Readers: Please educate me! What does Rivian know how to do that makes it worth huge $$ despite zero revenue? Wikipedia doesn’t describe any innovations other than maybe putting in four motors (but so what? A C8 Corvette has only one motor and it gets down the road and around corners).
It can’t be battery chemistry because the company buys batteries from Samsung (InsideEVs).
It can’t be that nobody else can make an electric pickup truck because the Ford F-150 Lightning will be here soon.
It can’t be that nobody else can make electric commercial vehicles because Mercedes promises the eSprinters to Americans starting in 2023 (Car and Driver).
I don’t see how it can be the case that Rivian will flood the market before the legacy companies, the way that Tesla has remarkably done, because Rivian is only just struggling to get its first vehicles out to consumers. If things go perfect, Rivian will deliver 40,000 units in its first year (source). Ford sells nearly 1 million F-150s per year.
An electric pickup enthusiast will have to wait his/her/zir/their turn for either a Rivian or a Ford. Why wouldn’t the typical buyer prefer to order a Ford? The price for Ford’s electric truck is lower than Rivian’s price and the reviews of the Ford are positive (example).
Ford is an investor in Rivian, so presumably there is a rational answer to why Rivian is worth a lot (since Ford knows the industry!). But what is that answer?
(Investors take note: I thought and wrote pretty much all of the above about Tesla when the company was young. I think it is safe to say that I have been proven wrong! But on the third hand Tesla didn’t arrive on the scene at the precise moment that the legacy car makers were going all-in on electric vehicles while Rivian is arriving after Ford already demoed the electric F-150.)
I caught an Uber from Jupiter to PBI the other morning. My Colombiana driver (I did not actually ask for this driver’s gender ID; should it be Colombianx?) blasted down the left lane of I-95 at 90 mph.
(Was this unsafe in a subcompact Honda C-HR? Certainly not! We were both wearing masks.)
I assume that an Uber driver knows the real-world speed limit and therefore that 90 mph is slower than speeding ticket territory. That raises the question: how fast would one have to drive on the straight perfectly smooth highways of Florida to be pulled over?
Based on what I have seen, traveling at 80-85 is a 75th percentile speed on I-95 in South Florida or on Florida’s Turnpike towards Orlando. Back in Massachusetts, I would say that the real-world limit is 80 mph (i.e., that one is likely to get a ticket driving above 80; note that Maskachusetts highway standards are lower than in Florida, where everything is newer and can be done to the latest highway engineering textbook standards).
Readers; What’s the real speed limit in your state?
I used to love the idea of leasing a car. Interest rates were almost zero. Technological improvements seemed like they had the potential to devalue used cars suddenly, e.g., if self-driving cars actually worked or if electric cars became inexpensive. The lease shifted the risk of devaluation onto the manufacturer. As with most things, my instincts were dead wrong. Instead of used cars being devalued, they’ve spiked to historic high valuations. As part of our move to Florida, I’ve discovered that a leased car is a huge headache if anything changes, e.g., state of residence. We couldn’t just pull the title out of a file folder and go to the nearest “tag and title agency” to get our Florida plates.
Moving our leased Honda required some interaction with people at Honda Financial Services. But now that half of America’s workers have decided to go home to play Xbox, smoke essential marijuana, etc., this turns out to require one-hour waits on hold for every question. It would be the same one-hour wait for anything related to insurance claims, e.g., if you got into a fender-bender.
If it is safe to say that customer service in the U.S. has degraded permanently (a high percentage of the long-term unemployed permanently leave the labor force and companies have learned that they can inflict any amount of pain on consumers by saying “#BecauseCOVID”), maybe it is smart to cut the number of situations in which one is a customer and/or deal only with enterprises that have figured out to do absolutely everything via Web form?
Separately, who is getting a Z06 Corvette? Does one need a flat-plane crank to be happy on trips to the supermarket?
Elon Musk gets paid more if Tesla’s market capitalization, revenue, and profit (using the fraudulent EBITDA number) rise, but the goals seem to be stated in nominal dollars, not real (inflation-adjusted) dollars. From Fortune:
Plainly the biggest driver of Tesla market cap is the baffling inability of mainstream car manufacturers to deliver a competitive product (they can’t even give us dog mode, a handful of lines of software for which an 18-year-old spec exists!). But what if investors are expecting the dollar to lose half or more of its value over the coming years of rule by Democrats? They’re throwing money into stocks, including Tesla, just to avoid holding the same type of cash that the government is printing like crazy. The revenue targets are easier to meet now that used car prices are rising (up 45 percent over a one-year period says New York Times).
How many other top executives are going to get a huge tailwind from inflation if this kind of nominal-dollar compensation plan is the norm?
From the imaginatively named The Gardens Mall in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, the Tesla store:
Answers the question, “What if you asked an artist to create a car dealer installation for Chinati in Marfa, Texas?”
A couple of doors down, a shop offered bracelets with inspirational messages. What were the two most inspiring messages, meriting a featured location just outside the shop door? “Survivor” and “I Am Enough”:
Perhaps my students will get together and give me an “I am way more than enough” bracelet to commemorate their time with me this semester! (And, of course, “Survivor” bracelets for themselves!)
What do Americans love to do most these days? According to the Amazon 4-star store, play Xbox and Nintendo Switch:
The mall doesn’t have quite the burned-out apocalyptic feeling of a Boston-area mall, but there were some vacancies and the place was fairly empty on a weekday afternoon:
I don’t know why U.S. malls can’t go in the Chinese direction and rent space to after-school programs (upper floors of all the malls in Shanghai that I visited).
Loosely related, a sign in a shopfront at a strip mall 10 minutes south:
But wouldn’t a much better way to fight natural selection, rather than wearing a mask that is about 11 percent effective (surgical; population-wide; “In the intervention group, 7.62% of people had COVID-19-like symptoms, compared with 8.62% in the control group.”) or 0 percent effective (cloth), be to stay home and/or restrict one’s in-person shopping to outdoor kiosks? If avoiding COVID-19 is our priority and we are going to #FollowScience by wearing a non-N95 mask, why not #FollowScience all the way by staying home?
I am concerned that there hasn’t been enough disagreement here on this blog on religious topics, e.g., whether mask use by the general population reduces or delays coronavirus infection (masking K-12 students doesn’t help, according to the CDC, but let’s order it anyway!). So it is time to introduce the topic of wax, polish, and other paint treatments.
An aircraft mechanic here in the Florida Free State swears by Nu Finish for boats and planes and says that it actually does last for nearly a year. This product is top-rated by Consumer Reports as well, being super durable and almost as easy to apply as the other top-rated product, Meguiar’s NXT Generation Tech Wax 2.0.
Here are the patients:
2005 Cirrus SR20 with original white paint plus some decals. It looks reasonably good after a wash, but could be glossier. The plane has lived in a hangar for its whole life, but is exposed to the sun for days at a time when on trips.
a 2022 Chevrolet that will be arriving soon. It will be garaged, but exposed to the sun when driving and this might be a car worth handing down to the kids so they can remember when internal combustion was like before President Harris banned it
(Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey won’t get any treatment because it is leased and will go back to Honda in January 2024. When turned in, the 2018 Odyssey still had new-looking paint despite never having been treated in any way.)
Both Nu Finish and Meguiar’s claim to offer UV protection. Does anyone have experience with these? Each bottle is supposed to be enough for one regular-sized car? So you’d need two bottles for a pavement-melting SUV and three bottles for a four-seat airplane? What kind of rags do you use for application?
Also, what about ceramic coatings for paint? I haven’t seen an objective comparison of this expensive process (many $thousands for an airplane) versus spending $7.59 every year on Nu Finish. The people who make money applying ceramic coatings swear by them, but consider that the people who made money putting COVID-19 patients on ventilators back in the spring of 2020 also said that was the best possible medical idea. If ceramic coating is such a great idea, why don’t Ferrari and Rolls-Royce do it at the factory?
A friend owns a car wash/detail operation. Here’s what he had to say:
We do lots of detailing on exotic cars etc. c8 [Corvette] more impressive in person than just about anything. Gm also finally figured out how to make a good looking interior. The detail shop team prefers c8 over Mclaren’s!
Be sure to get a ppf film on hood and ceramic coat as soon as u get. Worth money. GM paint is quite soft. As a result they pick up swirl marks easily.
[follow-up after I queried “Ceramic coating is not a snake oil scam? What about for airplanes ? We had some exotic formula tested on a square in our PC-12 near exhaust stack. Made no difference in glossiness or ease of cleaning.”]
Not snake oil at all.
Works 100x better than wax. The key though is the paint correction step. You have to buff paint to a very smooth finish then seal it.
The airplane stuff is a joke bc airplane paint is garbage in most instances. On cars you are actually sealing the clear coat.
The cost for ceramic on a car isn’t the coating, it’s the labor on the buffing step.
It really helps with acid rain degradation dulling of clear coat on east coast.
He’s smart and I respect his opinion, but I can’t get over my Efficient Market Hypothesis question: If ceramic coating makes sense, why isn’t it the final step at the car factory? The paint shouldn’t ever be smoother than when the car is brand new, right? Why not apply the magic elixir when the paint is new and doesn’t need the expensive “correction” step?
The PPF film that he mentioned is made by 3M, so that suggests it isn’t a total scam. On the third hand, despite the heavy truck traffic on the roads here in Florida, there doesn’t seem to be enough gravel to create a significant paint chip risk. God ran out of rocks somewhere in Georgia? And, again, if this is such a great idea why don’t they put it on at the factory, at least as an option?
Cars have never been in such short supply. Rental cars that I’ve been lucky enough to find, in our inflation-free economy, cost 2X what similar cars at the same locations cost in 2019, e.g., $120/day for a Camry at Dulles Airport.
The Democrats who rule in Washington, D.C. have promised higher tax rates on the subjects. Sales tax on a new car is a “state and local tax (SALT)” deduction that was limited during the Trump administration. (The richest 1% get more than half the benefit form a big SALT deduction, so the Democrats who say that they’re upset about inequality would have some explaining to do if they were to restore this and were unlucky enough to encounter an independent journalist.)
What if we combine the above trends? Any new car that we happen to have ordered should be rented out via Turo! People who can’t find cars at Hertz, Avis, and Enterprise will be forced onto the Turo platform out of desperation. Rates obtainable via Turo should be much higher right now than in previous years. Suppose that the new car is used primarily or exclusively for Turo rentals for a year or two. Wouldn’t you then be able to deduct sales tax, insurance, garage space, depreciation, and other car-related expenses?
Suppose that the U.S. economy goes from boom to bust? (after all, we’re told that low-skill migrants are the primary driver of U.S. economy prosperity and the Biden administration is talking about deporting thousands of Haitians) We get back to the days when anyone could walk into a car dealer and buy a car and anyone could go to the Hertz counter and rent a car for $45/day. Shut down the Turo operation and convert the car to personal use, having managed to cover much of the cost of the car via rental income that was mostly balanced out by deductible expenses and therefore that didn’t get taxed.
Omar lets people run up 200 miles per day as part of the price. Let’s say that he’s rented it for 110 total days (2 days per rental) and that Turo takes 30 percent of the revenue. Omar’s revenue is about $23,000. Suppose that people actually drove it 15,000 miles during these rentals (i.e., not quite the full 200 miles). Omar is charging $1.50/mile for extra miles driven. So if that number reflects the cost of depreciation and marginal maintenance from miles driven, he has actually not made any money (since $1.50 times 15,000 is $22,500). This YouTube enthusiast, at about 6:00 in, says that the C7 depreciated 48 cents/mile driven and predicts the same rate for the C8. On the third hand, 60 cents is probably the new 48 cents in our inflation-free economy. So Omar’s costs are perhaps 75 cents/mile driven (depreciation plus tires/oil). That leaves a profit from $23,000 of rental of only $11,750. That hardly seems worth it unless he is getting some huge tax savings on what would otherwise have been a non-deductible personal purchase. The IRS allows depreciation of $18,200 in 2021 and $16,400 in 2022 for a car placed into service in 2021. For a Californian or New Yorker in a roughly 50% state+federal tax bracket, that’s a potential tax savings of over $17,000 from the depreciation (though if the Turo business never makes any money, the IRS has a better chance of saying “that Lambo is a hobby”).
What about humbler vehicles? In our vicinity, I found a $30/day Hyundai Sonata 2016 (joined August 2021; never rented), an $87/day Tesla 3 2018 (joined April 2018; never rented; “The host cancelled this trip 11 minutes before it started.” and “The host cancelled this trip 3 hours before it started.”), a $48/day Kia Sorento 2017 (9 trips), a $35/day 2012(!) Camry (24 trips), a $39/day Volkswagen Jetta 2018 at $39/day (70 trips; this one must actually work as a business).
Readers: Did Turo get much more popular during the rental car famine of 2021? And will the Biden tax rates boost Turo yet higher? When the UK had high tax rates, one response was that nearly all cars of any value became company cars, paid for with pre-tax dollars (of course, the most sensible response was to emigrate to Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, and that worked out great for most of those who abandoned the sclerotic U.K.).
Electric cars don’t need a cooling airflow from the front, thus rendering grilles superfluous. The Tesla 3 has a flat nose and a slab where you’d expect the grille:
Some competitors have figured out more aesthetic solutions. The Kia EV6 replaces the traditional gasoline-car grille with… multiple grilles:
Here’s a Mercedes concept, suitable for Burning Man:
Could we find a more interesting use of this space? With an LCD or e-ink screen, the car could have different personalities at different times of day or for different drivers. The e-ink approach would consume much less battery power, of course.
A Maskachusetts driver could, for example, mirror the state-run highway signs that urge motorists to get vaccinated (but there are no vaccine clinics at the state-run highway rest stops). Alternatively, he/she/ze/they could turn the car nose into an extension of his/her/zir/their lawn. The nose display could read “Black Lives Matter” and then change automatically to “#StopAsianHate” if a gold Lexus were approaching. A Floridian, unable to choose among the 100+ specialty plates available, could rotate among the designs (no front license plate is actually required in Florida, but many of these are fun designs, especially if the mournful “save the…” messages were removed):
(Why do people want to concentrate on the negative? Wouldn’t it be just as effective to say “Celebrate Our Seas” as “Save Our Seas”? To say “Manatee Friends” rather than “Save the Manatee”? Why does the sea turtle plate need a written message at all? People who see the plate will be reminded that Florida is home to sea turtles and to respect their nesting sites.)
“Hyundai Ioniq 5 vs Q4 e-Tron vs Polestar 2 vs Model 3 group test (2021) review” (Car, an English magazine) says that the Hyundai is huge and maybe better for carrying adults in the back seat. Also, the Hyundai has tremendous style and cleverness. But the suspension isn’t adequate for the massive weight and the (“Long Range”) Tesla has better range than any of the competitors. What did more than 100 years of history do for Audi? Got them into last place! The Chinese/Swedish Polestar was “let down by ride, packaging, range”.
The Tesla 3 turned out to be the best all-around car, though they didn’t have the Mustang Mach-E to compare to. This is Car and Driver‘s favorite, but it lacks dog mode so I think a Tesla 3 would be way better for Florida, even if you don’t have a dog.
How is it possible that the experienced car manufacturers cannot knock Tesla out of first place when it comes to building a car? I’m amazed by this every day! (For haters who say that electric cars are bad, I guess the argument is that the Honda Accord is still a way better car than the Tesla 3 and therefore Tesla is not in first place.)
As part of our escape to the Florida Free State, I drove our minivan down I-95 from Maskachusetts. Mindy the Crippler and I hit traffic in Virginia, associated with an I-95 Express Lane extension project (massive traffic jams now with the promise of clear sailing in the future).
A friend who is an expert on these matters told me that the entire concept was a terrible idea. “Adding two express lanes in the middle of a highway requires building two extra shoulders and lots of overpasses for the exits,” he pointed out. “It is spectacularly high cost compared to adding two lanes to the main roadway.”
In other words, instead of having two new express lanes, for the same cost we could build six new lanes on the main road.
What about the congestion and tolling angle? These new express lanes will require a fee to be paid (or an EZ Pass set to “HOV mode”). If we had gotten organized with in-car transponder electronics and a display reading “You’re now being charged 30 cents/mile,” we could just designate the leftmost lanes of a wider main road as toll-required express lanes. It should also be safer and easier to have the HOV mode set automatically by the car, e.g., with weight sensors on the seats or an in-camera camera that can count the number of occupants and subtract for canines. (Our 2021 Honda Odyssey, relying on weight sensor alone, gets upset when Mindy the Crippler sits in the front seat and is not belted.)
We’ll be fueling inflation by printing money to spend on infrastructure (see “Inside Biden’s $4.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan”). If my friend is right about the off-the-charts dumbness of the highway-inside-the-highways express lane idea, I wonder if most of the $4.5 trillion will be wasted.
