Not rigged.

And your proof for that is? Because I clearly explained to you how you can see it was rigged in the video they provided. You need to at least explain that.

This is the most recent iteration of the 'Teslas plowing into kids' demonstration:>

Pretty hilarious assertion, in that first link you can see from the screen on the car in the first photo of the article they are not in self-driving mode as it has the map up. Just because a guy has his hands off the steering wheel does not mean the car is self driving you know... again zero proof.

These days you sadly have to assume anything negative about Tesla is a lie without substantial proof to the contrary, as there are far too many people willing to outright lie to put Tesla in a negative light. So I reject all of your links as lies unless you can show me any that clearly indicate the car is in self driving mode when it hits someone (that was a flaw in Mark Robler's video also).

It's really just so sad that your utter and all-consuming hatred of Tesla has you covering for a bunch of liars, and not even competent ones to boot!

This is my last message, respond as you will but if all you have to offer in response is lies then why waste time talking to you?

New Jersey is making Tesla remove 64 superchargers along a major turnpike - even though anyone can use the chargers there.

So I question if the article is just trying to paint a bright picture atop a more confusing scene.

The political left's hatred of Musk and by extension Tesla may well end up killing electric cars altogether.

Education helps a little, but not much. The root problem is that car dealers don't want to sell EVs, because they make less money on warranty service, oil changes, brake jobs, etc. So they do their part at "educating" consumers to avoid EVs. And that disinformation is a big part of why EVs aren't more popular. You can't fight that level of disinformation with information, because random people saying that EVs are great doesn't mean much when your dealer says you don't want one, avoids keeping any in stock for you to try, etc.

But forcing the car companies to sell a certain percentage of EVs does work. If they get fined for not selling enough EVs, suddenly their interests are better aligned with consumers' interests, and they're trying hard to convince every customer who could be happy with an EV to try one.

That's what they claim. Realistically, part of the problem was that they didn't guarantee a specific EV model, and not all of them were Teslas. If you thought you were renting a Tesla and ended up getting a non-Tesla BEV that couldn't be charged at superchargers, you were going to be really, really mad.

Another part of the problem was that they neutered the cars by not allowing FSD (and sometimes not even Autopilot) and locking them into chill mode to keep people who weren't used to the extra power from wrecking the cars. But that meant that folks who were actually used to driving *real* Teslas absolutely hated driving the things, because they had inadequate power, and that folks who weren't used to driving Teslas were completely unimpressed and had no reason to rent the things.

But the final nail in the coffin was when Elon decided to take away turn signal stalks and gear shifter stalks in the Model 3 and moved gear shifting onto the touchscreen. No rental car in its right mind would even think about renting out a car built with such a major safety flaw, which meant they couldn't add new vehicles to their fleet or replace them if they got totaled.

Between Tesla and the rental car companies, they did pretty much everything wrong, and then they wondered why it wasn't successful.

Again, the problem is that the market is being manipulated by auto dealers that don't want to sell BEVs. Without that market manipulation being balanced out by government manipulation, the industry will continue to stagnate.

Counting the manufacturing CO2 towards the lifetime CO2 emissions for a car is actually a fallacy. Most of that CO2 comes from mining raw materials and refining them. But once that happens, those raw materials are mostly metals, which are infinitely recyclable, which means you only mine them once, and you can reuse those raw materials for multiple cars over the course of millennia.

Once you take that out of the equation, the BEVs should win every time.

I'm not saying that making the synthetic fuel is a fantasy. I'm saying that it is so completely financially and environmentally non-viable that we'd be morons to even think about actually doing it unless you can get at least a roughly 2.5x increase in the energy output per unit of energy input. Again, there will always be a few exceptions where it makes sense to do it, whether for purity as you note or because we've run out of oil and we still need to fly aircraft, but otherwise, I just don't see it being viable before the last non-antique ICE car dies.

That's an average. The point is that an average ICE car with synthetic fuel pollutes more than an average BEV or even an average ICE car with gasoline. And that last part really doesn't depend on what car you're comparing, because it is comparing a car to itself.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

Rigged demo. Big clue is that it was posted on "Bluesky" for one thing...

You can tell it was faked by the supposed screen not showing the man standing on the left side of the road, clearly visible the whole time. They obviously captured the screen from when there was no dummy present and then overlaid that without self driving enabled at all.

AI stoked cars belong on closed streets, not on public roads killing the innocent.

Wow did you miss the point. We already know that statistically, modern AI cars get into far fewer accidents than humans do.

We also know for sure that AI cars have much better visibility than human drivers, since they can see all sides of a car clearly with zero blind spots. Perfect for city driving which is where the taxis will operate, and driving the accident rate even lower,

You just sound like some backwater amish luddite. Only I'll bet even the Amish are not afraid of AI like you are.

Robotaxis won't be any cheaper than other taxis

Pretty odd take to say a taxi without a driver cannot be cheaper but you do you I guess!

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

This part, I disagree with. While I'm not in favor of an outright ban, I am strongly in favor of government interference.

The fact is that there are a lot of people for whom the extra cost makes them choose a hybrid when a BEV would also work. Government subsidies can encourage them to buy the BEV instead, and more importantly, can encourage them to replace them on a faster cadence, which increases availability of used BEVs that can be sold to people who can't afford new ones.

And there are also probably a lot of people who automatically assume that they can't deal with BEVs when they really would be happier with them. Assuming chargers are close to fast food, you can grab food, charge, and have a couple of hundred miles of range by the time you finish eating, using restrooms, and start driving again. But many buyers are stuck in the mindset of one-hour charge times, and never give BEVs a chance. Having price pressure from limits on the number of ICE cars that can be sold would encourage more of those folks to at least rent one and try it.

And lately, rental car companies have been running away from BEVs as quickly as they can. That means there are very few BEV rentals out there, so people who want to see if a BEV would work for them can't easily do so.

So IMO, we absolutely *need* government interference, or progress will stagnate. That doesn't mean the laws should make it impossible for people who genuinely need an ICE car to be able to buy one, but governments should gradually limit the number of ICE cars sold as a percentage of car sales so that price pressure encourages people to give BEVs a chance, and so that rental fleets are forced to use BEVs for a significant portion of their fleets to make that possible.

Hey guess what happens on a graph after a long plateau meaning no new users?

It's obvious that we would get here with the completely gutted EV subsidies that we have now, yes. EVs cost more, and drivers tend to mentally overestimate how many long trips they take, making them believe that EVs are way more inconvenient than they actually are.

It's not obvious that we *should* be here, though. Hybrids are still way worse for the environment than EVs, and infinitely worse than EVs powered by renewable energy.

ICE cars produce 350g of CO2 per mile versus 200g of CO2 per mile for EVs. At last check, synthetic-fuel-powered vehicles took about 4x as much power per mile as battery-electric vehicles. So unless the energy mix used to produce them is *very* different from the average, that would mean that synthetic fuels would be expected to produce 800g of CO2 per mile, meaning that a modern hybrid using synthetic fuels would be about as bad as a gas guzzling 1980s-era SUV burning normal gasoline.

So while synthetic fuels might be useful as an emergency workaround in situations where moving to batteries is infeasible (e.g. aviation), they would still be completely impractical for automotive use, because building out the power grid enough to handle 4x the power consumption of everyone moving to an EV would be economic suicide; building out the grid to accommodate EVs is going to be expensive enough without quadrupling that number.

There is absolutely no sane universe in which the current generation of synthetic fuels should be used unless and until we completely run out of oil, and even after that, they should be used no more than is absolutely necessary. Maybe someday, the technology will be good enough, but we aren't anywhere close to that point yet. Right now, the idea of switching to synthetic fuels is basically pure fantasy from a practical perspective.

Because U.S. automakers' workers don't live in dormitories and work 50-hour weeks for $3 an hour.

Oh, you mean less than a Chinese gas car? Because the Chinese government massively subsidized their R&D and manufacturing costs.