction of the price of a Segway? Making EVs at scale required largely the same manufacturing pipeline.

It is the foresight of China’s industrial policy, not the amount of subsidy that has created the manufacturing powerhouse China has become.

US attempts are crude (sledgehammer) methods that leave the market far less free with mostly downside for everyone and no industrial policy goals, only domestic incumbents being protected from reality.

To be honest most of those accessories are actually incredibly cheap at manufacturing time and several have a direct impact on safety (e.g. ensuring people don't drive around with lights off). The cost usually comes as companies use them for pricing tiers where they market them as suggested extras to ratchet up profits.

Driving with your lights off at dusk or dark gets you (rightfully) pulled over by law enforcement in CA. It's well-correllated with driving under the influence.

I'm a huge fan of many car safety regulations, but this isn't one.

(Sign me up for car-hiding-in-blind-spot notification lights on side mirrors, though, those are great)

I don't understand what you're saying here - you think it's good to have your lights turned on - but you don't want them to automatically turn on?

Because of my ADHD I would constantly get pulled over if automatic lights were removed

You and I both!

I think they mean that it gives a clear signal to LEOs that the person driving is likely distracted/unfit.

Everyone makes mistakes. It's important to make it easy to do the right thing.

That doesn't make any sense. Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection, and automatic light sensors save lives.

It could make sense. We don't know the numbers.

Let's say net X lives are saved each year because of automatic lights turning on.

Let's say net Y lives would be saved each year without automatic lights, via more effective detection of drunk drivers and stopping them before they kill someone.

Is X > Y? We don't know.

> Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection

There are a lot of avenues to decrease DUI, among which one is effective detection combined with enforcement.

The EU has done lots of reach on road and car safety, there's lots of data out there - just perhaps not in the US as many American made cars have significantly lagged behind in terms of safety features.

I don't know if it's an EU rule, but in my (European) country cars are required to have their lights on at all times, even during the day. The lights switch on automatically when you start the car

I'm baffled that daytime running lights are not mandatory on all models of all cars in 2025. My 13 year old Grand Caravan has them, though I suspect it's because it comes from the Daimler Chrysler era.

After I visited Iceland where it's mandatory, I liked the improved visibility so much I turn my lights on for every single trip. It was not a takeaway I was expecting to have from the trip.

It's a good idea in some places. An overcast winter's day in the North isn't that well lit by default.

The EU also is far more strict on DUIs.

There may be something like that that does make it counterintuitive. Usually those kind of Malcom Gladwell paradoxes end up overstated.

There would be other factors, like drunk people are probably safer with their lights on too. Lane keeping probably makes it harder to detect drunk drivers too but also may make them safer.

This is simply because police don’t do their jobs. It would be trivial to simply wait outside bars at 2AM and give out tons of DUIs but a significant percentage of the population are alcoholics and this would result in massive blowback against the police.

Go to any small town watering hole at 2AM to see this in effect. The police have no legal obligation to prevent crime or enforce laws. None.

I'll do you one better, car headlights should never be off while the motor is running. Just like motorcycles since the 70s (maybe 80s?).

No switch at all, ignition on, headlights on, period.

Niche counter example:

Parents who sit in their idling cars for (fucking) ages while their cars are facing the tennis courts thus blinding the player on the other side of the court for however long it takes them to either turn their car off, drive off, or someone to tell them turn their fucking headlights off.

How long have you been holding that one?

It's only been a recent thing, noticeably more frequent the last couple of years.

Before that I've not had to intervene at all, as far as I can remember.

There aren't that many courts where cars park facing them, but my home courts are one of them ;)

Simple solution: when the wheels start rolling, the lights come on.

I'd still prefer to override both on/off though.

Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.

When the oncoming cars do not have headlights on I find it easier to give them just enough attention to see that they are behaving normally leaving more attention to devote to things other than oncoming cars.

I like this. Turns out a few countries require DRL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp

But what about for electric cars? Maybe whenever the car is in anything other than P, and for 5 minutes after P?

>I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even.

The closest this comes to is a Dacia spring. Which is not a great car. The dacia could not be made at US labor costs. 15k is an absurd price, Chinese companies can do it because they pay Chinese labor costs and have serious economies of scale. Unless you sell hundreds of thousands of these a year AND pay US workers like Chinese ones, 15k will not happen.

Dacia Spring launched in Romania at 6000$. Now it's 15-18000$ just because they can.

4 door Jimny are ~$15K in Dubai.

BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).

Japanese, Korean, and European brands already make a lot of vehicles to get around tariffs, although it makes sense for some sedans to be made abroad given American lack of interest in them (so economy of scales doesn’t work out), and sedans typically not being tariffed as harshly as trucks.

  BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).

Chinese investment in the US is inherently risky. For example TikTok. BYD would be stomping GM and Ford. The next thing you know, they would need to sell their factory.

> BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA

Or concentrate on the 80% of the worldmarket that is not the USA

They're very popular in Australia.

Companies spending money to navigate tariff regimes adds tremendous cost and inefficiency that makes everyone worse off.

Wouldn’t they still need to pay tariffs on all the parts they manufacture in china? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the tariffs but it sounds like Chinese companies would have to build completely separate supply chains to keep the US market

Before no, or at least not very high tariffs. Now I have no idea, Trump’s story changes daily. However lots of US made autos are using Chinese parts so they are all affected to some degree.

>heavily protected and faces virtually no competition

Huh? Out of the top 25 vehicles sold in the US in 2024, 16 of them are non-US automakers. Just because the US is actively blocking China from dumping heavily subsidized vehicles into the north american market, doesn't mean they "face no competition". Kia and Hyundai alone show that it's VERY possible to break into the US market if you have even a little bit of interest playing fair.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g60385784/bestselling-cars...

The only real way to break into the US market is to have factories in the US. Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

>Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.

And yet, that applies to everyone, including US automakers, which is why Ford had to do unnatural things to import the transit from Europe.

They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.

Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.

> they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of. > > Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.

Why should manufacturing jobs be well-paying? Human productivity has not kept up with business improvements at all. A contemporary robot can assemble car modules much faster than a robot from, say, the 60s. A human now works at the same speed as a human from the 60s.

I don't think this is true. Yes robot capabilities have increased but those business processes also make people more productive. I recently toured the F-150 assembly line and it is clear a lot has been done to improve worker productivity.

"Manufacturing jobs" doesn't mean doing the same job as in the 60s. Human productivity improves by offloading more to machines/tools/processes while having the humans manage other things. A human making cars now is not moving their limbs twice as fast as humans in the 60s, they're using tools that get the job done 3x faster than the person in the 60s. The jobs are actually quite different across time, but we colloquially call both "manufacturing jobs".

> They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.

"The US can't make anything" is an absurd delusion. We are the second most productive economy in the world.

> Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.

We are fully capable of meeting our defense needs already. If you really care about reinforcing our military-industrial capability the best way to do it is to arm Ukraine.

I LOVE it! THIS is the kind of truck I'd be looking at to replace my 1998 Ford Ranger.

Here is what could be potential deal-breakers:

- Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

- Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

- Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

- Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

If anyone from Slate is reading this, this is how I'm looking at this truck. FYI, I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!

EDIT: Ughhh, according to the video that another user posted, it looks like there's an app, and yes, "updates" go through it :(

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

Yes to a simple battery system!

> - Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

Yes!

> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families. You really want a bench seat to at least stick a small child between the driver and passenger. Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.

The article mentions an SUV upgrade kit that will bolt onto the back of the truck. Ugh, OK I guess. Sad that that's the way it will probably have to go.

1: https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw

> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families.

What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

> Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.

Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have, and survivorship bias makes us default to thinking it was ok. As kids, we used to go barrelling down dirt roads in the back of pickups or played in the backs of station wagons. There's a reason automobile deaths have gone down.

> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

<Get off my lawn>

My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.

</Get off my lawn>

And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?

A physical holder for a personal pad device.

The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.

The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.

And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!

Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.

> The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.

Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago

Lol, yes we just throw a phone and a Tablet with headphones to the kids.

[flagged]

I'm sure your screenless children are perfect :)

Aye. It's a staple of both failed and successful parents. In fact, using a screen in a car is wholly unrelated to, well, anything.

Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.

No OTA updates would be a killer.

What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?

Patches and OTA updates just scream "We know ahead of time our product is defective." Arguably OK for software (but I'd argue not), but not even remotely OK for cars.

>"We know ahead of time our product is defective."

All products are defective. Full stop.

Cars are necessarily complex and have a lot of software to get the safety, comfortable, and reliability we expect today.

Most vehicles get some sort of recall; usually minor. I just checked the NHTSA recall website and every car I could think of owned by people I know (~30 vehicles) had some had some recall.

Cars should have an easy way to update. I’m generally against always connected cars (which are the norm today), but there must be some way to patch them.

I don’t like the idea of cars having cellular modems in them (my mind goes to nefarious implications), but having a way to securely update it without having to bring to a mechanic would be nice.

OTA updates are considered bad? What?

OTA updates on my truck have vastly improved suspension response and cruise-control/ lane-assist features. My wife's car has had OTA updates that improve her cars charging curve, and have implemented recalls for stuff like brake light response when regen braking.

Sure one could say these things should have worked perfectly from the factory, but that's not realistic: not with my cars, not with your cars, and not with this new brand either.

The only alternative I see here is the old fashioned way of having to bring it to a dealership. I would rather have an entire foot of ingrown toenails over dealing with dealership service centers of any brand.

What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?

Yes, and no.

I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.

My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.

I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.

You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.

Ok but this car doesn’t have an infotainment system and it doesn’t detect road signs.

> It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.

Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).

The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.

If you consider a fur baby a family! :)

I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.

If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.

> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...

The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.

Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.

Some interesting people find your examples interesting: perhaps native to their personality.

However I strongly believe we can cultivate fascination with the droll.

A gray worldview might possibly say more about you.

Is a gray grain of sand interesting? Blaming a local world for being boring seems overly negative.

Boredom is not fatal. Bring it on.

The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.

And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.

They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/

Did they?

I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.

Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.

I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.

Citation needed.

Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.

Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.

I think you're projecting.

>Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?

That was before smartphone and tablets were common

[dead]

I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.

Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.

My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.

Could you talk us through the over-the-air update concern?

Or read books!

Read books, and/or knock yourself out with dramamine.

Kids will return to imagining Sonic running along the car

you mean "finger-man running on the side of the road and jumping over buildings"?

we would've called it parkour if we had known what parkour was back then

I never heard it quite put that way, but yes, I did something very similar.

{insert Sonic ring sound in your head}

The alphabet game still works if you teach them to read.

Is written in the article that it can fit more seats. And if you click through the pics you will see it.

Station wagons from the prehistoric era were family cars and had bench seats, and only had a Radio…

You had a radio?

> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families

I believe I saw there are plans for some sort of SUV conversion.

> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

IF it could just get a bluetooth signal from an iDevice or some Android thing, that would probably suffice for a basic option. If the owner needs more than than, let them install (or have installed) some sort of third-party infotainment head of some sort.

Back in the old days, cars sometimes had a single speaker and that was plenty sufficient for listening to music.

I'd want the mobile app to be an auxiliary, not a requirement for operating the truck. Keep the dashboard simple.

I'd be worried that once an app got a foothold into the product, the company would be unable to resist the urge to spread the app's tentacles across the entire vehicle, adding connectivity and telemetry and DRM, integrating it into the other car's systems, adding remote-this and wireless-that, and then inevitably the product would end up just like the turd cars we have today.

I have a iron filter that works via app. All configs can be done with button presses on the valve but in a much more tedious process/workflow.

It connects via bluetooth and not WiFi. If the company goes belly up, I'd just need the APK and an android phone to continue using the app to configure the valve and see/download water usage data.

Fast forward 20 years when I can't install the APK on android v79, I'd need an older phone to run the APK.. but that seems to be pulling hairs.

Apps would be great, it's how you handle the backend to it that's the gotcha.

I also have a water softener with an app that no longer works that had it's backend shut down. It can still be configured via the valve head button presses, but none of the "smart" usage data is available. As an example of good design, this is a perfect dichotomy of one company doing it well and one company doing it un-well[sic].

Not only the backend, but what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore, or we're all on phones that are totally unlike the phones of today, or if we don't even have phones or apps? I would expect the car to still work after that long, and making it dependent on a technology that is specific to a particular decade risks premature obsolescence.

I'll be ecstatic if my iron filter lasts 40 years.

I saw in another post that a person said there's a difference between "device dependent" and "device augmented" that really resonated with me.

There's diminishing returns on everything, and just throwing your hands up on any subject as bad/good might be a disservice.

If I live through an era where phones are no longer a thing and APKs are a thing of the past.. then I either...

A. Don't use the iron filter like that anymore. (manual programing now) B. Get a new iron filter. (ewwwww) C. Keep a legacy-device for the purposes of programming the iron filter. (doesn't need any internet connection or subscriptions)

(C) would be my most liked solution.

> ...what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore...

40 years? How about, like, 3 to 5 years? Remember when Apple decided to kill all 32-bit iOS apps for new hardware? I have an old iPod and iPhone 4S with "landlocked" software I enjoy using but can't anymore because Apple.

Phone manufacturers have shown they don't give a damn about allowing old software to function. Physical devices tied to software is a terrible idea.

Fully agree. We may have to keep a 40 year old phone around in order to just use a 40 year old car's companion app.

Relying on a mobile app is relying mobile operating system compatibility over the years and is just asking for combinatorial methods of obsolescence via OS/app/library breaking changes, plus if your old phone breaks, etc. Open sourced mobile app with open sourced back end might be somewhat acceptable but otherwise it's just asking to be bricked as soon as one of the companies involved goes under as we have seen time and again just in past couple of years.

Not an app, but an API. And an app on top of that, if desired.

Also there are evergreen interfaces, so to say. An RS232 / RS485 connector that serves 115kbps 8N1 serial interface and runs a VT220-based TUI should still be serviceable 40 years from now (VT220 was released 42 years ago). A now-modern web-based GUI also has a great chance to be serviceable 40 years from now.

100% agree. I would be fine if they had an estimated time-to-fully-charged displayed on the screen. I don’t need to know the status of my vehicle, personally. I would imagine a third party system could be implemented to achieve most of what one would need.

Nice idea in theory. In practice, apps imply ongoing OTA connectivity, which means the truck will be updated to show ads or at the very least collect and sell all my driving information to any dirtbag that can rub two nickels together. Connected devices can alter the deal so they will, after all I've lost any leverage against them after I purchased the vehicle.

If the vehicle had an open interface (maybe via CAN bus over the OBD2 port?), then DIY and aftermarket apps become possibilities.

I think legally they would need to require using an app for their back view camera. All new cars in the United States after 2018 need one and I don't see how it would work without using the phone/tablet as a display.

The article says the rear camera feed will be displayed on a screen behind the steering wheel which doubles as the speedometer and charge display.

That seems like a clever and reasonable compromise to comply with a particularly bad regulation.

I don’t have a problem with the regulation. Slate is trying to build a safe, affordable, electric vehicle. Having one display for all information seems like a good way to save cost.

You need an app. You could make steering to the left only available in a 50 USD per month subscription but steering right is free or something like it.

> Yes to a simple battery system!

Battery balancing and conditioning does not need to be fancy, and does not need a fancy screen; a couple of LEDs should suffice.

But I'd like my batteries charged competently, recharged efficiently while braking, worn uniformly, and kept at reasonable temperature. It's not hard to do completely automatically and invisibly; a quality electric bike would have it.

I absolutely agree with you on the NO APP thing. I too just want air conditioning knobs and that's it. A truck from 1980 that is an EV that can haul lumber to build a house.

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.

Why should it lack that? That's a tiny piece of software in the charge controller, which on this vehicle ought to be some tiny microcontroller.

In car it requires liquid cooling and from conversations I've had with former Tesla engineers, exquisite control over power quality.

Just ask a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt owner.

EV battery engineer here. It's not hard. Battery management systems are often over engineered but the state of the art is fairly straightforward and will allow battery packs of sufficient size last 200k miles or more easily.

> exquisite control over power quality

So a... 16 bit microcontroller?

> Noooooooooo! No apps, please!

I wish devices could have web servers and web-based UI rather than thick "apps" that end up rotting when device manufacturers arbitrarily decide that old software won't work anymore (cough, cough-- Apple-- cough, cough).

I know we can't because "security", no end-to-end over the Internet anymore, etc. >sigh<

It seems like we've engineered the networking and software ecosystem to promote disposable "smart" devices. It's almost like somebody profits from it. Hmm...

Why, we of course could if we cared. Let the car offer a wifi access point. WPA3 is secure enough, but you can of course have an extra layer of TLS inside it.

For the extra paranoid, a car could have a USB socket that pretends to be a wired network interface, offering DHCP.

Run a web server for car diagnostics and maintenance when connected to this interface. Do it from the comfort of your laptop, or anywhere anytime using your phone. Zero chance of remote exploits, if you set the things correctly on the car side. An ESP32-based system with $5 BOM would suffice to provide this.

Not with off the shelf protocols. Yes WPA3 is plenty secure, but any AP advertising the same SSID with the same key would allow the device to connect. So how do you know that you're connected to your car, and not to the black hat AP next to it?

From there, you can have as much TLS as you want, but that still won't give you server identity unless the server certificate is signed by someone you already trust. So a generic web browser would be screwed, because you either add SlateTruckCertificateAuthority to the globally trusted list, and then you still have to deal with revocations and certificate expiry, or you use some other CA that is willing to delegate. There's no good support for self-signed certificates or pinned certificates, and even if there were, the initial connection would be tough.

Unfortunately this really isn't a well-solved problem. Bluetooth can get you part of the way there, but it only offers really good security in theory (in practice it is constantly having issues) and it is intrinsically limited.

First of all, the SSID and password should be unique. Then, you can have a QR code printed in the owner's manual, and inside the glove compartment, or something. There's a standard for QR codes for connecting to wifi, so you don't have to type in the long and cryptic password.

But I don't see much incentive to produce a fake wifi AP for me to connect to with my car diagnostics. I'm not going to punch my bank account and password into it anyway. If I'm misled to alter the battery charging settings for someone else's car, or for a pretend mockup of the car controller, I don't see what the perpetrator could gain from it.

Then there must be a button on the car dashboard, or near, which I should press to activate the AC (it does not need to be up all the time), and press again to switch it off. This can serve as an easy way to check if there's doubt. The interface may have a function like headlights on / off as a simple way to check that the connection works.

> Yes to a simple battery system!

But you realize this will make cold-weather range suck and on-the-road charging suck, right?

Preheating the battery and cabin on "shore power" is something EV buyers just expect at this point because that can consume 2-3kWh of energy (equivalent to 6-10 miles or 10-16 km). That's almost 10% of Slate's range (see below).

Preheating the battery about 10-15 minutes before you arrive at a supercharger is another expected feature. It can increase charge acceptance rate by over 50% (reduce charge time by 1/3).

The 150 mile range is extremely optimistic given the size of the battery and shape of the truck. With just 5% top and bottom buffers, you'd need to achieve over 3.1 miles/kWh... which is the consumption expected of a small aerodynamic sedan. I would bet real money that highway range (at 75 mph) for the small battery is less than 120 miles from 100% to 0.

Highway speeds are worst case scenario so maybe you're right but I doubt it.

Your charge rate acceptance number is surprising to me, I've never seen anything like this in my years of experience designing EV batteries. Preconditioning helps extreme fast charging but isn't necessary for 1-2 C charges at all unless it's very cold out.

There's some caveats to this depending on the exact chemistry but if anything the newer semi solid state NMC cells are even less dependent on this and can charge down to -20C.

>Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!

What car is tied to your phone? A mustang mach-e, for instance, does not require your phone at all. It has a FOB for opening the doors and starting it, you can program the charging times from the in-car screen.

The app is optional, exactly as it should be. This car DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not. With no in-car screen you'll have absolutely no way to control charging which WILL come back to bite you.

>Yes to a simple battery system!

"simple" in this case will add cost. Nearly every EV has the battery as a part of the structural frame of the vehicle for a reason (there are some niche exceptions in China). Nothing is impossible, but I don't see them making the battery easily swappable, while also being structurally sound, and keeping the low price point.

> DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not

I don't own an EV. What for? Do you really need more than a button or two and some leds?

In addition to the sibling comment, you want to be able to check if the vehicle is charging and everything is fine remotely. EVs randomly stopping charging for various reasons is not rare at all. You want to get a notification.

You want to know when the vehicle finishes charging so you can vacate the public charger.

You want to be able to reduce the current when the charging is tripping breakers wherever you are.

Controlling your charging. You shouldn’t be charging more than 80% for daily driving unless you want to destroy your battery.

You will almost assuredly also want to be able to precondition if you live in a cold climate.

Again, why do you consider those things as better done via a smartphone and an app, versus using the already built-in screen (the one behind the wheel)?

> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

Take her car on those trips then. You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping? The product isn't trying to do everything. It's trying to be the minimum viable truck and be good at it. And just like the purpose built roadster you give up unrelated stuff, like family hauling.

> You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping?

Because 2-seat pickups used to function this way. It's okay to pine for functionality that has been lost, particularly when a new product like this comes along and gets your hopes up.

I think you're assuming a mobile app would mean that the car is dependent on your phone. Just because an app can be connected to your car doesn't mean the app controls your car.

Bench seats are almost certainly not coming back in modern low cost vehicles due to side impact safety regulations. They aren't _illegal_ but its extremely difficult to meet those standards with a bench configuration and ironically probably why a budget pickup is less likely to have them. Cutting those corners by not having a bench at all is an easy way to save money in the design.

The hauling and towing is another one. Unfortunately batteries are much heavier than a combustion engine and take away from the total capacity of the vehicle. It's curb weight is 500lbs more than the 1998 Ford Ranger. Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.

The problem with bench seating is not side impact but accidental steering wheel input during hard cornering. In the typical 10 and 2 hand position having your butt move makes your shoulders move, the shoulders make the hands move, and now you’re understeering. Understeering on a mountain road likely means death, and on other roads a ditch or hitting a phone pole.

Steering position has been taught as 9 and 3 for a long time now… but still fair point. You can add a bit of alcantara to the seat to help you stay in place though. My RDX has it for the sporty-ish trim and it helps.

It’s never 9 and 3 in a turn though is it. It’s more like 8 and 1. Or just 1.

It's actually more like 8 and 4 or even 7 and 5 to keep your hands and arms out of the way of the airbag

And then your problem is oversteering which puts you into oncoming traffic.

Skill issue. 100k miles on bench seats in full size sedans to full size pickups, including mountain roads, and nary a problem.

I had no idea bench seats had such an impact to side impact safety regulations. Thanks for that insight!

It also makes sense that the total capacity of the vehicle would diminish, but at the same time, and engine isn't weightless (though neither is an electric motor). If I had 1,500 pounds capacity, then I should be good to go.

The rear seats of almost all new cars are bench seats though. Is side impact safety requirements the same or apply the whole side of the car?

I believe airbag requirements prevent this because the middle seat would require a console mounted airbag where infotainment systems normally live

I suspect GP is misremembering why bench seating went away. Bench seats for the driver can lead to steering errors which can result in crashes.

There are other reasons too.

1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.

The only one alternative is a column manual shifter which is horrible to use.

You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.

There are dash mounted shifters but would probably hit the middle person's knees. Not sure since these are rare and usually European (fiat multipla) /Japanese

2. At a point a US safety requirement was all front passengers needed either an airbag or a automatic shoulder seatbelt, basically it ran along the door with a motor when the door closed.

Automatic shoulder belts were cheaper than airbags so manf usually picked that option but don't work with middle seats since they need a door/column for the rails.

3. Minor, but, additional side safety rules increased door thickness. Both sides pushed in more making it uncomfortable. Fine in rear but front, as you mentioned, is a danger to steering.

4. Smaller import cars due to gas crisis in 70s that US companies (eventually) copied that combined with reason (3) made the middle seat basically useless

> 1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.

Maybe in cars, but even when trucks still had a manual option, the S10/Sonoma as well as the full size GMT400 had a bench seat in the 90s/00s and a floor manual shifter, and it all worked pretty well. None of them shift like a Porsche, but especially in the full size trucks the center of the bench wasn't too bad if you weren't a large person, and they're generally pretty pleasant to drive.

You're right though that a truck could offer a floor shifter manual or a column auto because it's an easy conversion.

European cars did have the 4 on the floor but that's dated and these didn't have an automatic for the US (afaik).

I'm looking at the period when bench seats died though. A major change in car sizes and the dominance of imports.

> You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.

I’ve been in one of those. And I may or may not have been the child stuck sitting there. Mercifully only a couple times, because I was horrified. It felt like a child had the power to get us into an accident. 0/10 would not recommend.

I had an experience travelling across Kyrgyzstan recently in the middle front seat. The gearstick was just to the side of my leg, but changing gears invariably meant hitting my leg with it. It was a long 10 hours.

Hah, I was thinking of the fond memories I have of sitting in the middle seat and my dad letting me operate the shifter for him.

You're 100% right, they are used in semi trucks where it's not usually an issue.

It's also a horrible shifter experience even for regular commuter cars where performance isn't a priority. Considering how it's one of the three constantly used controls in a car it would likely hurt sales in a sedan.

> Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.

Leaf sprung solid axle is great for doing things on a budget.

But it's probably impossible to put one in a new vehicle because the hiring pool of the automotive industry is too indoctrinated against that sort of stuff at this point.

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

I get that cars have these, but my PHEV (which I don't often charge) lost its app when Ford pulled the plug as 3G was sunsetting and I don't think I'm missing anything. If there's anything wrong with the car, it can show the check engine light (or whatever it's called when there's no engine).

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.

Seems like a little early to declare this on a vaporware product? I don't think you need a screen or an app to have reasonable battery conditioning?

Anyway, I would love small trucks to return. I had a 2007 Ranger and I have a 2003 S-10, and there's nothing in the US new vehicle market that fits the small truck niche anymore. CAFE standards can't be met with a small footprint truck, so we only get large footprint trucks. But EV trucks don't have efficiency standards, so maybe we'll see the niche again. (I think you could maybe hit the CAFE standards with a single cab ranger and a hybrid drive train, but I also think automakers prefer to sell luxury trucks rather than base model trucks)

This is why it's so hard for companies to introduce stripped-down or small models of anything: People will tell you how much they want it, but as soon as they see it they realize they actually miss something from the models that are already out there.

It happens with small phones (iPhone mini) to laptops and cars. There are comments throughout this thread claiming that everyone would be buying small sedans if not for CAFE regulations, but we have plenty of small sedans on the market that aren't selling well.

It always comes down to market demand. The big companies have market demand figured out better than many give them credit for, even if it's not exactly the product you want.

I'm grateful they don't make truly stripped down models of cars anymore, because those were always what would end up in the rental car inventory. Every time I'd rent a car, it felt like I was taking a step back in time.

Now all rental cars actually have some reasonable set of features, without you having to pay for any up-sells.

You should try renting in New Zealand. It literally is a step back in time, lots of companies mostly rent very old (20 years plus) Japanese models. So cheap though.

So the rest of the economy should suffer to subsidize your rental.

Huh, lack of an app is a major plus in my book

[flagged]

> Lack of a mobile app…

At the 6 mins and 40 seconds timestamp on this video (https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw?t=400) he shows the car app that will tell you current range, etc

I'd recommend folks watch the video – it's fascinating.

The truck gets OTA updates through your phone and not some LTE modem. It doesn't have one. They moved all car management including OBD-like functionality to the phone, too, which I think is awesome.

This is how I want the interior design philosophy of manual controls to be digitized – with digital control. I'd pay $10k more for physical buttons, though.

Only if the phone app is open source, or at least the api, alllll of it, is public so no one needs the default app nor is limited by it.

Alternatively, maybe the overall simplicity will mean that a 3rd party full computer replacement would be feasible even without any official help from the manufacturer.

I’d be good with no updates. Ie make it simple enough that there shouldn’t need to be updates.

And if there’s something major maybe you download it onto a thumb drive and plug it in.

I’m tired of my vehicle being changed without my consent.

I mean yes, but also this is a complex new prototype vehicle. I can assume that there may be mistakes/ non ideal things that they only catch post production.

As long as the fixes are a long the lines as bios updates (not required per say, but may fix bugs or edge cases) then that seems reasonable.

Oh sweet. Delicious. Very reassuring. Was really hoping this thing was going to be device agnostic.

My 2015 car had 3g "smart" features that no longer work since 3g has been sunset in the US. Awesome to see forward thinking of a smart feature-set that can be updated with a module you'll likley already have an upgrade path for.

Ugh. Yuck. Very disappointing. Was really hoping this thing wasn't going to be phone dependent.

There's a difference between phone-dependent and phone-augmented. I don't know the details of the truck, but I think a happy medium would be for an app to exist to augment the truck's abilities and allow at-home updates, but to not require the app or phone to just use the truck (even for long periods; i.e. you could go forever without using the app and the truck will just keep working in its current state).

This sounds like the feature creep tesla always struggled with.

also, no mobile app? that is a feature.

The appeal of this vehicle is that it IS like your 1998 ranger, not: mobile app = data collection = monetized vehicle = mobile upgrades = basically all the things that are bad with technology.

Honestly, all these "monetized experience" companies forget that (like matt ridley's rational optimist says) with trust, trade is unlimited.

Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog.

Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.

Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.

> I occasionally need the hauling capacity [of a] 1998 Ford Ranger

Then rent a suitable vehicle for the occasion.

- Your example Ford Ranger[1] seems to have towing capacity of 6,000lbs (~2700kg), and a payload capacity of 1,260lbs (~570kg).

- Compare that to the worst model Toyota Hilux[2], which has a payload of up to 1240kg, and can tow 2500kg. These can be rented for like $65 AUD per day (~$40 USD).

[1] https://www.kbb.com/ford/ranger/1998/specs/ [2] https://www.redbook.com.au/cars/details/2019-toyota-hilux-wo...

> a cheap and easy to replace battery pack.

Battery expansion is a user installable option. It might not be as easy to replace the main battery, but the expansion battery will be, and will make it easier to install newer tech down the road, etc.

This truck has 150 miles of range at 100% charge with no weight. I like the idea of the truck, but you won’t be doing “glamping” with it and you probably won’t be using the battery for anything but driving

Please no apps. Please no smart phone garbage.

I'm kind of excited by their App idea. They don't have an infotainment, speakers, etc. You can just use your phone + their app + bluetooth speaker.

> Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

Would be nice if they had a protocol locally for a 3rd party to step in an offer their own offerings here.

They could offer an API kit or sdk so people could make open source apps for it.

Same. Only thing missing for me is is a gas engine and manual stick shifter.

Same. Though this looks like the first EV I might actually consider.

Same, though the company trying to reuse the International Scout name got my attention. Physical controls and an on board gas generator.

I grew up with an (already old, and by the time we got rid of it years later, hilariously rusted-out and with tires containing more fix-a-flat than air) Scout and their announcement ad for the electric one hit a bullseye with me.

I don't really do new cars (too expensive) but damn... if I had enough cash to not give a fuck, they'd have been well on their way to selling me one just with that ad. Really well done.

I also Love the direction of this truck. It would be nice if they installed speakers…two door and a small sub and just left a space in the dash for a standard radio of your choice. Or at the very least cut out the spaces and run wire so installing a proper stereo isn’t a nightmare. I don’t need “infotainment” but I do consider a radio with decent sound to enjoy the ride standard equipment.

I think you are way off on the target demographics. The idea is to have a car that is minimalist in nature, which does mean:

- no app - no bells - no whistles

Slate.. I will add one more thing. If you will make it spy on me like all the other new cars now, its a nogo either. I might as well just get an old car from 90s... which amusingly will still work for what I need it to do ( move some stuff around ).

There is an app - see about halfway down this page https://www.slate.auto/en/charging

Hopefully it comes with an OBD socket you can connect to as with all other cars.

That should provide basic diagnostics/stats. No need for "apps".

It's actually not required for EVs - Tesla has started to drop it from recent models. I bet these guys would omit it as well to save money.

Or use it because using an existing standard makes everything that needs to interface with it cheaper/easier.

Lack of a mobile app is the single BIGGEST reason I just reserved one. This is precisely the truck I've been wanting.

(Well, a PHEV would be even better, but I can deal with pure BEV.)

> I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.

This truck might just steal the thunder from an EV Maverick, and Ford can't release that soon enough.

From the FAQ:

Beginning in 2026, you’ll be able to find charging stations using the upcoming Slate App.

https://www.slate.auto/en/faq

it doesn't explicitly answer whether the app will satisfy your criteria, but there'll be something.

> Lack of a mobile app.

OVMS was originally developed for the Tesla Roadster and then adapted to the Leaf, ...

https://www.openvehicles.com

The subheading said Digital Detox. Means no App. For apps, get a Muskmobile .. the ones running with high beams on all the time.

The Maverick apparently has poor build quality but I'm hoping Toyota comes up with a pickup using the same small footprint + bare bones + hybrid drivetrain formula.

Toyota already has the Toyota Hilux Champ @ 12k USD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hNYwTVPUkQ

The Japanese companies have been making kei trucks for 70 years. They've never been sold directly in the US and never will.

They don't want our chicken

https://www.autoblog.com/news/why-the-chicken-tax-still-cont...

Holy crap! And it will have a manual option! Love.

There will be no way this will be sold in the states. You would have to live in some place like Thailand or Costa Rica.

I read that as comparing it to one of Ford's cheap cars from the 70's. Which would be a low bar to meet.

I just mean poor vs trucks from Honda or Toyota. I don't know if there's anything from a US brand that has comparable build quality and engineering these days.

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

God, please, no. Why on Gods green earth would I want that? Stop doing this to stuff. It is an abomination. I am sure many others echoed this point but holy crap. No. I am all for technology. But I do not want some tracker in my car. Apps are anathema to my freedom.

>Lack of a mobile app.

FFS, do you want your dishwasher tethered to the cloud too?

> I still want an app to manage charging

Consumers with preferences like yours are the #2 reason (after new regulations) that modern cars are terrible

> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

Wait, you actually want your car to upload all your data to someone else's cloud for them to sell?

Your passion is something that market researches for this company should salivate over, especiall from a curated forum like HN.

Unforuntatley, this company and this project are VC expenditure "throw away projects", made to fail.

No motor vehicle satisfying NHTSA can be made in america for below 20k cost of materiels, nevermind msrp. This article and the company are pitching that this is "realistic" due to cutting costs of paint, radios. Which...are pennies on the dollar compared to what satifys US road requiremnents for EV; safety, suspension, manufacturer support, parts availability, reparability. Are they skimping there too? will this 2025 electric vehicle have LEAF springs?

20k is the pre-production estimates. When in history has that not balloned especially for car platforms made in USA? What will a made in USA replacement lead acid accessory battery cost? 3k?

Once this goes over 40k (which, is guaranteed. A mazda miata which is as bare bones as it gets, old technology, is still 32k base, and thats made in a cheaper labor market.), the funding will back off, and all the R and D money wasted.

Please research these vehicles:

https://www.chevrolet.com/suvs/trax?evar25=Vanity_Trax_20170...

https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/crossovers-suvs/kicks.htm...

It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. Sounds like you can mount your own infotainment system. Just an electric motor, battery, and chassis, and the rest is up to you. Isn't this what we've been asking for?

Yea, it's pretty exciting. I'd like to see how much more they could strip out to reduce the price and still have a viable commercial product. I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car. Then again, I haven't bought a car new since the 90s, so I'm probably just an old fart who hasn't grokked what things cost today. I still remember the day when the base-model Corolla started costing more than $9999 and I thought the world was coming to an end.

EDIT: Yep, I'm just old. Another commenter linked to a "10 cheapest new cars" list and there seems to be a price floor of around $20K. No major manufacturer seems capable of making one cheaper!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794523

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[1], $9999 in 1995 is equivalent to $21,275.25 today, so it's a pretty spot on price for a barebones car.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Not impressed.

>Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms.

Except with all the safety equipment, crumple zones, airbags, sensors, etc. I would expect an increase in price.

And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS have a hard job. Both options— a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up.

> moving to plastic for the body

Some of those $10k cars in the 90s had more plastic in the bodies than cars today, e.g. Saturn S-series, where all body panels below the belt-line were plastic.

It isn't necessarily the cost savings one might expect though, because steel panels can also be load bearing and part of the crash structure, which is not really practical with plastic panels.

With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to.

Steel panels can also be made to be replaceable. Plastic has to be because it can't be welded to the frame.

In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced.

If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.

Yes, bodywork is quite a mature discipline. I was presuming the parent commenter meant user-replaceable, i.e. bolted on.

> The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.

Often this is because the special high strength steels used in vehicles today depend on proper heat treating to attain their strength, and welding can compromise this. Many OEMs even specify panel bonding for repairing particular crash-critical parts of vehicles now because of this.

It's mostly because the factory welds are the result of someone running numbers until they find the bare minimum whereas the autobody guy would rather not risk it.

The OEMs have proper repair procedures that are the correct way to fix the vehicle, and if the autobody shop is reputable, they follow them. And the stated reason OEMs specify panel bonding instead of welding is:

1. because UHSS is sensitive to heat, and robots are much more accurate in how they heat than Jimmy with a tig torch, and they were programmed by a process engineer, where as Jimmy welds until 'it looks good'.

2. welding may compromise anti-corrosive treatments on the inside of inaccessible cavities, which can lead to corrosion issues

e.g. https://rts.i-car.com/crn-24.html

A crappy shop will certainly just weld panels in without any regard for materials engineering, but it results in a crappy repair.

The Pontiac Fiero has notoriously bad plastic panels.

Cost savings wasn't the reason for the Saturn plastic panels, IIRC -- they were intended to make the car more durable; they were hard to dent. Some Saturn salespeople would kick the side of the car, hard, to demonstrate their resilience.

Those cars always looked great on the used car lot because they never had any door dings.

Modern cars are almost universally safer and more fuel efficient than the older models. And in many cases faster.

In nearly all cases they're faster. 10+ second 0-60 times used to be pretty normal for "regular" cars. Now days, people will complain that a car is slow if they can't put down 7 second 0-60 times. And "quick" boring cars of today are as fast as sports cars of the past.

The 1996 Ferrari F355 Spider and the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N both have a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds.

The average price of new cars sold in the US last year was nearly $50k. The manufacturers make more money from expensive cars than cheap cars, and people keep buying them, so that's what they sell. Before they canceled the Fit, Honda was selling almost 10 times as many of the larger CR-V each year.

You can find numerous new cars for sale in Mexico for under $15k USD.[0] Even Europe has several new cars under €20k.[1] These are the same manufacturers we have here, but lower cost models that are only sold in lower-income countries.

[0] https://compra.autofact.com.mx/blog/comprar-carro/mercado/au...

[1] https://techzle.com/the-cheapest-new-cars-of-2024

I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car.

You're not even living in the past. Our 20 year old Scion xB cost us $20K out the door new (granted, that's with most of the paltry list of options added, $15K base). And that was a cheap car at the time, Toyota marketing to "the kids".

The last time $20K was "a high price" for a new car was probably before most HN folk were born.

For those price-comparing, it is $20K after the federal incentives. So, its real cost is around $27K which makes it way more expensive than what the article claims.

Keep in mind $20k in 2025 dollars is the equivalent of ~$10k in 1997 dollars, if that helps set your frame of reference

According to this, there is only one new car model of any kind selling for under $20K in the US these days

https://www.carfax.com/rankings/cheapest-cars

One would be wiser to based on annual depreciation in real $ plus time value of purchase price. I suspect out of new trucks a tacoma would be the cheapest since the depreciation is low to negative (IIRC recently a Tacoma was worth more 1 year old than new).

All new car brands/models will not have comps for several years. Even folks buying Rivians, etc have no idea how the resale value will play out so you’re always going to have to take a gamble

This article is missing at least the Mitsubishi Mirage - the 2024 model year still seems to be available for 17k in the base trim?

> $20K still seems to be a high price for a car

Keep in mind this price is before the USA federal tax credit. So we're potentially talking about a $12,500 car. And consider inflation.

After federal tax credit, ergo $27K.

(Hat tip to @vaidhy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794867)

Well dang.

That's with federal incentive and likely before they factored in the tariffs. Those 500 parts aren't all coming from US. I wouldn't expect any usable version of it to be below 30k once it's actually available.

> It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform.

And it'll always be sold out.

I'm sure you can get on the waiting list (for a lead time of 3-40 years) or buy it from a reseller for $70k. Problem solved.

> buy it from a reseller for $70k.

Now there's the real price.

> a comprehensive active safety system that includes everything from automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection to automatic high beams

No stereo, but luckily they still found space for a few DNN accelerators that will slam on the brakes randomly when getting false detections. Likely still has a 4G uplink and all the modern car cancer to make sure they can datamine their clients as much as possible and offset the subsidized purchase cost.

Worst of both worlds?

Another comment said there is no cellular modem; updates come through the app using a phone.

That's exemplary if true, though it's a bit hard to believe.

Is it? They show speakers mounted in the front as a "soundbar". Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?

I just want some power ports and good mounting points, then I can put whatever I want there, and upgrade it. I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.

> I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.

I am hoping like hell this ends up being the case. Give me power, a place to put my own stuff and some details on the CAN bus and leave me to it.

I do not want to pay a premium for your slow, locked down, buggy / seldom-updated touch screen.

DIN format radios are still around. My recent-ish corolla's infotainment display is just a well integrated double-DIN. I'm surprised this car doesn't as far as I can tell, have a DIN slot for one.

Yes, they have a nice storage bin right behind where you put the optional tablet mount, but the only option I've seen for that bin is a speaker kit. I don't want a tablet mount or speakers in the bin. I want the left side of the bin (above the controls) to be a double DIN mount.

So mount speakers all around the vehicle? The idea is: customize it yourself.

> Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?

No, because they knew what they were getting into when they bought this truck. And I'm sure there will be a dozen DIY ways to add a more traditional sound system.

on long car trips, it seems like everyone in the car (except, me, the driver) has headphones on. no one will miss the lack of rear speakers.

Sounds very twenty-first century. No shared music recognition, no sing-alongs.

If passengers want to DJ, you can get one of those little FM transmitter thingies that plugs into a phone/table headphone port.

The interesting modern tools for passengers wanting to DJ are shared Spotify playlists and Apple SharePlay.

A lot of Bluetooth speakers today can fill a car with a sound wall better rear speakers used to. Apple says you just need two of their Bluetooth speakers to fill a room in a house with great stereo and reasonably good surround sound. The square footage of a car is generally smaller than the supported room size.

What phone still has a 3.5mm headphone jack? Sincere question, I'd like to buy one.

Samsung Galaxy A Series (A15 / A15 5G, A14 / A14 5G, A25) all have headphone jacks. These are their "lower-end" models, though. The higher-end ones don't. And of course, iPhones haven't for a long time, too. Alternatively, for other phones with just a USB-C port, you could get a USB-C to headphone jack adapter.

edit to add: if Slate is successful, I wouldn't be surprised if a decently sized ecosystem pops up around easily installed custom sound systems and the tablets (possibly with headphone jacks!) to control them.

The 2025 Moto G Stylus has one!

I like it. My wife runs a riding academy and we use a Honda Fit the way some people would use a pickup truck: we can fit 10 bales of wood shavings in the back. [1] We’re dreading when it fails because they don’t make the fit anymore and compact hatchbacks seem to be on the way out. Recent experiences have made me a bit of a Buick enthusiast and I can see driving a 2005-ish sedan except that I won’t get those sawdust bales into the trunk. We are also thinking of fitting in EV into the fleet, so far the used Nissan Leaf has been the main contender but this is a pickup truck I could get into.

[1] We were profitable from day one because we didn’t buy a $80,000 pickup on day one the way everybody else does.

The Honda Fit is great. You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission (used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable), and if you're using it heavily then you have the advantage that most cara on the market take less abuse, so you can maybe grab a decade beyond that by picking up somebody else's used Fit when you're done repairing yours.

>You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission

In many parts of the country (I'm Canadian, I assume the same for the US) the body and undercarriage are going to rot before the drivetrain goes.

This is the issue with mine here in Minnesota. Rust is the car killer.

If you stay on top of fluid filming or wool waxing you can largely avoid this. I've got 7 winters of WI slush and salt on my truck and just a few nickel sized spots of surface rust on the frame so far.

> used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable

Where are you finding a 100k mile Honda Fit for $3k? Before I bought my current daily driver, Honda Fits were on my list to look out for and in the central NJ area I never saw one in decent condition around that mileage for less than $5k. Even looking now I see people trying to part out theirs for $2k or looking for $4k for a 200k mile one. I messaged someone on FB Marketplace that had a 2013 with 65k miles on it to try and bring down their $11k asking to $8k and just got ignored.

NJ is probably on the higher end of the market but the deviation can't be that big.

Sorry I wasn't clear. You can get a motor with 100k miles from a totaled car for $3k, including the labor to replace it.

To your actual question, I bought mine (2008, manual) in 2018 for $5k with 100k miles in The Bay, and it took about a month of waiting for a good deal to crop up. I've put another 100k on it without issue and plan to drive it a long time. Inflation and the chip shortage have roughly kept up with depreciation, so I'm currently seeing some good options in the $6k range and similarly expect that $5k is around the bottom of what you can pay for a nice vehicle with 100k miles on it.

Also, deviations can absolutely be that big. It's more prevalent at the top of the market, but there are big differences in Subarus and Civics, for example, in different parts of the country, even in the sub-$5k range. It's often worth a flight and driving back to purchase a car (if you value your time at $0 or have other things to do while you're there).

Damn, that's a great deal. And yea, $5k seems to be about the bottom of the barrel in terms of getting a decent car.

For my "daily" driver (I drive a few times a week and it's rarely more than 20 miles), I ended up buying an imported WRX on an auction site. Cost more than a used Honda Fit but it's a ton of fun to drive.

Don't forget, 2008 was before the "cash for clunkers" program that hit the used car market and drove prices up across the board.

Japanese cars, particularly cars that have been orphaned, keep their value at high mileage.

If I had to get a high mileage car in a hurry in upstate NY with some expectation that my acquisition + repair costs would be reason I'd go looking for a 2005 Buick. Maybe half of that is getting older, the other half is that my son drives a '96 Buick which has needed some creative maintenance but has been rock solid reliable after a flurry of work where we replaced aging parts.

Why a Buick? Which 2005 Buick? You can probably, find a simpler or less expensive doppelgänger if you look at the same car but with a Chevy or an Olds badge. I don’t mean this as a dig, simply curios.

Buick is gonna be less ragged out than an Impala or Olds of same age (you see the same with the Grand Marquis vs the Crown Vic). An 05ish one will come with a 3400 or 3800v6 which was pretty solid and cheap to own by then. The rest of the car is nothing special, just keep oil and coolant in it and drive it.

Basically he's picking a very well sorted platform of a vehicle and then choosing the brand that most correlates with buyers who'll keep it in good order.

When my son got his first job and needed a car in a hurry to commute I helped him get his first car and in the search we wound up looking at a lot of Buicks that we liked and were at a good price and in good condition, particularly circa 2005 though we wound up with a '96 Park Avenue. It was my first experience owning an American car (title in my name for the cheaper insurance) and my own experience plus what I read indicates I probably would have done well with one of the 2005s.

My take is that at that age you don't pay that much more for the upbadged car but you're likely to find it in good condition but you get to enjoy the bling (the '96 is ahead of its time with traction control) and Buicks of that vintage have one of the best engines GM ever made.

I also love this design and I'm happy that someone is doing it. I think it's unlike anything else on the market.

But, they won't necessarily be competing against other new things on the market. My wife also rides horses and we got a $5000 20 year old F250 which is very basic but has been bulletproof, and it can tow. I imagine old, basic trucks, either cheap domestic ones or kei trucks will be what this thing competes against.

I hope it does well. This is the kind of design thinking that the auto industry needs.

Also I'm increasingly convinced that the Honda fit is what peak performance looks like. But when it dies you do have options - maybe a Ford Transit Connect or a Metris.

All micro cargo van providers have stopped building them. The Transit Connect, Metris, Promaster City and NV200 are all now discontinued. The VW Caddy isn't sent to the states.

There are rumors that they will make a cargo van based on the Maverick but they make them in Mexico, and with the tariff situation I'm not sure if they will be going through with that anymore.

All of the perfect compacts and hatchbacks are slowly disappearing, and solid work trucks have been replaced with $60k+ fake trucks that will melt their gaskets with crappy turbos and can't even fit a piece of 2x4 in the back. There is an enormous category of consumers that just want an auto that's simple, affordable, safe, fuel efficient and reasonably sized. Almost nobody is serving them right now.

> All micro cargo van providers have stopped building them. The Transit Connect, Metris, Promaster City and NV200 are all now discontinued.

This is an entirely american problem, because the small van is largely dead in the US. They're doing fine elsewhere.

The Metris is still manufactured (as the Vito, or V260 in China), and is not the smallest model which is the Citan (based on the Kangoo, with its second gen based on kangoo III in 2021).

The Promaster City (Fiat Doblo) still exists, as a rebadged Berlingo since 2022.

The NV 200 was replaced by the NV 250 (a rebadged Kangoo II) in 2019, which was then replaced by the Townstar (a rebadged Kangoo III) in late 2021. There's also the Docker / Express below that (which descends from the Logan MCV / Van).

And the Transit Connect was replaced by the Caddy (rebadged), but Ford dropped its original plans of a US release.

> There is an enormous category of consumers that just want an auto that's simple, affordable, safe, fuel efficient and reasonably sized.

Apparently not sufficiently so (or with a consistent enough need) that they can be catered to. Or at least not so that you couldn't make more money selling them pavement princesses.

Ford have an even smaller van than the Transit Connect, the Transit Courier, I am considering an electric one for my next car.

Maybe Slate could offer a van version as well as the SUV.

To give credit where credit is due, the ~$25k Ford Maverick was a decent step towards "enough" vehicle for many people, while minimizing cost.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a64351746/2025-ford-mav...

And definitely went the other way from the industry.

Yeah, except dealers ruined it. I wanted to buy one but every single dealership had them at $10k over MSRP.

Too bad the "ecoboost" engines in them are total garbage.

The 2.0 doesn't have the problems that the 2.3 Ecoboost has. The '25 model has port injection added to deal with carbonization.

To be fair, a lot of farms need a big-ass pickup truck because they are always towing horses to go to shows or trailheads. We have 70 beautiful acres and a network of trails my wife built that were inspired by Het Vondelpark in Amsterdam. [1] If everything goes right we trailer in a horse once and never have to trailer it out although some horses don't fit in or have to go to the vet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vondelpark

The Fit, however, is really genius. It's got the utility of an SUV in the body of a compact. I can't believe Honda's excuse that it wasn't selling -- in my area it is a running gag that if you have a blue Fit somebody will park another blue Fit next to you at the supermarket or that it makes a great getaway car, if somebody catches you doing donuts in their lawn you can say it musta been somebody elese.

If the grocery store parking lot is any indication, farming is the number one profession in America. All farmers can have their big trucks and still regulate out the other 99% of the 22-foot monsters used to commute to offices.

Comments like these are rooted in selection bias (willful or otherwise).

You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it, and this is before you adjust for what kind of grocery stores HN shops at vs the kind that people who use the crap out of their trucks shop at. If you live the median "suburb to office and back" life you'll never see trucks doing anything. You need to be on the road and not in a cube during hours when "things" get done to see that. And the people who do things with their trucks mostly don't live and cross paths with the people who don't.

I could use the exact same faulty logic you're using here with slightly different parameters and come up with the conclusion that cars don't need a second row of seating.

And before anyone projects anything stupid at me, I own a minivan.

> You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it,

I think you missed the point of the GP post. They were noting the presence of (a lot of) trucks at the grocery store parking lot. Whether they are towing/hauling isn't really the point.

There are trucks and then there are trucks. The Ford Maverick gets 42mpg in the city, 35mpg on the highway and is reasonably priced. If you value economy, ecology, efficiency and such that's right up there with a compact car. The F150 is a L size electric truck, an S size truck will appeal to people.

I've found this to be very regional. There are parts of the country where there are a lot fewer trucks and most appear to actually see a meaningful amount of real-truck use. There are other parts where like 40% of the goddamn cars on the road are pristine, bloated modern trucks that are just used as commuter vehicles.

If you're towing a horse trailer you really want the biggest truck you can get or a GMC Suburban or something like that.

On the other hand in the suburbs of some New England towns that I'm sure are full of white collar workers you see nothing but trucks in the driveway and I laugh when I see a Ford F350 with a lift kit and commercial plates idling and see, a few minutes later, a few pencilneck geeks come out of a frat house and climb into it.

depending on the rurality of that part of new england, they might have a legitimate claim to need the ground clearance and 4wd in the winter.

sometimes backroads aren't plowed well. or they. are plowed well and you need to scale a giant snowbank to get into your driveway.

(although my personal preference would be for the industry to make more rally-inspired high-clearance AWD sedans/wagons to fit this niche)

Something I also only really appreciated after spending more time out plains-west in the US, it's dangerous to drive small vehicles because of the average distances and abundance of larger wildlife.

When you're regularly driving 2+ hours one way to a town and a random pronghorn appears in the middle of the road, at night, when you're doing 85 mph... you want to be in something that can take the impact.

> Also I'm increasingly convinced that the Honda fit is what peak performance looks like

Close. A bit of work on the rear hatch dimensions so that you could get 4'x8' sheet goods in there, as was possible on the 1980s Honda Civic.

Also, just a teensy-weensy bit more power, please. Ours struggles even on moderate hills here on the edge of the Sangres de Cristo (southern Rockies).

Otherwise, all hail the Fit/Jazz, car of the future past.

They're both good in different ways. The advantage of the Fit is largely in cargo height (with the magic seats flipped up), but for some other objects the 80s Civic is better.

I'm also a Honda Fit fan. Technically, it is still made, just not sold in the North American market. It's had a new generation come out since they stopped selling it here, matching the new Civics' style.

The closest Honda offerings are probably the Civic Hatchback (lower roof, but the seats still fold down) and the HR-V, which is basically a Fit on stilts with more weight and slightly less room.

I went with a hatchback Civic Sport Touring to replace my Fit (which has 210K miles on it and is still reliable, though I'm passing it on to someone else) and my girlfriend is about to try the HR-V to replace her (newer) Fit that was just lost in an accident, since she needs more roof height for dog crates.

The Fit is a wonderful car. I'd buy one if I could find one for a decent price, but 40k miles 2020 (last year for them in the US) still runs around $20k at dealers and Carvana! For five grand more, I can get a brand new Corolla Hatchback, which is what I'll likely do, but I'd pick up a Fit without thinking if I could find a good price.

I am going to drive my Honda Fit until the wheels fall off, then I'm going to put new wheels on and drive it some more. Best car in the world IMO.

The rear seat legroom is absurdly good for a car that size. It's been our only car for the past 10 years for a family of 2 adults and 2 kids. Zero issues outside of regular maintenance. Bought for $18k new in 2014 (2015 model). Good times.

Would a used Metris cargo work? We have the passenger version and it’s excellent. True 1000kg load rating, and the cargo version can be had extremely cheaply.

We also have our eye on this truck, but with less urgency since our van does everything we could want.

The Telo MT1 also has us eyeing it…

Most small SUVs should be fine though. You switched between wood shavings and hay bales, but I reliably fit 7 hay bales in a 2005 Saturn Vue (wife always managed to get 9 in there), which means that 10 bales of shavings should not be a problem since they're much smaller.

TBH, I think a minivan would make it even easier.

I run a Honda Pilot for this reason. With the seats folded I can haul 8’ lumber or 10’ PVC pipe inside the vehicle, no tie down needed. If I need to tow, I have a 5,000LB tow rating so most anything around the property is possible with a good trailer for a couple thousand extra.

I bought reasonably used, spent about 30k instead of 50k+ for a comparable pickup truck which lacks the ability to haul 7-8 passengers when needed.

Also has the benefit of being one of the most “Made in America” vehicles out there, #3 IIRC.

I use a 2018 Subaru Forester to move stuff like this, with the seats folded flat the cargo space is decent. You can add some cargo boxes on the back trailer hitch as well.

The dream is a Pacifica minivan - they make a hybrid version.

The Pacifica and Sienna (and probably Odyssey as well) are absolute garbage for hauling crap. If that is what you are looking for, get a used one from the prior generation.

Love my Honda fit - had to replace the transmission at 160k km (in-warranty!) only thing I wish is it had AWD and just a little more clearance for the snow

The Chevy Bolt is very similar shape and size to the fit. Supposedly there is going to be a 2026 model. People have thrown after market tow hitches and towed (small) trailers pretty far even. Check out the BoltEV subreddit.

A Mazda 5 might be a good option in the future. I used to run esports events and could get 20(!) 6’ tables in the back, with some rope to keep the back door down.

A used Chevy Bolt might make a good replacement. You can find them for less than $15K these days.

how do you haul hoss though? i would imagine you then outsource to professional hauling services? what do you do for vet visits, when it's not a farm call?

Just pay somebody. In a rural area there are a lot of farmers with a big truck and a trailer and it costs less than the monthly payment on a big truck.

i'll be honest, if the rest of your profile wasn't at least somewhat corraborative, i'd say you're larping, but what you're saying is at least irresponsible. most farmers in rural area have livestock trailers, not horse trailers, hauling for hire (including if you're hauling for students at your barn or whatever) requires CDL and a bunch of other documentation, which you're not typically going to have as a farmer, and more documentation if you're hauling interstate (my vet is across a border), but would i even trust random joe dirt to haul for me? i've hired professionals to transport horses, and i have a handful of people who could haul in a bind and unlicensed but i wouldn't rely on them to be available in an emergency. last year i had to haul an old mare, she was colic, she laid down in the field, covered in sweet, and had to be put down at the vet, but overall it was less than an hour from load to vet. if i had to rely on "farmers", that would prolong her agony. now i just train, so i don't usually have freak accidents, but at riding barns, with students, on trail, something happens from time to time. riding barns i work with tell me horror stories all the time. i'll give you a benefit of the doubt, maybe your wife knows the details, and ithaca being horse country, maybe she's got a friendly neighbor on speed dial, but then you're at best outsourcing your responsibilities to someone else. what other things you can save on to make your operation profitable, at the expense of safety and well being of hoss?

Often these "farmers" are horse traders or people I know with a CDL who have the right equipment and also do other work for me like cut my hay. One of them is "retired" but he waved to me driving a dump truck when I was photographing a sign for my Uni that had a field of daffodils in front of it this morning.

The farmers I associate with care a lot about their animals and I expect them to take the same care with mine. As a rural person I judge people based on relationships and reputation and not on how much insurance they have. I'd trust any of these people to haul a horse in a big-ass trailer than I would trust myself or my wife.

And for a horse that's not used to loading, a livestock trailer is often much easier because they're more comfortable getting into it than, e.g., a 2-horse slant.

Judging by the number of horses my wife hauls, most horse owners don't have their own truck/trailer. Which makes sense: for most people, the trailer won't be used very often, and hay is usually delivered by the farmer, so don't need a truck for that.

How did we get so far OT?

you're limited to one horse at a time with livestock trailer, and if load is a problem, you can use a straight load and i guess remove center divider in a straight load. because i train rather than haul, i'd opt for taking time with load of course.

personal farms don't need to haul, there's no disagreement about that, but op suggested that you can run a horse business this way. it took me a while to realize that he has a vanity farm that's funded by his tech money, so you know he can gradually grow, he doesn't need to board, or train, or any of those other things people in the business diversify their income sources with.

i don't think we're OT at all. in horse business and generally farming you have two types of vehicles relevant to this conversation, trucks and gators. you absolutely need both. your truck can act as a gator, but your gator can't act a truck. you can use pretty much anything as a gator, i've got an old cherokee, an atv with a hitch and an actual gator doing the gator business. op uses a ford focus. the electric pickup from original post is probably a solid gator. kei trucks can be used as gators. but none of this stuff replaces a truck, which you still have to pay shit ton of money for.

usually in conversations like this it's horse people who come in and say "nah we need a truck to haul", but this time op suggested that you can in fact run a horse business with a gator, which prompted some questions from me

you're not a rural person, c'mon, you're a wealthy cornell tech with a vanity farm. ithaca is dollar horse country, everyone knows that, so yeah i totally buy that in your fairly unique circumtances running a horse business off a back of a ford focus works. i read you as suggesting that the rest of the industry is silly for buying trucks, and you've got it figured out, but you simply punted on the hauling problem.

Most farmers have a semi and thus a full class A license. Though often haul my horse is done as a labor trade - I'll haul your horse in the off season for me if you help me in my busy season, no money changes hands.

Wat. Horses are easy to haul. This happens all the time.

My family background on one side was poor-rural and yeah, being surprised at this reads like a class difference to me.

this whole subthread started with some cornell guy saying that you can run a horse business off a back of a gator, because your neighbors can haul for you, which is pretty much as cloud people as it goes. i'll venture that there's not a single horse farm in u.s. no matter how poor that is not subsidized with tech money that outsources its hauling. we're talking about running a business here, not hauling daisy to county fairgrounds three times a season.

We don't even have a gator. My wife does the material handling herself. Our bill for horse moving is probably less than $400 a year in a bad year, a payment on a big-ass truck is upwards of $800 a month. For that matter, in bad years my wife's business subsidized my tech activities and not the other way around.

In my experience, most people who live in rural areas already have access to a suitable vehicle - because a 30-year-old pickup is the cheapest vehicle to own in those circumstances, long-term.

As a car audio enthusiast, the biggest obstacle to putting a system into a new high-tech car is bypassing the deeply-embedded infotainment system while retaining decent aesthetics and steering wheel controls. The idea of getting an electric drivetrain and new-car safety with a 90's-style blank canvas for audio is amazing.

I hope that the noise isolation and intended speaker mounting locations are good!

feature, not a bug, they want you to buy their $4000 BOSE upgrade which is actually $500 of equipment.

Do you have any proof or even a hint of a reason that this will be the case? Or is this just nonsense?

Their FAQs even state: > Built-in infotainment systems raise a car’s price, and they become outdated quickly and have high failure rates.

It seems unlikely that a company saying this will throw in a $4,000 infotainment system in a $20,000 vehicle.

I read this as the parent complaining about other car manufacturers selling you crappy default stereos so that you'll upgrade, not that Slate is excluding a stereo on this truck to upsell you.

In fact, I would be rather surprised if you could buy $4,000 worth of stereo equipment for this car, given their promo materials seem to include a $100 bluetooth speaker below an iPhone.

The parent comment was about the general trend for car manufacturers to do this, not the manufacturer in question.

Its a cool car, but forgive me for not getting Lucy-Footballed again by an electric car startup claiming to be able to "change the game" while never actually getting any cars sold.

Yeah, the completely unrealistic timeline, price point, and the fact that the company is only now looking to hire engineers sets off my "fun looking product that will never be available for sale" alarms. I don't think they even have a prototype built yet, everything you see is just a render. They have not even started planning how to start building the factory.

The price point is assuming the R&D is already paid off, the factory is built, the supply lines are optimized, and they're building a million of these things every year. History has shown that you can't start off with a cheap mass produced car as your only product because mass production requires way too much startup capital. The success stories started with hand built extremely expensive cars that were used to pay down R&D costs and keep the company afloat while they built the factory for the mass production model.

About the only way I see this happening is if Bezos goes all in and dumps an outrageous amount of money into getting the production line running knowing that he won't see a return for at least a decade or more, and I don't think he's quite that generous. Also this assumes that cheap lightweight powerful batteries become widely available in the next couple of years.

>I don't think they even have a prototype built yet

https://insideevs.com/news/757237/slate-ev-spotted-los-angel...

https://insideevs.com/news/757649/slate-auto-truck-suv-revea...

In rebuttal:

- "This doesn't seem to be a working vehicle. The Autopian's David Tracy climbed underneath and didn't see any powertrain or proper suspension components, indicating this is a non-functional show car."

> The Autopian's David Tracy climbed underneath and didn't see any powertrain or proper suspension components, indicating this is a non-functional show car.

If they could produce 100,000 of these instantaneously and sell at a 20K price point they'd sell all of them before the end of tomorrow and they'd immediately go out of business because they would be about a billion dollars in the hole, at a minimum.

Not to mention that it's actually more like a $30,000 vehicle because the headline is pre-pricing in rebates.

Absolutely love this. Love brands taking the SLC (simple, lovable, complete: https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/) approach - minimalism is an absolute delight in a world where everything is crammed with unnecessary/unused feature bloat.

(That said, I'd love a stereo - even if it was just a built in bluetooth speaker/aux-in, which feels like a perfect compromise!)

I like this comment because it both argues for "SLC" design and contains the reason why we don't get it: "Sure this thing looks great if only it had <FEATURE>" where <FEATURE> is different for every buyer.

Good news, it can be added.

> A Bluetooth speaker holder that fits under the climate knobs is available, but there is also a soundbar that can be installed in the dashboard storage compartment.

https://americancarsandracing.com/2025/04/25/best-accessorie...

Technically you could zip tie or duct tape an Amazon Basics Bluetooth speaker to just anything even a lawnmower. This looks like just one step above that.

It’s a shame they didn’t add a DIN head unit slot and throw a plastic cover over it, preinstall install speaker wires. Anyone could then DIY a real stereo for less than they are probably selling the Bluetooth speaker/soundbar.

or just pre-installed dashboard speakers with an AUX input and single volume+power knob. very cheap off the shelf parts. would save customers from weird bluetooth speaker setups, and would support a wide variety of devices – from iPods to tablets to pocket radios.

no speakers and low range are the only two things I'd quibble about. and maybe the price, seems too high for what you're getting.

Or even just conduit between all the common places we would need to run cables.

I loved the Saturn plastic doors. The salesdroids were conditioned to call them "polymer panels" and I got corrected when I bought my SL2 back in the day, but I was sold when in their own showroom he kicked the door in, it visibly dented, and then popped itself right back out with no damage to either the paint or the pla, uh, polymer.

That SL2 went from California to Maine, down to Georgia and back to California. It never had any dings and had only a few scratches in the paint. My Civics seem to get dinged if you look at them wrong.

I wish I could have said the same about the Saturn's stickshift, though. That actually fractured when I was in Gilroy. I mean, the shaft literally snapped.

My first car was a Saturn, they performed that same trick in the salesroom as well. They didn't keep that trend up forever though, in the late 2000s my father went to go purchase another Saturn, and he was reeling up to give it a kick before the salesman had to hurriedly tell him they didn't make them like that anymore.

That was probably by the time they had become a glorified Opel rebadge shop. I was probably going to buy another Saturn and I might have settled for an Ion, but the Astra was, to borrow from Dan Neil, "hewn from solid blocks of mediocrity." So now I drive Hondas again.

Yeah, the problem with Saturn was the general level of QA of GM cars of that era. I could make the "check engine" light come on by pressing the accelerator with a small amount of force in my SL2. And it didn't handle very well.

I put down $50 to reserve one. I grew up with an old car that I tinkered with endlessly. Mostly because it was simple enough for me to get my head around! This car reminds me of that time.

I'm hoping that they go with a lot of "off-the-shelf" electronics and mechanical parts. Standards are a blessing.

It feels like they're going with a different business model to traditional car manufacturers. AFAIK most manufacturers make a lot of their money via servicing. I'd love to take a look at what their long-term business strategy is.

You could buy an old Volkswagen bug (not the new models) for cheap. They are dead simple too with tons of parts available.

Depending on where you live you can almost build certain older cars from new parts. For the UK I believe you can get every single part of an Morris Mini either brand new or at least refurbished. For France you can probably built a Citroen 2CV for parts, including an EV version.

how did you find their website? all i get are articles about the car but no links

https://www.slate.auto/en

The configurator is fun:

https://www.slate.auto/en/personalization

Thanks for the link. I see they sell portable bluetooth speakers we can mount under the dash. I like the idea of DIY wrapping both the interior and exterior; I can imagine anime fan boys like my son coming up with very wild art for these wraps. I had also forgotten cars used to have hand cranks to roll up the windows.

>The rather extreme omission of any kind of media system in the car is jarring, but it, too, has secondary benefits.

>“Seventy percent of repeat warranty claims are based on infotainment currently because there’s so much tech in the car that it’s created a very unstable environment in the vehicle,” Snyder says.

I'm totally cool with them not having an infotainment screen or even a stereo itself. But speaker management might be a pain.

I really hope they decide to either include speakers to which you connect to your own infotainment system or at the very least, have the space or brackets where you can bring your own speakers and install them without cutting.

Having a bluetooth speaker take care of all the sound is just too bulky and cumbersome for those of us who need to live with constant music in the car. Plus, I don't want to leave a $150 bluetooth speaker in my car all the time and encourage break-ins.

There is a video going around showing Slate’s answer is an optional, removable Bluetooth speaker. It looked similar to a JBL. There’s a bracket to mount it on the dash.

just place 4 bluetooth speakers connected to eachother in a mesh or something

I'd rather have my Bluetooth speaker stolen than an installed stereo stolen where they just gut parts of the car and rip things up. But it will be a bigger target since it's easier to resell.

> But it will be a bigger target since it's easier to resell.

Indeed: https://www.reddit.com/r/Toyota/comments/1bt8ck8/loved_dropp...

Looks like the dash and door cards are pretty much just flat plas- er, reinforced polymer. Aftermarket stereos and speakers come with mounting brackets and bezels to cover the holes you’ll need to cut.

Very exciting! Electric vehicles have the ability to be very simple, much simpler than an ICE.

Although electric can't be 100% analog, I miss the old days when a car has no software updates, no telemetry, no privacy issues, no mandatory subscription for features.

I don't mind too much if there's still microcontrollers in the car, but I'd really rather they didn't have internet connectivity. The only antenna should be for AM/FM radio.

AM is on its way out with EVs though. there's no reason that a car that has all of that internet connectivity cannot have the same features just without sending the telemetry. upgrades do not need to be OTA, and be upgraded through a USB or even bluetooth from a device. the only reason for it is that there's money to be made from that telemetry.

> The only antenna should be for AM/FM radio.

And TPMS. And key-fob remote lock/unlock. And BTLE for BYO music / calls.

> but I'd really rather they didn't have internet connectivity.

This is the one big thing that has me leaning towards "used, 2015 or older" for my next car. With an EV, you really do want a way to specify how much power / when should be used for charging though; some "discounted" electric utility plans require being able to shed / schedule big loads on demand, too.

If this vehicle doesn't have any screen, you need to use a phone or similar to configure all this. Yes, schedule data can be done over BTLE, but something big like an OTA update can not be (at least, practically).

There's also a lot of value (for some people) in being able to change/monitor charge capacity from distances further away than what BTLE would support.

If the modem could be toggled and there was a USB port for software updates, I'd be _thrilled_.

I've a petrol car so I don't really know, but what's stopping the power/timing controls from being buttons on the charger wall unit? Even a local network app I'd have no issue with, but I really don't want my car or charging unit on the internet.

Yep, this can absolutely be done. Home wall chargers are just a fancy switch[1], you just need a way to enable/disable it. Could be a feature of the charger, but in the worst case you could add your own secondary contactor that removes power from the entire charger when you don't want the car to be charging.

[1]: They also have control pins to tell the car the maximum amperage they're allowed to draw, but that's not relevant to the feature of "disable the charger when I don't want it charging"

> but what's stopping the power/timing controls from being buttons on the charger wall unit?

The car makes all the decisions about how much power to draw and when to do it. Excluding the DC super/fast chargers, the hardware on the wall is pretty "dumb".

It's been pointed out elsewhere, but remote notifications are useful so you know it's time to get out of the public charger and let somebody else in (or to go back out and check on why it's suddenly stopped charging)

You’d be bringing your own FM radio antenna in this case, the car doesn’t have a sound system

While the processing is practically necessarily digital it is possible to build an analog of an analog system - which is to say a digital device that acts in very much the same way that an analog device would. I think many people are underestimating the mini revolution still going on in the quality and price of electronic components.

Are they making any 100% analog ICE vehicles currently? This is just a consumer products issue. Sadly.

What do you mean by "analog?" It's not possible to make an "analog" vehicle of any kind due to regulation:

* It would be impossible to pass modern car emissions standards without electronic engine control.

* Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.

* Lane keeping is required in Europe as of 2022, so that's a suite of sensors and computer-steering as a requirement.

* AEB will be required as of 2029 in the US, so that's a full electronic braking system (some form of pressure accumulator/source, solenoids/valves) and forward looking sensors (radar, lidar, visual, etc.).

> Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.

I wonder if regulations would allow for a sort of periscope system.

(Not that it would be practical.)

The specific regulation is here:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/part-571/section-571.1...

Nor practical but an analog system could probably meet the standard.

---

Rearview image means a visual image, detected by means of a single source, of the area directly behind a vehicle that is provided in a single location to the vehicle operator and by means of indirect vision.

Rear visibility system means the set of devices or components which together perform the function of producing the rearview image as required under this standard.

---

5.5 just says it needs to meet certain testing standards, start displaying within 2 seconds of backing up, and stop displaying when driving forward.

FMVSS does in the US, but it'd have to be very steampunk to meet all the requirements.

A lot of delivery vehicles used to have convex mirror behind to give an idea where the bumper is.

>Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.

The vast vast majority of backup cameras ARE analog, including all the little one inch cubes you see poorly mounted on the back of sedans, and including the ones VW/Audi uses.

You could in fact plug their signal into a tube TV from the 50s. You might lose some overlay features.

If you want any one of:

Smooth running. Reliable start. Smooth Throttle application and resistance to all the problems we had with carbs. Airbags. Automatic management of cold weather performance.

Then you REQUIRE electronic actuators, sensors, and microcontrollers.

How many people know what a "Choke" is anymore?

Don't want or need analog: Just don't enshittify the digital! CAN bus is a great system; don't IoT it or use dark patterns.

God no, CAN is horrible and the horrors people working around its limitations have brought into the world are even worse.

CAN is really great for what it is. It is one of the simplest ways to get N devices to talk to each other. Really simple and easily debuggable.

Obviously it is too limiting for modern cars so it will get mostly dropped. It clearly is a great protocol though.

What limitations specifically are you referring to?

The packet size is a major one. The lack of larger packets leads to nonsense like the "freshness manager" in things like AUTOSAR's SecOC, or the addressing scheme. Every subsequent CAN extension has tried to rectify both of these in different ways and inevitably failed, which leads to the next layer up the networking stack reinventing the wheel badly. Eventually you end up with UDS.

Yea, that 64-byte frame size. In practice, I've always seen it abstracted away into a layer on top, but if you're working low-level (e.g. implementing that layer), it's a pain. So, a given packet may be represented by multiple frames.

I hold a patent on the design of a hardware offload engine to hide the handling of multiple frames from a main CPU.

I doubt CAN bus will be around that much longer, I know several EV manufacturers are actively phasing it out. Yes, it was revolutionary in it's time but it's a 40 year old standard that doesn't have enough bandwidth for the requirements of modern cars, and it was designed before security was even a thought. It's also unnecessarily complex wiring that adds weight to the car. Even the updated FD standard is only 8 mbps, so it's barely enough for video from a backup camera.

It's a tool that's more than sufficient for most things. Video isn't one of those, and it's a 2-wire bus, so I don't see what the wiring concern is!

As I understand it, newer systems like LVCS and Ethernet use less wire and smaller connectors. Apparently it can save up to 30% of the weight in a wiring harness which would be about 100 lbs. There was a thread on it on HN not long ago.

Video for a backup camera is mandatory on new cars in the US and Europe, so it makes sense to use the same bus.

I love it.

However I wonder about the overlap between people that need a truck and this particular truck. I have only owned trucks when I needed to go out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with a payload, in places with poor access to electricity. If I need to go in bumfuck nowhere without payload then there is no need for the truck, and if I need a payload in the city it's just way way cheaper to have it delivered when you factor in depreciation of even a cheap truck.

Would really love to see something like this with a simple 4 cylinder motor. Like the old s-10 / ranger. Until then the solution I have found is to just tag a trailer on small passenger vehicle, since it is now impossible to find a compact gas truck.

I think that you're looking at extremes exclusively when it comes to your assessment. I live in a "city" in WV and need my truck all the time to get to rural areas, but that doesn't mean that I don't have reasonable access to electricity. Furthermore delivery around my city really isn't affordable or available in a lot of cases.

That being said, I really wish we had a small ICE truck in the USA, or an equivalent to the s-10/ranger. Even the ford maverick is exceptionally tall and it doesn't come with a bed that is big enough to conveniently move building materials. The maverick bed is only 54" or 4.5ft and older model rangers and S10s can be had with up to a 6ft bed.

https://www.motor1.com/news/698055/toyota-13000-dollar-hilux...

I bought a Maverick and it wasn't noticeably larger than my extended bed ranger, I actually feel like it is smaller, especially considering modern A pillars and such are very thick and rigid compared to the death trap of the old ranger.

I have had no issues moving construction materials with the Maverick. I've moved around 12ft boards and stacks of drywall. The only real difference I noticed is I can't lazily hang things off the tailgate, which tailgate latches aren't specced to do anyways.

Not sure which ranger you're talking about - but if you mean the 6ft one, 18 inches of bed length is definitely noticeable.

It's also definitely possible to haul all those things with almost any truck. Hell, you could even buy a rack for a maverick that makes full 8ft by 4ft sheets of drywall/plywood super easy to carry around, but being able to really easily load up stuff and not have to do some complicated strapping/securing of the payload is a big win with a bigger bed. I personally haul motorcycles a lot, and being able to have two motorcycles in the bed with tailgate up is a huge plus for me.

edit: misunderstood your first comment. What year Ranger are you talking about? The difference between an 80's/90's small truck and an early 2000s can be very considerable.

There's a whole different conversation and argument about the general size of vehicles in the US that is essentially circular and leads to bigger and bigger vehicles in the name of "safety".

Yeah, with the exception of the bed size, the Maverick is only ~4in longer and wider than the 2000s era Ranger. It's a pretty close match.

https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/2022-maveric...

A Maverick is within spitting distance of a single cab short bed Ranger. You get a little less bed but an extra row to make up for it.

There's plenty of pictures of them parked side by side.

The Maverick is also kind of dumb because of the choice to do unibody instead of body on frame. I'm sure there's some weight savings or whatever, but at least on a body on frame truck, I can opt to change the bed out even on a short bed truck and add a flatbed when it makes sense. When someone using it like a truck inevitably beer cans the bed, they're going to be really sad that it's not a relatively quick and simple thing to fix (by just going and getting another bed).

> I live in a "city" in WV and need my truck all the time to get to rural areas

How rural are these areas? No roads?

Yes. I want this truck...but with a 4 cylinder ice engine. Nothing fancy. No needed stereo or seat warmers or complicated anything. I want a small, simple, and affordable truck with good reliability. Before anyone asks, I can't drive the tiny Japanese trucks in my state. They are cool, but look too small when people are driving what are essentially container ships with wheels these days.

Any company that made that would be penalized by CAFE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43795946

Kind of sounds like the Toyota IMV, but we'll probably never see that truck ever in the US, unfortunately.

The base model Ford Maverick XL exists and is the truck that 95% of most people need.

No thanks. More expensive with garbage infotainment system that violates the user's privacy. Also I'd bet the engine won't hold up well in the long term

Rural areas tend to not have gas close. 10 miles or so. I know farmers who get gas delivery just because some cars never go to town, just field to field. Charge an ev at home and they avoid a lot of fuel headaches.

I remember in the '70s in central California many farmers did a similar thing, except with propane instead of electricity. They already had large propane tanks and regular propane delivery because they used propane for heating and cooking, so converting a truck to run on propane brought the same kind of convenience that an EV brings today.

LOL. I live in a rural area, and I think a gas station 10 miles away is close.

In my experience "bumfuck nowhere" has better access to electricity than the city. Every farmer has a welder plugged into a handy accessible high amperage socket.

My experience of rural areas is that few are actual farmers. After all, farming has largely consolidated and become automated. Most country people just don't want a city lifestyle. They might have some of the accoutrements of a farmer and have added lifestyle (enjoyable/fulfilling) overhead and significant attitude (independence & sometimes xenophobia) for themselves, but it's a lifestyle choice. Therefore most don't have a welder (though they probably know someone who has one).

That's rural but not "bumfuck nowhere". Within ~100 miles of a city there are a lot of rural non-farmers, but only farmers will live 200 miles away from the closest city.

Very few people live over 200 miles from a city in the lower-48 states of the US.

To give you an idea: It's 413 miles between Colorado Springs and Wichita[1], leaving a very narrow area to be over 200 miles from either. Grand Island, Nebraska is 402 miles from Denver.

Pretty much all the land is over 200 miles away from a city of at least 50k population is in the great basin. To give you an idea, there are 3 cities in North Dakota (a 200x200 mile rectangle) that have a population of at least 50k, and with Bismarck relatively near the center, that rules out much of the state alone.

1: Dodge City is technically a city, but at much less than 50k population I'll omit it. If you allow anything called a city to count you could probably fit the list of people on a single piece of paper. Using the 50k cutoff you still have 3 cities in North Dakota, a 300x200 mile rectangle.

My definition of bumfuck nowhere is where I grew up. almost 200 miles to each of Regina Saskatchewan, Brandon Manitoba and Minot North Dakota.

I don't think that's true, but can't quickly find evidence. Ultimately it can't be depended on and is something an EV buyer would want to verify for their region.

Definitely depends. Most my neighbors in the country have 100 amp service and they are sucking that dry already now that they have heated water and electric HVAC. Many more run solar only since it can cost $30K+ for a half mile extension.

It sounds like the truck is very modular so maybe they’ll offer a generator option for gasoline-powered charging. Otherwise you could throw a normal generator in the bed.

I definitely worry about the ability of this thing to drive through a couple feet of water safely.