Plenty of electric cars under $40k? Name five good ones, ones where they don’t rattle incessantly and when you shut the door you don’t feel surrounded by a sea of the cheapest plastics (offgassing the whole time naturally). I can tell you from personal experience the Bolt isn’t a good one. And just to be clear, my standard isn’t Lexus or Maybach, I’m comparing with Honda Accord/Toyota Camry/Mazda CX-5 for interior and overall quality.
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The Chevy Bolt is cheap and feels it. Read my other comment on it; I have driven one more than a few times, ridden in one even more often, and it’s absurdly bad compared to even a base level Mazda3 in interior quality. It honestly feels cheaper than my my first car, an early 90’s Toyota Tercel, let alone compared to a modern import. If the Bolt is the future of EVs, we’re doomed, because it’s not fun to drive and every moment in it is a reminder that it’s cheap for a reason. It may be better than the Prius C due to being an EV, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear, and I’m pretty sure it will lose where it counts, customer satisfaction. I can’t imagine someone with the money to buy something better puts the money down for a Bolt and is happy with their decision after six or 12 months, let alone the decade plus that we all should be keeping our vehicles to defray the environmental cost of their construction.
That leaves people with limited financial options, the people forced to buy either a used ICE vehicle or the cheapest EV when their old car dies; you’ll probably recognize them as the working poor (and their ranks are growing thanks to runaway capitalism). If the solution is to force them into terrible vehicles, perfect; the Bolt should serve as a wonderful reminder that profits are valued above them at every step.
Re-read the comment I replied to and my own. I want an electric car, they’re just not economically feasible for most people, and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. People can’t afford electric cars with reasonable seating for a family and space for their stuff.
My gas powered car is paid off, any electric car isn’t, and any electric car with equivalent space for my family and bimonthly Costco trips and equipment to make the ride comfortable would run me $50k. Guess which one I’m driving for the foreseeable future.
Is this the climate conference led by an actual oil tycoon, or the one where they all fly separately in private jets and nothing actually comes from their promises? I can’t keep track of the BS get-togethers, I’m too busy going to the beach in North America in late November because it’s so warm.
They got a former employee into the Cabinet, of course they’re following the money.
I think it’s a multifaceted problem. Police data is being scrutinized more heavily, arrests and forced confessions are being broadcasted widely, more and more people have wised up to the golden rule of don’t talk to cops, and police are tasked with so many stupid/useless things like the drug war, stopping abortions, arresting kids in schools whose parent just died of cancer, that they don’t devote enough resources to actual crimes like murders. Plus, you know, people are lazy in general and cop unions are the best at protecting their members.
Even cooler, thanks! I’m so used to the paywalls that I archive everything.
The people making the decision to offshore to China are not the people who will be doing QA/QC, and they’re definitely not the people who get their hands dirty prior to offshoring. The people who make that decision are trying to cut labor and thus product costs to make their quarterly bonus bigger. They likely won’t be around long enough to even hear about the increase in defective products and if electronic, the corners cut at the Chinese factories on materials.
I worked at a company that had electrical devices manufactured in China and was very displeased when one of the factories offered to whip up any safety certifications we needed with no actual testing. Thankfully the owners quit doing business with that factory after that. Another factory owner collected meal receipts from visitors so they could cheat on their taxes. Anybody openly trying to cheat on their taxes isn’t fooling me with confidence that they’re by the book when it comes to other aspects of their life.
You might want to listen to the first season of The Big One, which was on NPR. One of the things they talk about is how many towers haven’t really faced a big quake since they were built, and the City of LA refuses to say which buildings won’t stand up to even a medium quake. Quake liquifaction is a thing you should read up on; it’s scary because it’s a distinct possibility in some of the most populated cities in the world. Japan has done a great job of building earthquake resistance into their buildings, but again, very few of them have actually faced a massive, local quake, so it’s all based on best guesses. I know my single story isn’t coming down like a tower, and I can personally turn off my natural gas line to reduce fire risk. Towers don’t have individual gas shutoffs AFAIK.
All concrete construction reduces the risk of small fires spreading, but like the Twin Towers proved, once the building is on fire the only way down is the stairs, because external ladders aren’t tall enough. It also doesn’t help when the buildings are clad in flammable materials, like the residential tower in the UK that went up like a candle. I literally don’t stay above a certain floor in hotels when I travel in the US because even the FDNY’s tallest ladder only goes up 137 feet (41.75 meters for the metric lovers). Internationally, I don’t stay above the fourth floor, because most fire departments don’t have ladders to reach much higher than that.
That your building escaped without people inadvertently infecting others is great, but I hope you realize that part of what made Covid so dangerous, especially in the first year, was that it could spread before symptoms presented strongly, and that there was strong asymptomatic transmission. It’s not crazy to think some of those characteristics will be shared with other, much more deadly, viral strains, given that we’ve seen such hopping in bacteria. That’s why antibiotic resistance is so dangerous; germs share with each other. Positive pressure in the hallways being a positive presumes contagious individuals know they’re contagious and will stay inside their flat until they’re no longer contagious. I don’t think I need to tell you how unlikely that is for large segments of the population.
More like, “Hey kids, do you want to be in a vehicle that filled with plastics that happens to catch fire?”
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/recall-all-chevy-bolt-vehicles-fire-risk
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/consumer-alert-important-chevrolet-bolt-recall-fire-risk
Electric vehicles could be good, the cheap ones , specifically the Bolt, are not.