I'd say a reasonable compromise would be that they're allowed to show ads, so long as I'm allowed to completely delete their app from my radio (which of course, should then prevent any future ads). So, they can be annoying at their own peril.

I tried it once many years ago. I could never get past how bad the music all sounded due to the excessive amount of data compression.

I have one of those cheap Chinese Android head units in my older ICE vehicle. I received it free as a review sample and TBH, it's just okay. CarPlay is a little laggy compared against how it works in my Chevy Bolt, and the built-in amplifier is rather anemic.

I really wouldn't consider it an upgrade from modern(ish) infotainment systems. For an older vehicle with a factory tape deck or CD player head unit, or something like the Slate truck (which for some crazy reason won't include a radio), sure, why not.

Oh, I think people will still be riding in plenty of cars - they'll just be Waymos, Tesla Robotaxis, etc. When people can't afford to buy, they rent.

We're probably never going back to truly affordable new cars in this country, because there's too much money to be made selling transportation as a service to those who can't afford a car.

This is what the Slate EV is supposed to be. Granted, it's a bit more spartan than even the smaller pickup trucks of the late 90s and even after adjusting for inflation will be slightly less affordable, as well.

And for better or worse, it's an EV, so that rules out some of the use cases where you might want to drive it out to the middle of BFE without worrying about charging infrastructure.

Pretty much if you buy anything made by Ford it should come with a backup vehicle. /s

With new car prices the way they are, a lot of people actually are taking more serious looks at e-bikes and e-scooters. Heck, Car and Driver Magazine even did an e-scooter review.

I live in a part of central Florida that's not particularly affluent and have noticed that these things have absolutely become the "poor man's Tesla".

Well, whatever we've currently been doing certainly hasn't incentivized domestic auto manufacturers to produce affordable cars. Or very many cars that are actually "cars" (as opposed to SUVs and pickup trucks), for that matter.

Technically Chevy is bringing the Bolt EUV back soon. They call it a compact SUV, but it's really just a small hatchback car with some adornments to make it look more SUV-ish. I've heard that they've scaled back production targets since the EV tax credit went *poof* though, so they're probably not planning on selling many of them.

That's not what's going to change. What's likely going to change is that domestic manufacturers can scale back production and sales targets of their EV models, since fleet efficiency numbers won't be as important, and they might tweak ICE vehicle software to have the start-stop systems default to being disabled.

There's not going to be any major retooling happening, because administrations change.

I like to say that gas is currently cheap because anywhere you'd want to drive to spend money has become too fucking expensive.

As for EVs reducing demand, ChatGPT estimated that if all of the roughly 4 million EVs in the USA were magically transformed into ICE vehicles, the price of gasoline would raise by about 1.3%, which is well within normal market fluctuations. So no, you don't really have to thank us EV drivers for cheaper gas.

At least now I know that my own individual contribution in lowering gas prices by owning an EV is roughly one-hundred-thousandth of a cent per gallon. You're welcome.

The weird thing about the USA is that inexpensive new cars don't sell well. Probably because if you've got decent credit you can just stretch the loan out until the heat death of the universe and get something fancier.

If you don't have good credit, even a cheap car quickly becomes too expensive once those awful interest rates do their thing.

A "much-needed move" would be to allow BYD cars to be sold here and let the free market economics (that conservatives ostensibly claim to love) sort everything out. But nope, gotta keep selling those high profit margin gas guzzlin' pickup trucks that over half of Americans can't actually afford.

The only solace I take from this is that Musk screwed himself by supporting this administration, because Tesla's sales are down, too.

I ran my own BBS back in the day as a teenager. Most of the people on BBSes were there because they had an interest in computers, whereas most of the people on modern social media couldn't care less about the technology and are there to discuss something else. It used to be that you had to have some basic knowledge to get online, now phones come preloaded with the Facebook app.

Basically, the normies/"Eternal Septembers" took over.

They've been using AI based moderation for awhile now. Was actually a bit hilarious the time my partner ended up getting a brief "vacation" from Facebook because it misidentified a picture of a new Samsung phone as containing nudity.