Bill Gates has entered the chat.

To be fair GM sold or closed a lot of its brands and foreign subsidiaries, and paid back the loan.

I fucking hate what the US auto industry has historically and is currently doing (making constantly bigger and more expensive trucks in a time we need smaller lighter EVs), but it’s actually a bit different from the SpaceX or EV credit subsidies and more of a low interest loan.

The US has far too many dispersed rural towns for public transit to cover. Yes we need more high speed rail and light rail, but we’re gonna need personal cars because of distances, weather and employment practices for a long time still. And there’s no reason they need to be 3 ton high speed blind spots.

I'd argue that a critical piece of competition for all nations has always been stealing knowledge and technology.

Sucks to suck, our car companies suck and they absolutely should loose and be forced to fire people if they can't compete. Give me my cheap and decent Chinese cars please. I live in a capitalist country so lets act like it instead of being fucking pussys

Capitalism isn't about anything other than keeping the ruling class rich and in power. How it chooses to do that has varied throughout time. During the 20th Century the lie was that "American Style" capitalism was fair because the capitalists would promote Laissez-faire style economics ("Free Trade") out of their mouths, while actually building monopolies.

With the rise of Trump-style 'conservatives' Republicans have adopted a new strategy, Mercantilism. Mercantilism doesn't even pretend to be fair or free. The word 'Competition' doesn't even appear anywhere in that article because competition is bad for Capitalists and they see no reason to continue to lie about that. They actively oppose free trade.

Even if 'Capitalists' possessed the ability to feel shame for being hypocrites (which they certainly do not), calling them out for not following along with the principles of 'the free market' does no good since they have abandoned advocating for that a while ago.

Not the same thing?

Yeah that's a good point in a sense. Mechanically I think they're a lot less repairable (or at least a lot less at home repairable), but from the angle of needing repairs, they also need less repairs because most of what tends to fail on ICE vehicles is all the mechanical stuff attached to the engine. Even on my hybrid I repair a ton less and my mechanic said that because all the accessories are electronic since they can't be belt/chain driven because the engine is off half the time that they're ultimately more reliable in the end - it's the mechanical aspects of them that fail on ICE vehicles.

No confusion at all, I was talking about car company bailouts only, since the other person mentioned "all the bailouts US car manufacturers received". I think the Bush/Obama thing you're referring to was TARP, which was for financial institutions.

<Page Not Found> on your link. But yeah it would be great if competition were about improvements.

Good, let's do it. I'm tired of our tax money keeping shitty car companies floating.

After 25 years of other brands I finally went Honda and I can't believe how happy I am with it. I never have problems.

there. too bad Musk lost interest after he completed SEX + Cyber truck

Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday

Got a subaru as my first non-american car. The old CVT torque converter is wearing out after 120k miles, but she survived being lightly t-boned with just a door repair

And no competition. I'm pretty sure that they can shave some of the price off from that massive jump that came with COVID due to [checks list] "supply chain issues" and yet never went back down after...

But recently there have been some news that they blindly work overtime within the company, and have meetings after get off work, etc.

Lol, managers are Tesla are contracted for 80hr work weeks...

Even if it is a big company, as long as it exploits people, we must oppose it.

Agreed! Fuck em all!

Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we've put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it's parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

As for performance, it moves well enough. It's a mini-van, so you're not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I'll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I've been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I'd also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I'd take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

So ya, we've been happy with it and I'd give it a recommendation.

Manual swap time

Bill Gates doesn’t sell cars

Sorry, fixed