General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
They are doing it to themselves so let them. What rises from the ashes will be more suited to getting the job done.
No no it’s a free market until <insert_donor_company> feels the burn then it becomes a problem!
Driveable surveillance devices? Pass.
I wouldn’t buy their bullshit cars anyway. As an American who has been inside many, I can say that most American cars and trucks suck. Their reliability and build quality have driven me to only purchase vehicles from former WWII Axis powers nations.
Globally, the Chinese automakers are taking a huge chunk of market share
Is it just the import that’s banned? Or is it more, like registration, sale, ownership, purchase, …?
Like, if I could teleport a Chinese EV into my garage then what’s stopping me from using it?
You can’t register it for on-road use, with an exception for automakers who agree to destroy the car within a year.
The maintenance costs of my GM vs my Nissan are like night and day. My GM was junked by the time my Nissan was paid off, and that’s getting close to half of its lifetime ago now, and I still haven’t replaced as much shit in my Nissan as I needed to in the GM.
Though tbf, I have been putting only synthetic oil in it and that might actually make the difference. At least for the components on the drive train. I also recall not having working AC, fuel guage, digital clock display… Only issue with my current car is sometimes one of the speakers gets a bit of a buzz at certain frequencies, but even that doesn’t happen frequently.
self-driving cars
Ew, fuck off. I don’t trust those things being on the road near me, not with how much worse they are than human drivers right now.
As someone who works in the bay area California. The Waymos are unfortunately better than most human drivers. It is noticeable…
Which isn’t a high bar to clear. Humans are horrible at driving.
At least theres a human to be responsible though, in most places with mandatory insurance.
Personally, I think waymo should be allowed to operate, but each car should be tied to someones ownership/ liscence (ie the CEO’s) and that it should come with an automatic guilty / full at fault in any accident or incident.
Agreed. I’ve also seen a lot of hits (and sometimes runs ) in San Francisco. I haven’t seen a Waymo hit anyone yet and they have been able to navigate people parallel parking on the street. Waymos are not the best but they haven’t hit anyone and def know how to drive better than the average person in the city.
It’s the lidar, my dude. If musk hadn’t demanded those be ripped out then Teslas wouldn’t be such absolute shite at driving with their lame cameras.
It’s
waymo > human > TeslaWhen it comes to average driving skill.
Depends on whose. The Waymo ones do remarkably well. Other makers aren’t nearly as good.
I don’t care. Any self driving car is resigning my autonomy to a corporation. That is not fucking happening.
Isn’t waymo just using remote workers to drive the cars?
Not exactly; they’ve got a remote worker facility where they’ve got about 1 person per 100 cars, who maps out what to do in situations where the software can’t handle it, but doesn’t do a full-on remote-drive.
I’d prefer that to them just letting an AI do it
I’d rather pay a taxi driver.
For a lot of people, the main risk with a taxi is being attacked by the driver.
They said taxi, not uber.
Those have the same problem, but less concentrated ownership
Well, yeah…
Yeah, but the whole point of a car is autonomy and independence. The person’s, not the car’s. If you’re looking for someone, or something, to transport you places, buses and trains are much cheaper and safer.
Self-driving cars can give an amazing level of autonomy and independence to people like never before. Think about elderly and disabled people who normally would have to rely on others to get around having the ability to do so on their own terms.
Also think about freedom of time you would get back. Stuck in a traffic jam? Watch a movie, read a book, get some road head. Everyone suddenly has their own personal drivers.
Accidents would decrease too (Waymo has published a peer reviewed paper showing that it’s almost 12x safer than people). No having to worry about drunk or tired drivers.
Most people don’t care about driving, they just want a way to get from point A to B, and self-driving enables all of that.
I’d rather live somewhere with buses and trains. You can get places when old and/or drunk, you build a better world for everyone, and you don’t funnel money into shitty privately owned tech companies.
And until we can tear down and rebuild the world, that’s not going to be possible for a large swath of people. Think about places that don’t have good mass transit infrastructure and probably won’t. This gives those people access.
Everyone suddenly has their own personal drivers.
I don’t want a driver. Even if I had enough money to pay a personal chauffeur, I wouldn’t want one. I prefer to drive my own car.
But maybe I’m in the minority on that one. Maybe most people would prefer self-driving cars. That’s fine, I guess, but I just hope someone keeps making regular cars, because I ain’t interested in being driven around by a robot.
Ideally I’d be able to live in a city or town designed around people, not cars. So I wouldn’t have to own a car, autonomous driving or otherwise, to get around.
Eventually your auto insurance will go up to the point where it’s unaffordable to drive yourself.
This isn’t a near future prediction, but it’ll happen once self-driving cars reach a critical mass.
Why would the cost of insuring human-driven cars increase? It’s not like the risk of a human drivers will suddenly go up with driverless cars on the road. In fact, driverless cars, if they worked, would lower the claims rate of human-driven cars.
And the insurance companies won’t pressure owners to switch to driverless vehicles. True self-driving vehicles won’t require insurance at all. If the manufacturer is completely responsible for any risk, then it’s the manufacturer that has all the liability. Your self-driving car would just have a lifetime worth of insurance coverage built into the purchase price. A world of only self driving cars is a world where car insurance companies don’t exist.
Because humans are terrible drivers and would be responsible for the vast majority of crashes. And the fact that self driving cars don’t need insurance would drive up the costs since the premium pool would be much smaller.
Eventually your auto insurance will go up to the point where it’s unaffordable to drive yourself.
Then I’ll sell my car for scrap and walk or bike. And when I can’t walk or bike anymore, well, there’s always mobility scooters.
Well then… you’re the market they’re talking about.
It’s almost like the ousted CEO of Stellantis was onto something with his “Dare Forward” plan. But apparently having long-term vision is punished by the market, so now they’re bringing back gas guzzling V8s and fucking small-car diesel engine options (despite them being banned in more and more inner cities in Europe).
I’m thinking of Mary Barra at GM who pushed for the Bolt, then canceled it, then brought it back, then decided only the larger model and that it’s a limited run.
Yeah, that was some baffling leadership.
That got to me. I’d pay extra for a union made electric subcompact.
That’s fine, they can survive on the large domestic market thanks to protectionist tariffs, and Americans can enjoy their very own Trabant equivalents
The same US Automakers who ruled the world virtually unchallenged for 100 years and then had to steal from the taxpayers to stay alive because decades of shit management had squandered every ill-gotten gain and opportunity?
That US Automakers? Yeah a NYT article ain’t gonna get it.
To sell them to a nation of impoverished firmer middle class who can’t afford them
Who needs cars if you have AI and mass surveillance.
