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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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That's great. Build it. Until this hits the showroom floor, I don't care. Electric cars have been consistently 10 years away for the past like 30 or 40 years. For every other automaker, electric cars are now here today. Except Toyota, where they are still 10 years away. And for me, The electric car isn't 10 years away, it's parked in my driveway. So as far as I'm concerned, this is all just press bullshit to try and discredit current EVs and buy Toyota time to continue pushing gas and hybrid.
And as for the whole thing of people not buying EVs, that's twofold. One, people are hurting right now, and people in bad economic condition get really price conscious. The second gas prices go up they'll all be trading their gas guzzlers for EVs. Second, the simple fact is a lot of EVs on the road kind of suck. And other than Tesla, the public charging infrastructure is awful so if you like road trips you're going to have a bad time. Given that in another year other automakers will mostly be switching to Tesla charge ports, unless you're buying a Tesla there's some logic in waiting.
LoL. There's a Google tech talk where the guys doing the autonomous driving DARPA challenge talk about how slow and awful military contractors are. Then they say "we just took off the shelf gps systems (you know, the ones the military contractors spent decades designing and building) and built something that works! Look how much faster the private sector is!"
That talk is 15 years old now.
Oh for sure. There's a whole industry of them, and they all milk Uncle Sam for everything the taxpayers worth with little need to produce real result. Look at SpaceX versus SLS. Well it's true that SLS design was handicapped by Congress requirement to use old shuttle parts, the result is still a giant boondoggle that is very late, tens of billions over budget, and best case is going to cost $2 billion for each launch (which can only happen once every year or so). Meanwhile, all SpaceX expenditures to date including development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Starship, Super Heavy, Merlin, Raptor, and construction of an entire spaceport in Texas, have cost them by most estimates less than Boeing took to design one rocket. SpaceX is launching Falcon 9 twice a week. And to compete with SLS, once Starship is online it could theoretically launch once a day for $20 million rather than once a year for $2 billion.
Private sector can be efficient, but only when their own bottom line depends on efficiency. When there's cost plus contracts involved, it really doesn't.