feedle

Democrat-run media says car prices will go up 25% due to Trump’s new tariffs. My prediction: average transaction price goes up 3% and if we hold the car model and trim level constant, up 5%. What’s the basis of my prediction? Americans spend every penny they can earn, borrow, win in family court, in...

Compared to Maskachusetts, Florida is the land of the divided thoroughfare, dedicated left turn lane, and legal U-turn. It’s a little tough for people making a right turn on the cross street, though, to determine if a driver is making a left turn (no conflict) or a U-turn (conflict). Now that all of...

Our neighbor has a Model Y that is one generation behind the recently introduced one. He reports having made a 4-hour trip from Gainesville (home of University of Florida, which needs to branch out!) without once touching the steering wheel. I wonder if this supports a “yes” answer to Do self-drivin...

“BYD confirms new 1,000V ‘Super E-Platform’ capable of fast charging 400km in 5 minutes” (electrek): Chinese auto conglomerate BYD has introduced a new 1,000-volt EV platform that can enable charging rates as fast (or perhaps faster) than a trip to the gas station. We’re talking five minutes. … offe...

The Righteous accuse Florida of being deficient in drag shows, especially drag story time for toddlers at the public libraries. Ocala, Florida, however, is home to a permanent drag show: the pet-friendly Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing. Here’s Wile E. Coyote’s dragster, which used “a rocket system...

A follow-up to 12 Hours of Sebring, a perfect Florida fly-in destination… This year, we arrived early to the race, scheduled for International Day to Combat Islamophobia. We traveled by Cirrus, an example of the kind of technology that has enabled all of the world’s religions and cultures to mix on ...

Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!): My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, which se...

Kanye West was dumped into a memory hole due to his unwise exercise of First Amendment rights. Before he was purged I saved some favorites from Ye’s X account? (Below are screen shots for preservation.) For our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Palm Beach County with Maybach labels on their...

Loyal readers know me as someone who rejected the SUV religion almost as early and often as I rejected Faucism (saliva-soaked cloth face rags, lockdowns except for liquor and marijuana stores, and school closure as a way of slowing down SARS-CoV-2). Today I have a shameful admission to make… I’m alm...

“Hailing a Car in Midtown Manhattan is Becoming More Expensive” (NYT, January 5, 2025): Many of the vehicles that crowd the tolling zone are taxis and cars for ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft. The new tolls will not fall on the drivers of those vehicles, who are often struggling to make ...

I’m hoping that the Tesla Full Self Driving experts will weigh in on a question… does FSD work better on the newest roads with the clearest markings and most logical designs? In Maskachusetts, for example, there are a lot of ambiguous situations due to heavy traffic combined with old roads, worn-awa...

Who here has experienced Tesla Full Service Driving 13.2? A friend who is very tech-savvy and skeptical says that it was awesome on a couple of trips that he did in a sister’s car in Los Angeles. As a joke I asked a venture capitalist/Bitcoin bro friend in Miami when he’d be getting a Cybertruck and...

Inflation is whipped, except that the most significant cost for a typical person remains unaffordable (the “housing affordability crisis”), with government intervention required. The latest affordability crisis (i.e., Americans not being rich enough to afford what used to be considered American life...

“How I Leased a New EV for $0 Down and $0 per Month” (Car and Driver, December 2024): During my morning scroll, I came upon news of a Denver dealer offering a Fiat 500e lease for $0 down and $0 a month. The minimal fine print said lessees had to be Colorado residents, which I am, and just had to cov...

Here’s a recent text message: How does the scam then work? I respond with “Sorry, but we ran out of SF90s last Wednesday” and… then what? How does this person (or robot?) end up with my not-very-hard-earned-and-certainly-undeserved Bidies? Or maybe this SF90 shopper is legit. I took some pictures of...

On a recent trip to San Francisco, a local friend took us to Andy Goldsworthy’s Spire in the Presidio: We had just come from a parking lot where quite a few cars were virtuously marked: Our friend said “What we need is a drone to paint the Spire sculpture in the Palestinian flag colors.” Let’s suppo...

A lot of motorcycle accidents are caused by human automobile drivers failing to see the motorcycle and, e.g., initiating a left turn. (It’s tough to find statistics on this, actually, except from trial lawyers who say that nearly all motorcycle accidents are caused by someone other than the rider.) ...

The leisure hours of a software expert witness at trial are few. I did find time to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by walking out of the war room and into Fort Worth’s Sundance Square for a September 21st event “Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with a vibrant showcase of lowriders and culture....

I’ve seen a few wrapped Tesla CyberTrucks lately. Apparently folks aren’t in love with the stock look and in the vinyl age don’t need to be. For the first time in the history of cars we have tons of people who are happy to pay $100,000 for a vehicle and then happy to pay some more money to radically...

State Farm, January 19: $936 + $884 = $1820 for six months of car insurance. State Farm, July 20: $1049 + $1001 = $2050 for six months of insurance. That’s a 12.6 percent increase in half a year. If we weren’t assured that we live in an inflation-free economy, we would call that “25 percent/year inf...

I’m not sure what caused our rented-from-Sixt Mercedes E 300de to fail and refuse to start even with a jump, but I am suspecting 12V battery health. The battery measured 12V on the tow truck guy’s multimeter, which sounds good for a 12V battery, but the chart below (source) says 12.4 is more of a pr...

Loyal readers may remember my proposal to Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? (apply coronalogic to other situations in which human lives are at risk) Maybe European readers can tell us if this is the month when Europeans begin to follow the Science. Back in 2022, Autoweek said “Anti-Speeding Tec...

Today it has been one year since we lost Alex Here are the memorial tiles that a few of us got together on, installed at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky: He loved engineering and cars, so it seemed fitting that he be remembered at this temple of American engineering excellenc...

Question for Europeans and Mercedes nerds: Can a new Mercedes have aluminum wheels without visible lug bolts (I’ve been told that Mercedes uses bolts rather than the conventional nuts)? Sixt rented me a 2024 E 300de at the Lisbon airport with the exterior covered in dirt/grime. This was at the end o...

Photographed in Lisbon, the 8 hp Moroccan-built Citroën Ami: “Biden pulls back on tightened car and truck fuel standards” (Politico): The Biden administration on Friday backed off its proposal for a dramatic rise in fuel economy requirements for SUVs and pickup trucks, in yet another move that risks...

Parked in front of the Embassy Suites RDU for the entire evening of May 29: It occurred to me that this demonstration of solidarity with Hamas (see Talking with a pro-Hamas college student for how the folks who say that they’re only “pro-Palestinian” actually do expect and seek long-term Hamas rule)...

I was chatting with a senior engineer at a Detroit automaker. “We design the car to last 10 years or 150,000 miles,” he said. He explained that component manufacturers try to torture-test the components so as to meet the same standard and then the entire car is given an accelerated aging beating on ...

I recently finished The MANIAC, a concise novelized biography of John Von Neumann bizarrely bolted onto a history of computer programs that dominate chess and go. Somehow the combination works! What I hadn’t realized was how quickly programs that play chess and go can evolve when entirely freed from...

We regularly read about foreigners doing heroic deeds on behalf of Palestinians seeking to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and establish a river-to-the-sea nation. Most dramatically, we have learned about the deaths of six foreigners working for World Central Kitchen (Wikipedia): The I...

Who wants to meet at the Miami F1 race, sort of, on Saturday, May 5? This is one day before the “big race” that rich people are desperate to see. There are a lot of events throughout the day, including a spring race, the F1 Academy (from which 73 genders recognized by Science are excluded and this e...

Scenes from a shopping mall in Newport Beach, California: The salespeople explained that “Creature Comfort Mode” had been released on Friday, March 8. When could we get one of these Lucid cars for which a 1-2 year wait was expected? “If you’re paying cash, you can have the car today.” Lucid...

“I feel the need for speed,” said my friend who flew the F/A-18 for the U.S. Navy to the Hertz folks in Tampa. They rented him a Volvo XC40 EV, purportedly capable of 293 miles of range. It’s 190 miles and 3 hours to get from Tampa to our neighborhood in Jupiter, according to The Google. It took him...

Our current central planners love electric vehicles. “Slow Rollout of National Charging System Could Hinder E.V. Adoption” (New York Times): More than two years ago, lawmakers approved billions of dollars [at least $5 billion] to build out a national electric vehicle charging network in the hopes ...

Loyal readers may recall that one of my pet obsessions is why the manufacturing techniques that have made cars and widgets cheaper can’t be applied to housing. Why can’t, at least, the house have plug-in bathrooms, kitchens, and utility rooms so that all of these items can be refreshed cheaply with ...

Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey’s lease expires in January 2024. Due to the mostly peaceful inflation that the government says does not exist, leasing a replacement would cost nearly 2X what we’ve been paying on our lease whose built-in interest rate is close to 0%. I’m trying to decide whether to bu...

Florida Power & Light is our remarkably entrepreneurial local electric utility. They may have purchased a mailing list of “total douches very likely to own a Tesla” because they recently sent me an email trying to sell an unlimited charge-at-home plan for EVs: If they don’t need to pull a permit ...

The Cybertruck is officially launched. I wrote about this product in 2019: With today’s Teslas, one expects the driver to emerge and deliver a lecture on climate change, the merits of Elizabeth Warren, unions (except at Tesla itself), and a larger government, etc. What would the image be of someon...

From Elon Musk, the book: Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that Full Self-Driving was just a year or two away. “When will someone be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they’ve arrived?” Chris A...

Back in November 2021, I asked “What edge does Rivian have in the truck or EV market?” and questioned the company’s stratospheric market cap. It has been two years. How is the company doing and how is the stock doing? Given the calculation that working class subsidies to elite owners of EVs are $50...

I have begun to listen to Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. A few interesting points so far… Musk, born in 1971, had three big passions in the early 1990s: electric cars, rockets to Mars, and solar power. Thus, he is today working on the same things that he thought were important when he was 20-22. The...

Messages to a group chat from a friend whose daughter is a high school athlete: So my daughter caught a ride today from NJ to Boston with a girl whose father had a Tesla took six hours to get here because they had to stop three times to charge his thing “we went to get sandwiches and the dad st...

At a Chevrolet dealer in Stuart, Florida on September 15, I learned that non-in-demand cars are selling at sticker, leaving the dealer with $4000 more in profit than in the old days when the cars sold at invoice. In-demand cars continue to carry an additional markup. For example, an electric Chevy i...

In Los Angeles, I rented a Chinese-made Polestar 2 electric vehicle from Hertz. Here’s one of their PR images: The experience of driving my Nevada-registered car in California was wonderful. The car crushes the road at 4,500 lbs., doing far more damage than a (much lighter) Honda Accord or Toyota...

I took our 2.5-year-old Honda Odyssey in for a B127 service, for which I’d made an appointment. Due to the dealer being short-staffed and, apparently, not completely organized, they couldn’t do “7” (brake fluid change) without adding a multi-hour wait on top of the promised 1.5-2-hours. The parts s...

We have two cars. They’re older than they were a year ago and presumably less valuable. We have had no tickets, accidents, or claims. Progressive is bumping the rate by 30 percent. I talked to a friend in Austin, Texas. His rate is also going up 30 percent. Readers: What are you seeing for car insu...

A friend who has owned a Tesla X and still owns a Tesla S recently added a Lucid Air Touring to his fleet. Here’s what he likes more about the Lucid: substantially quieter at all speeds smoother ride over the potholes of Maskachusetts (“better suspension”); can be put into “swift mode” for maximu...

I’m inaugurating a new category for blog posts today: transferism. The working class has already paid for a portion of all of the luxurious electric cars being driven around Silicon Valley. Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness scheme forces the working class to pay for elite families’ kids’ college educatio...

People who paid last month’s price for a Tesla are upset that this month’s price is a lot lower. See “‘I feel duped’: Tesla price drop angers current owners” (Bloomberg/LA Times), for example: Marianne Simmons, a self-professed “Tesla fan girl,” bought her second electric vehicle from the company ...