Anyone who knows a lot about #cars, I need some help!
My sister started up her 2007 Grand Caravan and heard a loud noise. The car is now leaking coolant like crazy directly under the engine and the front starts shaking like it's in an earthquake.
Obviously, she's not gonna drive it right now and we'll take it to a mechanic when we can, but I just wanted to get some idea of what might be wrong. I think it's a head gasket.
Another example of Tesla not being the green company it once pretended to be: shareholders voted down a proposal not to use minerals retrieved through deep-sea mining.
The new CarPlay design system inverts the relationship between carmaker and iPhone, and places the #iPhone (mostly) in control of the entire dashboard including the primary instrument cluster behind the steering wheel. Instead of CarPlay receiving a rectangle into which it can render images, the car creates configurations that CarPlay then uses to insert their gauges, camera feeds, and controls. But CarPlay is ultimately in charge of nearly every pixel of the display (with the exception of telltale lights). Even the government-regulated displays like speedometer and fuel gauge are configured through iPhone, even though they are rendered by the car.
Any business folks know anything about Aptera and their market potential? I believe they can make it to production at this point, and I believe their car can meet their claims (or get close enough). What I'm concerned about is that I think the 2-seater eco-tech car market is tiny. I don't know if it's big enough to sustain the company long term. But they also have side projects going on, so....
Meanwhile in Columbia, traffic free city Sundays are a big thing; this looks like a great way to start to wean us off our urban addiction to automotive travel. Imagine what this would look like in London, Manchester or Edinburg (or any town/city).
Of course the 15-minute-city conspiracy theorists will have some nut-job theory about how this is a communist plot... but for the rest of us, looks like a great idea!
Chinese carmakers’ global growth “comes as major U.S. carmakers … have withdrawn from promising markets such as India, Indonesia & Thailand to focus on their North American base.”
Market share of Chinese automakers “has jumped in many markets over the last 5 years, growing from 3% to 10% in Thailand, from 1% to 9% in Australia and from nothing to 13% in Mexico … Gains in Russia have been even starker, jumping from almost nothing to more than a third.”
“Inside Tesla’s sprawling factory in Austin, Texas, known as Giga Texas, the company on Monday took a striking step to adjust to its new reality. It was the first day without a night shift for the Model Y … which effectively cut the company’s output of the vehicle in half.”
The United States is protecting is uncompetitive automakers addicted to expensive SUVs and trucks from facing a real challenge that would force them to innovate and could accelerate the EV transition by making cheaper models much more accessible.
“Juanita Vidal, 71, was crossing Eldert Street near Knickerbocker Avenue with her 44-year-old daughter at around 5 p.m. Thursday when she was fatally struck by 2024 Mazda CX5 speeding away from police, officials said.”
I don’t often share the fanblogs, but this is a good look behind the scenes: Elon Musk has been absent from Tesla for the past year, but now he’s reasserting himself by doing mass layoffs with little regard for the effects on the business. It’s a mess.
This is truly one of the more baffling decisions I’ve seen in a long time. Tesla is a leader in charging infrastructure, to the degree that virtually every other carmaker is even adopting its standard.
Then Elon Musk laid off the entire Supercharger team.
Elon Musk is betting Tesla’s future on using self-driving fantasies to boost the share price instead of building a real car business. He just gutted the teams working on the Supercharger network (right as other companies are adopting it!) and new vehicles.