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The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.
Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.
Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.
That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
If you want a top tier electric car these days, get a BYD, not a Tesla. Tesla only has the best self driving these days and if that's not important to you or you don't think regulations will permit it in your jurisdiction any time soon there's no reason to go Tesla anymore. It has nothing to do with virtue signalling.
I don't know what to tell you man, from my neighbors to coworkers, it's a very specific type of person that even thinks of buying an EV.
Interesting. From my neighbours and coworkers the only people even looking at ICE cars these days are petrolheads who like the vroom vroom. If you're not one of those in my circles if you're buying a new car nobody even considers anything not electric. Used cars sure people still care about petrol models but that too is a declining portion.
I don't know if you include hybrids in that but I see plenty of people getting hybrids. Its a combination of lack of charging infrastructure and perhaps a Sweden specific issue (in the context of Europe) of people genuinely driving longer distances relatively regularly, leading to range issues. This is not at all a question of cost, seeing as hybrids are as or even more expensive than pure electric.
Its about 50/50 with electric and hybrids sales.
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Aren't you some London finance quant? The only way to get less representative of the average European from that is if you married into literal aristocracy.
Sure, I fully admit that my circles are not representative of the general population, but trends like these generally percolate down over like a decade to the common man. And btw, I'm personally looking at getting a BYD Sealion (which btw, at 522 bhp has an engine basically as powerful as a Jaguar XJ220 for the petrolheads,) at some point, which can hardly be called a luxury car.
ICE cars make noise and little else. Electric cars are like your very own quiet and dependable yet extremely powerful vahana.
Percolation will depend on how cost effective the tech gets. It might happen at some point, but until then EV's will mostly be a matter of virtue signalling.
And even if it does happen, it's a separate question if Tesla pulls it off, or gets outpaced by competitors.
Evs are already superior than gas vehicles for a small but growing proportion of use cases. Fully 2/3rds of my trips happen by electric unicycle these days, and once i hit that my mileage goal (2000 miles, enough to pay for the uni by counting avoided gas spending and depreciation on my car) I'll upgrade to a faster suspension wheel and interested that proportion even further.
For a single person (or pair of adults) in an urban area, EVs and PEVs are great and getting better.
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Sure, but we're talking about the average person who buys an EV, which is already a very small portion of the population in the first place.
If the circles he's describing were the majority of EV owners, why would car companies bother making anything other than luxury car EVs, and gas powered cars for the middle class?
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