I don't think so, not like it was once upon a time. I had a manual 6-cylinder I bought in about 2002 for around $14000, no leather, 2wd extended cab. That's like $25k in today's dollars according to Google. If they made a basic truck for even $40k as EV it might sell a lot better, but I am pretty sure they are all about selling 60k+ trucks for profit.
There's a 100% tariff on top of all the regulatory and political hurdles that prevent BYD from selling in the US, but it shows that a very nice truck can be built for $40k.
Americans are not allowed to have better quality, lower priced Chinese vehicles because they have to suffer the incompetence, failure, abuse, and plunder by their ruling class due to … the decades of incompetence, failure, abuse, and plunder of their parasitic and alien ruling class.
It is easy to understand what the tariffs are attempting and why, but what supporters don’t get is that at the very least it’s all wrong in sequence and timing, not to mention poorly executed due to the schizophrenic and manic nature of American politics that is dominated by the president’s supposed term limits and warfare of memes people believe. “A day late and a dollar short” has probably never been more appropriate.
The inherent problem with empire and reserve currency is that it supplies a drug to a ruling class that is already inherently prone to excess.
“ The first archetype, Euro premiums, has an average labor cost of $2,232 per vehicle and includes premium brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, and Audi. This group is characterized by high production costs, complex design and advanced manufacturing processes, and strong labor unions.
Within the category, German manufacturers face among the highest labor costs of $3,307 due to stringent regulations and high wage rates.
The second archetype, electric vehicle-only manufacturers, includes startups as well as more established players like Tesla, which do not operate under organized labor contracts. Their average labor costs range from $1,502 to $13,291, and they face high per vehicle production costs due to low manufacturing volumes. EV-only manufacturers also have been heavily reliant on government subsidies, which are now being cut back by the new administration.
The third archetype, mainstream model manufacturers, has an average labor cost of $880 per vehicle and includes traditional high-volume automakers from various countries. Japanese manufacturers enjoy lower labor costs per vehicle, with an average of $769, compared with manufacturers in the United States, where the average is $1,341 — a labor cost per vehicle that reflects recent historic union gains.
The fourth archetype, Chinese car manufacturers, has an average labor cost of $585 per vehicle, characterized by low wages and high efficiency. The group maintains the lowest overall conversion costs in the industry by leveraging its newer factories, efficient supply chains, and high production volumes” - https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2025/apr/...
There was a dip on the first chart in the article, it also sbows something like 9% of companies using it.
What I wonder is beyond "using" AI, is what value the companies are actually seeing. Revenue growth at both OpenAI and Anthropic are increasing rapidly at the moment, but it's not clear if individual companies are really growing their useage, or if it is everyone starting to try it out.
Personally, I have used it sparingly at work, as the lack of memory seems to make it quite difficult to use for most of my coding tasks. I see other people spending hours or even days trying to craft sub-agents and prompts, but not delivering much, if any, output above average. Any output that looks correct, but really isn't cause a number of headaches.
For the VC's, one issue is constant increase in compute. Currently it looks to me like every new release is only slightly better, but the compute and training costs increase at the same rate. The AI companies need the end users to need their product so much they can significantly increase the price to the end users. I think this is what they want to see in "adoption", such a high demand that they can see the future of increasing prices.
Yeah, it's pretty clear Tesla is still the best EV experience. I'm just waiting till the next gen of EVs to have proper connectors before I will consider another one. Our model Y is fine, but I don't want to buy another vehicle from them with Musk at the helm, and they don't plan to have a regular pickup anyways.
They’re actually nearly useless at non-rural gas stations. There’s no money to be made. Far and away most people on an ev will not stop at a charge station anywhere within a couple hundred kilometers of their home.
Intel basically hit the clock speed limit and diverged to multiple cores. However, they still make x86 based chips, not ARM. They owned an ARM license for a while and got rid of it. For whatever reason, Intel felt like putting all there money on x86 was their only option. For a while they were making Atom chips for mobile, but at some point that design was hobbled because Intel has always been about the 60%+ margins on server chips. You cannot sell the cheaper chips at the same margins. It's not that Intel couldn't technically figure stuff out, it's that they couldn't see past those 60% margins.
For a while Intel's process knowledge was supposed to be better, even if the design was less efficient, but that turned out to be a mirage around 10nm or so. Intel now without a process advantage is probably never going to regain it's monopoly, and so far hasn't really transformed itself to do anything other than build those high-margin chips.
Once upon a time, I wanted to use one of the chips from a company they bought in networking, but Intel's model is to make the chip and let other companies make a product to take it to market. Intel doesn't want to make a market, just sell into it. You can see that with their attempt at TV where they stopped when they didn't want to spend money on content. So the chip I was interested in didn't get much R&D or a product and it more or less disappeared, another wasted investment.
I've worked with several types of people. For me, the best mentors were the ones who would answer questions I had with the full answer, often with details. Then they got on with what they were doing while I went back to my desk and tried to understand/retain some of what they told me.
I'd personally find someone shadowing me and asking questions super annoying.
I don't think this would work with all teams, the takeaway I got from the article is about artificial metrics.
The Mini Electric is down there. Weighs more than gas, and one of the reasons it isn't long range, would push up the weight too much.
The current generation of battery tech is just a little heavier than would be competitive to ICE on weight. Gasoline holds a lot more energy than a battery can, but the engine is heavier. If/when battery density is able to double (and this solid state tech is 2x-3x current battery, so it would be a game-changer), you would have very similar car weights. This seems to be one of the reasons the big trucks are first, adding a thousand pounds to a 6000 lb. truck isn't as bad as adding that to a car half the weight. I expect we will eventually see vehicles that weight less than the ICE counterpart that get a reasonable range, but hard to say when battery tech advances that much.
The Hummer in any form seems like a ridiculous vehicle. The Rav4 Prime weighs more than the Model Y, so depends on what version. The 4runner, Tacoma, Tundra, Sequoia etc. are all same or heavier, the big difference is that in the future, battery technology is expected to get better, so EVs should become lighter.
Model Y RWD weighs 4065 pounds, but pretty sure my Tundra is a lot less safe for pedestrians, as it sits higher and weight about 1800 pounds more without fuel.
Yeah, smaller cars are better for pedestrian safety, but North American drivers in general want bigger cars. Ford stopped making passenger cars for NA, even. Although you could argue some of their small 'SUV's are really hatchbacks at this point.
Not sure how you get people to want to buy smaller cars other than taxes.
I should have clarified I'm not picking on the Model Y in particular because I think it's a perfectly reasonably sized car and I agree it's much safer than most full-size trucks, it's just surprising how much EVs can weigh. The worrying trend is that moving forward, there are a lot of EVs much bigger than the model Y in the pipeline:
lifepo4 doesn't require any fancy materials but lithium, less energy dense at the moment, but also doesn't degrade as fast. Panasonic is currently producing ~260Wh/kg batteries for Tesla, so much of the mass market EVs will likely end up with those types of batteries. Looks like lithium production needs to go about 3x at current demand growth, but if cell density goes up, maybe less? Unfortunately this article does seem to be about the li-ion battery tech, but at leas you will need less materials for the same energy.
Not in CA, but where I live there is continuous work on covering canals. A lot of canals were dug a century or more ago and are just ditches, something like 60% of water is lost to evaporation and seepage. The issue is still the cost, the price of water delivery is not generating the revenue to do it all at once. If they can also do solar, they can recoup those costs faster.
