The Geo Tracker was a severely underrated runabout. I’ve driven a few of these before and have always adored their underdog spirit, their surprising off-road capability, and their oh-so-cute looks. Is it time for the Geo Tracker to come back? Oh yeah it is.
Thomas wrote about a new graphics package for the Toyota RAV4. TheDrunkenWrench got me really excited:
It is time. All the pieces are there: -The people crave small, cheap, proper 4x4s -The CAMI plant needs a model to save it’s production -Vinyl graphics are back
THE GEO TRACKER MUST RISE FROM THE ASHES.
GM
Matt wrote a Morning Dump that contains an interview with the legendary Bob Lutz, who held back no punches about modern BMW design. Ranwhenparked:
The headline could easily read “Ex-BMW Exec Bob Lutz Has Functioning Eyes, Brain”
Sid Bridge:
BMW Exec: Sir, I thought you should hear what Bob Lutz said. BMW President: I hope this is worth interrupting my lunch. BMW Exec: He said our cars are ugly. BMW President: What does he know?! Now go fetch me some more onion rings to put on top of my Kimchi & Durian sandwich and don’t get any on the shag carpet. Oh, and check and see if my new “Best of Slim Whitman” CD came in. Say, why don’t you drop by this weekend and we’ll catch up on the the absolute best James Bond movies with George Lazenby. And go ahead and put a few bucks on the Dallas Cowboys for me. I think this is gonna be their year.
Peel
Jason wrote a Cold Start about the Peel P50, and I love how the advertisement shows what appears to be a woman meeting a guy for a coffee date by driving her car into the shop. UnseenCat:
Taking a P50 into the cafe for a date does make some sense. After all, if the datye starts to go badly, or he turns out to be a creep, she can just slam the door and peel right out …
You could argue that an “electric car company” is not something that needs to exist, and that car companies should simply be Car Companies, not tied to any particular powertrain. But electric car companies do exist in the U.S. in the form of Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, and Slate, and the reason why is pretty obvious: “Electric” was the hottest new term of the last two decades, and a necessary one to raise enough capital to get a new company off the ground. Pitching a hybrid car company to a group of investors would have been as fruitful as the messages I used to send on dating apps. But now it’s 2025, and that hot “electric” term is now lukewarm at best.
A few months ago, I was at a Rivian event in which I asked a representative if the company would ever offer a gasoline range extender. The answer was an emphatic “no.” I asked the same question at a Lucid event and received the same answer. “The future is electric,” is the refrain I typically get from folks when I ask this question. To which I respond: “What’s your point?”
Telling me what the future is doesn’t seem particularly relevant. We could all be driving flying cars in the future, but if you started selling only flying cars today, you’d be a fool. This reminds me of 2022, when GM announced it would skip hybrids because the future is electric. More specifically, per the Detroit Free Press, Mary Barra said:
“GM has more than 25 years of electrification experience including with the plug-in vehicles like the Chevy Volt …From that experience, our vision is for an all-electric future. Our strategy is focused on battery electric vehicles as they represent the best solution and advance our vision for an all-electric future.”
I remember thinking upon reading that: “Sure, the future may be electric, but you’re selling cars now, in the future’s past. Right now, people want hybrids.” As expected, GM backtracked on its plan to offer only EVs and to skip hybrids, and is now going heavy into the hybrid game (while still offering a solid array of EVs).
Too Many Companies Are Splitting Too Small A Slice
The future is electric, but today is not electric. Toyota understood this because they understand consumers, though they got dragged by journalists for not going all-in on the new hotness. But sales numbers bear out that hybrids are the answer, and what’s more, automakers like Rivian and Lucid losing absolute metric crap-tons of money on electric vehicles — and other car companies like Ford deciding it’s worth losing $20 billion to cut many of its electric vehicle programs altogether — goes to show that the market just isn’t there for fully electric cars.
Of course, there’s Tesla, a company that managed something amazing. Lightning in a bottle, you might call it. It was an American company that came out of nowhere, developed its own charging infrastructure, created electric cars that were generations better than anything up to that point, and offered the cars at a rather competitive price. They also had a larger-than-life CEO who was admired by most of the world at the time, and also, they made loads of money by selling ZEV credits to automakers running afoul of CO2 compliance. That credit system is likely gone in the United States, thanks to the new presidential administration.
I get the impression that many companies saw Tesla’s success as proof that a sustainable EV company can exist. But in my eyes, to try to replicate Tesla’s model is silly. Tesla is one-of-one. An outlier. I tweeted this thought over a year ago, suggesting that EV companies should hybridize ASAP:
My suggestions to EV-only automakers: 1. Be careful looking at Tesla and thinking “I want those sales numbers.” You are not Tesla. Don’t try to be Tesla. Tesla is an anomaly. And 2. Get on the range extender bandwagon as soon as possible. Transition back to BEV-only later. https://t.co/1b7H2jmfN0
You know who replied to that tweet? None other than Ford’s own Jim Farley, CEO:
Now it’s nearly 14 months later, and Ford announced that its departing fully-electric F-150 Lighting is being replaced by a range-extended F-150 Lightning.
This is what happens when you make sh*t products. This has nothing to do with making EV’s; this has everything to do with making bad EV’s. https://t.co/f3kxBlR6Ul
You can see my opinion on the matter in the reply above.
This seems like a smart move on Ford’s part. The truth is that fully-electric pickup trucks make little sense for the mass market, and if you don’t believe me, just listen to what the former CEO of Lucid (an electric car company that refuses to offer gasoline engines) told me when I interviewed him last year:
“But let me tell you the reality is, and it’s me saying this, that it is not possible today with today’s technology to make an affordable pickup truck with anything [other] than internal combustion.”
This is just reality, which is where major corporations have to live.
With Fully Electric Vehicles, America’s Love For Big Cars Gets Expensive
America loves large cars, and large cars typically have what’s called in the industry “a high Vehicle Demand Energy” (VDE). This is the energy needed to move the vehicles down the road, and though it can be affected by powertrain (because, for example, a gas engine requires more cooling, which can lead to more drag; an electric vehicle is heavier, which can lead to more rolling resistance, etc.), this is more about the vehicle in which the powertrain is placed than the powertrain itself.
America’s taste for large vehicles means we tend to drive cars that require lots of energy just to go down the road, and if that vehicle is, for example, a pickup truck (like a Chevy Silverado EV) or SUV (like a Rivian R1S), you’re going to need a massive battery to achieve the range that the average American wants. Both the Silverado EV and the Rivian R1S offer batteries over 140 kWh, with the former offering one over 200 kWh.
Add a big trailer to those vehicles, and even those giant batteries won’t be enough to overcome not only range issues, but recharging issues, as infrastructure still isn’t good enough, and pull-through chargers for trailer-pulling pickups just aren’t very common even in 2025. When it comes to towing, EVs are simply the wrong tool for the job, as I wrote last year.
Image: Lucid
With Lucid and Rivian losing billions of dollars annually as EV demand remains softer than expected (though we do have some early signs that Rivian is turning things around, with a few quarters of positive gross profits, though net profits remain elusive), there’s an obvious question worth asking: Should these companies build cars that appeal to more than just a small electric sliver of the American car market-pie?
Rivian thinks the upcoming R2 and R3x will be enough. I have no doubt that they’ll sell relatively well, but I do have doubt about whether they’ll bring Rivian to sustainable net profitability. After all, the world already has cool, small electric SUVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Chevy Equinox EV. And sure, you could say the world has lots of great hybrids, but the sales figures are on a different level. With hybrids, there’s more than just a sliver of the American market “pie” to share.
EREVS Are A Compromise That Can Minimize The Most Important Compromise
Image: Ram
America wants hybrids; when Scout offered its vehicles as fully-electric or range-extended hybrid models, the majority of pre-orders were for the hybrids. And for good reasons. Though some EV purists call hybrids “compromises,” in truth, every car is a compromise, and a hybrid’s main advantage is that it’s actually a compromise-minimizer. If you think about the compromises that actually matter in the car world, it’s not compromises to packaging or complexity or even vehicle performance — what matters, big picture, is minimizing compromises to the way a driver actually uses their vehicle, while keeping the biggest compromise — cost — down. And in this way, hybrids are less of a compromise than BEVs.
I live in California, where the infrastructure is better than pretty much anywhere stateside. Still, charging a BEV can be an inconvenience compared to filling up a gas car, and what’s more, it can actually cost as much or more. I’m not saying charging a car here is bad — if you leverage the right apps, and are smart about planning, you can really get a lot out of driving a BEV (and you can save money on driving) — but the compromise is nonzero. It’s not about charging infrastructure or charging times or poor towing range — more than anything, it’s about cost.
Americans want to drive big cars, and they want to be able to not have to worry about range anxiety. This RA term is one that lots of EV journalists have historically dismissed. “Nobody needs 300 miles of range. 100 is just fine!” many say. In fact, here’s a Facebook reply to our story on Ford ditching the BEV Lightning for an EREV:
The Lightning is an excellent vehicle that won’t sell because truck buyers think they’re going to tow a trailer 500 miles every weekend. They won’t, and the range of an Lightning would actually meet their needs 99% of the time, but people stupidly make buying decisions based on that remote possibility that they might need extra capability someday.
I’ve heard this argument 1000 times. “People don’t need 300 miles of range! Just buy a car with a small battery in it!” My engineer-brain totally gets it, and concurs.
But, the truth is, this doesn’t really matter; one of the most important things for any car company to understand is that humans are irrational. A Porsche 911 buyer doesn’t buy a track weapon to actually go on a track. A Jeep Wrangler buyer isn’t going to tackle Pritchett Canyon in Moab. A Ford F-150 buyer isn’t going to tow 10,000 pounds or haul a ton in their bed. On a less extreme level, a typical Toyota Rav4 buyer with one child could probably make do with a Honda Accord. Heck, many Honda Accord buyers could probably make do with a Honda Fit.
This “overbuying” is something inherent to Americans as consumers, and calling us all dumb and trying to force us to buy cars for purely rational reasons has historically not worked. If it had, we’d all have been driving Toyota Priuses for the past 20 years. Instead, the Toyota Rav4 SUV and Ford F-Series pickup are the best-selling cars in 2025.
This is where the market is, and this is where automakers have to go. Give consumers what they want, even if those cars aren’t purely logical. Especially in the current political climate, expecting strict regulations to shape consumer preference doesn’t make sense anymore, and if you let consumers choose, they’ll keep overbuying as we have for the last century. Americans want big cars, they want them cheap, they want them to be able to drive far, and they want them to be able to fill up quickly.
With an EV, this combination of traits simply cannot coexist. Even most modern EV automakers know this. There’s a reason why the best-selling electric cars in the U.S. are ones with ranges over 300 miles. These vehicles force their drivers to carry around 1,000+ pounds worth of expensive batteries that they rarely use. For everyday driving, for those who can charge at home, 50 miles of range would do, but most of the most popular EVs offer over 300 miles. That’s 5/6 of the battery that is just being dragged around daily, waiting for an edge case situation. That’s a lot of expensive weight being hauled around.
An EREV gets rid of half that battery and replaces it with a small gasoline generator. Now, instead of 5/6 of a 100kWh battery being dragged around for most days, a smaller portion of a smaller battery is dragged around daily, along with a small gas generator. The 100 kWh battery can become a 40kWh battery, and now the car can go about 120 miles on a charge. When that runs out, instead of pulling from a huge, pricey 60 kWh battery for the edge case, the little gas engine fires up.
The Gas Generator Doesn’t Have To Be Great Or Expensive
Image: BMW
Installing a small gas generator sounds simple enough, but it really isn’t. Modifying an existing EV platform to accept a gas motor would also take a bit of work (cooling/packaging/crash are all considerations). If you were an independent “EV Car Company,” you’d do best to just buy a cheap gas motor from someone.
My BMW i3 REX, for example, uses a little scooter engine from Taiwanese company Kimco. It’s more than adequate because I rarely use it. Most days it sits there doing nothing in much the same way that 1,000 pounds of expensive batteries sit around in a typical BEV, also doing nothing. If you’re a major automaker with gas engines in your other offerings, you can just pluck a little 2.0-liter out of something. The gas motor doesn’t have to be amazing or expensive. It just needs to be able to generate power for edge-case driving scenarios.
Are EV Car Companies EV-First or Environment-First?
Anyway, with Ford’s announcement to turn the F-150 Lightning into an EREV instead of a BEV, I felt compelled to write my thoughts on the matter. I think it’s a great idea — such a great idea that I think other automakers should follow suit.
Surely, 2026 will be the year of the hybrid, and the easiest way for a company that builds EV platforms to hybridize is to incorporate an EREV. This, I want to really emphasize, is not in any way, shape, or form a defeat. I think many EV purists think offering a gasoline range extender is somehow shameful. On the contrary, it’s a fantastic thing for electrification and for the environment, and I think any car company that bills itself as one that cares about the environment should jump on board, as an EREV can actually be better for the environment than a BEV, especially if the range extender is rarely used.
More importantly, the goal should be to, as quickly as possible, get as many people as possible driving electric as often as possible. That can happen if you bring down cost and allay fears related to range anxiety/charging issues. In short, by letting people drive electric vehicles without forcing them to make the biggest compromise, which is a significant change to how they use a product (and also pay a lot for the car).
OK, So There Are Some Huge Branding Problems
Image: Rivian
One topic I cannot ignore is the branding of it all. If a company has built its identity on a powertrain, things get tricky if they want to offer a different one. Rivian is all-electric, anti-gas. Lucid is the same. Tesla is the same. Since their inception, they’ve been no-gas, all-electric companies, largely because none of these companies would exist otherwise. How, then, can you maintain brand integrity if you offer a gasoline range extender?
It’s hard, because brand is everything. That’s the primary value of these companies, especially the ones that aren’t making money — their names, which they’ve painstakingly and precisely built over the years. Had these companies built their brands on environment-first versus BEV-first, this could have been a fairly easy bridge to cross, but again, BEV is what got investors’ ears the past 10 years or so, so the brands find themselves in a tricky spot. How long can they keep burning cash? With no federal rebates and no carbon credits to sell, can they bank on enough organic EV-market growth and battery price reduction to get to the promised land? And if so, can they keep treading water for another year? Five years? Ten years?
Big, diversified car companies like GM can keep rolling out BEVs because they have gas trucks they can make money on. But if you’re Rivian or Lucid, is there a point where hybridizing just makes sense, if not from a financial standpoint, simply from an engineering one? Americans want big trucks, they don’t want range anxiety or long charge times, they want towing capability, and they want a low price tag — the engineering solution, as Lucid’s own Peter Rawlinson made clear — is gas. Why not offer the best engineering solution regardless of powertrain?
The answer is branding. An EV brand is an EV brand. You live by it, you may die by it.
I Love EREVs, But Even They May Have A Hard Time Selling Over Gas Or Conventional Hybrid Cars
Though I think EREVs offer the best of all worlds, and they give EV car companies a way to hybridize on a single platform shared with a BEV, as I wrote in my article I Don’t Think Anyone Really Knows How The U.S. Market Will Respond To EVs With Gasoline Range Extenders, I by no means think EREVs or BEVa are going to be participating in any cake walks over the coming years. With EPA credits and rebates gone, and with gas prices fairly reasonable, consumers are asking themselves why they should electrify at all. And if they do want to save some at the pump, why drive electric when they can just buy a 40 MPG hybrid like a Toyota Rav4 Hybrid? It’s this thinking that led me to my take on the Slate (which I think would have more legs as a cheap gas car).
Electric cars are a tough sell, range extender-equipped or not. Performance, though, is fantastic. In cities with high fuel prices (where I live in LA), driving electric daily is awesome. Maintenance is basically zero (I change my range extender’s oil every year or two, and that’s it). In traffic, an EV is a quiet, lovely sanctuary compared to an ICE car. There are so many traits of an electric car that make it a much, much better daily commuter than a gas car. It’s just a matter of making that experience more attainable to more consumers, and allowing consumers to enjoy that without having to change how they want to use their vehicle.
EV Car Companies Are In A Tricky Spot
I just don’t see what the other options are for electric car companies, other than praying costs go down very quickly, that the American market pie-slice for EVs gets bigger, or that American big-car sensibilities change. Big expensive EVs are just not going to work for the masses (see Kia EV9 and Ioniq 9 sales, which admittedly are down due to production woes, but still), and while I’d like to see more small, cheap EVs like Ford’s upcoming Universal platform cars, America today loves Big. So why wait when EREVs offer a great, positive opportunity to get more people driving electric every day? Offering a range extender is not a defeat; it’s a win for the consumer, for the environment, and potentially for car companies.
Potentially.
For a more complete breakdown of Range Extended EVs’ benefits and drawbacks, see my three articles on the topic. Note: I am not an oracle, and many of you, dear readers, are geniuses, so I welcome your thoughts in the comments. Also, for the EV-purists who will inevitably be upset that I like something other than a pure BEV: I also love BEVs. In fact, I love them so much that I wrote positive reviews about the Cybertruck and Fisker Ocean. BEVs are an excellent option for folks who can charge at home/work, requiring less maintenance than an EREV. Neither BEVs nor EREVs are not the answer for everyone, but variety is key.
Blue Origin has "paused" its New Shepard program for the next two years, a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative.
The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.
So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company's longest-running program?
"We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn," wrote the company's chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on Friday afternoon. "We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation's goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence."
Move was a surprise
The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission eight days ago, launching six people into space. Moreover, the company has four new boosters in various stages of development as well as two new capsules under construction. Blue Origin has been selling human flights for more than a year and is still commanding a per-seat price of approximately $1 million based on recent sales. It was talking about expansion to new spaceports in September.
Still, there have always been questions about the program's viability. In November 2023, Ars published an article asking how long Bezos would continue to subsidize the New Shepard program, which at the time was “hemorrhaging” money. Sources indicate the program has gotten closer to breaking even, but it remains a drain on Blue Origin's efforts.
More than 500 people spend part or all of their time working on New Shepard, but it also draws on other resources within the company. Although it is a small fraction of the company’s overall workforce, it is nonetheless a distraction from the company's long-term ambitions to build settlements in space where millions of people will live, work, and help move industrial activity off Earth and into orbit.
In a company-wide email on Friday, Phil Joyce, senior vice president for New Shepard at Blue Origin, said the team has safely flown many people to space and proven technologies used to land the New Glenn rocket. "This program has laid the groundwork for our company's future success," he wrote. "We should all be proud of what we've accomplished together."
Limp said the company would support its employees in finding other roles at the company, "particularly within Lunar and New Glenn." This underscores that this decision, almost certainly made by Bezos, is intended to accelerate the company's efforts to fly New Glenn more frequently and deliver on its cargo and crew lunar landers.
Ultimately, this is good for NASA
This certainly dovetails with NASA's priorities, as it is counting on Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX for contracts to land humans on the Moon as part of the Artemis Program.
Multiple industry sources on Friday afternoon expressed both regret and appreciation for the decision to move on from New Shepard. The program offered a safe way to fly humans into space, with minimal training. The dozens of people who flew experienced an amazing 10 minutes: launch, ascent, weightlessness, a grand view of Earth, and a return to the planet; almost all were in awe afterward.
However, the flights of Bezos and other prominent people, notably Katy Perry, opened up Blue Origin and the broader commercial space industry to the criticism that spaceflight was just a plaything for billionaires, celebrities, and their toys.
The decision to end New Shepard will inconvenience a few dozen very rich people waiting their turn to go into space on New Shepard, but more broadly, it is a win for the US space industry. Blue Origin has justifiably been criticized for trying to do too many things at once, resulting in all of its programs moving too slowly. Focusing on New Glenn and the lunar lander program in the near term will be a great boon for space access and the nation's competition with China to secure the Moon.
If you’ve ever driven an electric car or have been in close proximity to one in a parking lot, you’ve probably heard a strange noise emitting from under the hood or bumper. That’s because, as of September 2019, EVs are required by law in the U.S. to emit an audible noise when traveling at speeds up to 19 mph to alert pedestrians of their presence, per Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 141.
Other than tire noise, EVs are usually totally silent on the outside, since they don’t have the noise of thousands of little explosions from an internal combustion engine coming from an exhaust. So it’d make sense for an otherwise quiet two-ton-plus battering ram to make a noise to alert the people around it of its presence.
The NHTSA doesn’t specify the type of sound EVs have to make, though, which has led to some fascinating noises, some of which you probably wouldn’t expect from a car without an engine. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N’s fake turbo four-cylinder noises and the Dodge Charger Daytona’s Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust, which replicates the sound of a naturally aspirated V8, come to mind.
Most carmakers go in a different direction for their EVs, though, electing to play futuristic hums through the external speakers to alert pedestrians. Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, and many others are well known for this. Nissan, with its new Leaf crossover, takes these noises to a totally different, much more haunting place.
This Sound Makes Me Uncomfortable
While rotting my brain on TikTok, I came across this video of a new Nissan Leaf reversing. Normally, seeing a car reverse through a parking garage isn’t very interesting. But if you listen with sound, you’ll understand why I’m sharing it here.
Like the other brands mentioned above, Nissan employs a sort of futuristic high-pitched hum for its reversing noise. But it sounds far more… sinister than any other car I’ve heard before, for two main reasons. The first is the tone itself. It reminds me of something you’d hear in the background of a sci-fi horror movie or video game. The second is the pulsing delivery of the sound. It’s an on-off noise rather than a continuous delivery, making it feel like a church chorus you’d hear when you’re about to face a boss in a Dark Souls game.
I could imagine it being overlaid in that scene from the 2013 feature film Prometheus, where the astronaut-explorers are marching into the alien-made superstructure they just discovered for the first time. Or in the video game Halo 3, when you’re about to face off with the Flood, a parasitic alien life form that turns the dead bodies of your allies into zombified enemy corpses. My colleague Jason had another apt suggestion:
If I heard that, I would certainly assume the latter, Jason.
Nissan Was Nice Enough To Explain It To Me
Source: Nissan
Rather than just assume the Leaf’s engineers are trying to traumatize pedestrians with every gearshift into reverse, I reached out to the brand to see if it could tell me why, exactly, the Leaf’s backup sound is so unsettling. A representative gave me a nice, detailed response that actually sounds pretty logical:
The sound you’re hearing is part of the LEAF’s Vehicle Sound for Pedestrians (VSP) system, required because EVs are very quiet at low speeds. It uses a distinctive, intermittent tone in reverse to make the car’s direction immediately clear and ensure it’s easily noticed by pedestrians, including those with visual impairments. The intermittent pattern is intentional — it’s more attention grabbing than a constant tone and helps differentiate reversing from low speed forward motion, which uses a continuous sound.
The point of a reverse noise is to be noticed, not appreciated. And if there’s one thing this scary backup sound does, with its underworld tone and perfectly cinematic pulses, it’s get noticed (by me, anyway). While I hope I never have to hear it in real life, I have no choice but to commend Nissan’s engineers for their ability to keep pedestrians on their toes, and possibly their hair on end.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is a powerful tool, but like many powerful tools, it has the potential to allow humans to let our natural abilities atrophy. It’s the same way that the invention of the jackhammer pretty much caused humans to lose the ability to pound through feet of concrete and asphalt with our bare fists. We’re already seeing effects of this with the widespread use of ChatGPT seemingly causing cognitive decline and atrophying writing skills, and now I’m starting to think advanced driver’s aids, especially more comprehensive ones like Level 2 supervised semi-automated driving systems are doing the same thing: making people worse drivers.
I haven’t done studies to prove this in any comprehensive way, so at this point I’m still just speculating, like a speculum. I’m not entirely certain a full study is even needed at this point, though, because there are already some people just flat-out admitting to it online, for everyone to see, free of shame and, perhaps, any degree of self-reflection.
Specifically, I’m referring to this tweet that has garnered over two million views so far:
The other night I was driving in pouring rain, fully dark, and the car randomly lost GPS.
No location. No navigation. Which also meant no FSD.
I tried two software resets while driving just to get GPS back. Nothing worked. So there I was, manually driving in terrible… pic.twitter.com/hKlU6AlCEZ
Oh my. If, for some reason, you’re not able to read the tweet, here’s the full text of it:
“The other night I was driving in pouring rain, fully dark, and the car randomly lost GPS. No location. No navigation. Which also meant no FSD. I tried two software resets while driving just to get GPS back. Nothing worked. So there I was, manually driving in terrible conditions, unsure of positioning, no assistance, no guidance. And it genuinely felt unsafe. For me and for the people in the car. Then it hit me. This feeling – the stress, the uncertainty, the margin for error – this is how most drivers feel every single day. No FSD. No constant awareness. No backup. We’ve normalised danger so much that we only notice it when the safety net disappears.”
Wow. Drunk Batman himself couldn’t have beaten an admission like this out of me. There’s so much here, I’m not even really sure where to start. First, it’s night, and it’s “fully dark?” That’s kind of how night works, champ. And, sure, pouring rain is hardly ideal, but it’s very much part of life here on Earth. It’s perfectly normal to feel some stress when driving in the dark, in bad weather, but it’s not “how most drivers feel every single day.” Most drivers are used to driving, and they deal with poor conditions with awareness and caution, but, ideally, not the sort of panic suggested in this tweet.
Also, my quote didn’t replicate the weird spacing and short, staccato paragraphs that made this whole thing read like one of those weird LinkedIn posts where some fake thing someone’s kid said because a revelation of B2B best practices, or some shit.
It seems that the reason this guy felt the way he did when the driver aids were removed is that he’s, frankly, not used to actually driving. In fact, if you look at his profile on eX-Twitter, he notes that he’s a Tesla supervisor, which is pretty significantly different than calling yourself a Tesla driver:
This is an objectively terrible and deeply misguided way to view your relationship with your car for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that even if you do consider yourself a “supervisor” – a deeply flawed premise to begin with – the very definition of Level 2 semi-autonomy is that the person “supervising” has to be ready to take over with zero warning, which means you need to be able to drive your damn car, no matter the situation it happens to be in.
If anything, you would think the takeaway here would have been, shit, I need to be a more competent driver and less of a candy-ass as opposed to coming away thinking, as stated in the tweet,
“We’ve normalised danger so much that we only notice it when the safety net disappears.”
This is so deeply and eye-rollingly misguided I almost don’t know where to start, except I absolutely do know where to start: the idea that the “safety net” is Tesla’s FSD software. Because that is exactly the opposite of how Level 2 systems are designed to work! You, the human, are the safety net! If you’ve already made the arguably lazy and questionable decision to farm out the majority of the driving task to a system that lacks redundant sensor backups and is still barely out of Beta status, then you better damn well be ready to take over when the system fails, because that’s how it’s designed to work.
To be fair, our Tesla Supervisor here did take over when his FSD went down due to loss of a GPS signal, but, based on what he said, he felt “unsafe” for himself and the passengers in the car. The lack of FSD isn’t the problem here; the problem is that the human driver didn’t feel safe operating their own motor vehicle.
Not only was he uncomfortable driving in the inclement weather and lack of light (again, that’s just nighttime, a recurring phenomenon), but the reason he had to debase himself so was because of a technical failure of FSD, which, it should be noted, can happen at any time, without warning. Hence the need to be able to drive a damn car, comfortably.
What does he mean when he says, referring to human driving, “no constant awareness?” Almost every driver I know is constantly aware that they are driving. That’s part of driving. Do people get distracted, look at phones, get lost in reveries, or whatever? Sure they do. That’s not ideal, but it doesn’t mean people aren’t aware.
Unsurprisingly, the poster of this admission has been getting a good bit of blowback in comments from people a little less likely to soil themselves when they have to drive in the rain. So, he provided a follow-up tweet:
To everyone that says I should’ve have a license:
This is a true story – it was pouring rain a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday night, with insane wind making it a recipe for disaster. I had just washed the car and was on my way to pick someone up.
I’m not really sure what this follow-up actually clarified, but he did describe the experience in a bit more detail:
“I knew the rough direction but not exactly. I never use my phone while driving, so 1 rely solely on the car nav. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working, and I had to pull over to double-check where I was going.”
That’s just…driving. This is how all driving was up until about 15 years ago or so. I have an abysmal sense of direction, so I feel like I spent most of my pre-GPS driving life lost at least a quarter of the time I was driving anywhere. But you figure it out. You take some wrong turns, you end up in places you didn’t originally plan to be in, you looked at maps or signs or asked someone and you eventually got there. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what you had, and when we could finally, say, print out MapQuest directions and clip them to the dash, oh man, that was a game changer.
I took plenty of long road trips in marginal cars with no phone and just signs and vague notions to guide me where I was going. If I had to do it today, sure, there would be some significant adapting to exhume my pre-GPS navigational skills – well, skills is too generous a word, so maybe we can just say ability – but I think it could be done. And every driver really should be able to do the same thing.
FSD (Supervised) is a tool, a crutch, and if you find yourself in a position where its absence is causing you fear instead of just a bit of annoyance, you’re no longer really qualified to drive a car. Teslas (and other mass-market cars with similar L2 driver assist systems) don’t have redundant sensors, most don’t have the means to clean camera lenses (or radar/lidar windows and domes), and none of them are rated for actually unsupervised driving. Which means that you, the person in the driver’s seat, need to actually live up to the name of that seat: you have to know how to drive a damn car.
This tweet should be taken as a warning, because while it’s fun to feel all smug because you can drive in the rain and ridicule this hapless fellow, I guarantee you he’s not alone. There are other people whose driving skills are atrophying because of reliance on systems like Tesla’s FSD, and this is a very bad path to go down. Our Tesla Supervisor here may actually have been unsafe when he had to take full control of the car and didn’t feel comfortable. And that’s not a technical problem, it’s a perception problem, and it’s not even the original poster’s fault entirely – there is a lot of encouragement from Tesla and the surrounding community to consider FSD to be far more capable than it actually is.
Driving is dangerous, and it’s good to feel that, sometimes! You should always be aware that when you’re driving, you’re in a metal-and-plastic, ton-and-a-half box hurtling down haphazardly maintained roads at a mile per minute. If that’s not a little scary to you, then you’re either a liar, a corpse, or one of those kids who started karting at four years old.
We all need to accept the reality of what driving is, and the inherent, wonderful madness behind it. I personally know myself well enough to realize how easily I can be lured into false senses of security by modern cars and start driving like a moron; to combat this, my preferred daily drivers are ridiculous, primitive machines incapable of hiding the fact that they’re just metal boxes with lots of sharp, poke-y bits that are whizzing along far too quickly. Which, in the case of my cars, can mean speeds of, oh, 45 mph.
The point is, everyone on the road should be able to capably drive, in pretty much any conditions, without the aid of some AI. Even when we have more advanced automated driving systems, this should still be the case, at least for vehicles capable of being driven by a human. But for right now, systems like FSD are not the safety net: the safety net is always us. We’re always responsible when we’re in the driver’s seat, and if we forget that, we could end up in far worse situations than just embarrassing ourselves online.
One of the many ways wealthy people retain and grow their wealth is through the art of secured loans. Also known as collateral- or securities-based financing, it allows someone to put up some sort of asset—real estate, stocks, bonds, etc.—as collateral to secure a favorable loan from a bank.
There are three main benefits of taking a loan out on an asset rather than selling that asset to get the cash. The first is speed. Selling a piece of real estate could take months or years, but a bank can transfer cash into your account in no time at all. Rich people routinely do this to make big purchases or quick investments.
The second reason is to avoid taxes. If you sell a stock you’ve made money on, you’ll be subject to capital gains tax. But by using the stock as collateral, you get to keep it in your portfolio and avoid being taxed. The next benefit is lower interest rates. Securities-based interest rates are usually lower than traditional loans, since you’re putting up a specific piece of collateral that can be seized by the bank if you default on the loan.
In addition to more traditional securities, banks have also begun accepting more unusual assets as securities for loans. Art pieces, watches, jewelry, and wine collections have become popular collateral in recent years. Now, you can add car collections to that list.
To These People, Expensive Cars Are Basically Investments You Can Drive
If you think these are cars that are meant to be driven and not appreciating assets that should be kept safe and secure, you’re not looking at cars like a wealthy person would. Source: Mercedes Streeter
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest bank on the planet, today announced plans to expand car-collection-based lending services, which allow people to borrow against their rare, vintage, or custom vehicles, to Europe (it was already available in the U.S., unsurprisingly). According to Bloomberg, cars are a pretty important asset for younger, wealthy individuals:
The lending push comes as wealthy individuals use car collections — and other physical assets — as a way to diversify fortunes, building on the auto sector’s traditional status for passion projects. Classic cars from European brands such as Ferrari NV, Porsche AG and Mercedes-Benz Group AG have outperformed stock markets in recent years, and the overall market still grew in 2024, even amid a broader downturn for luxury assets.
High-end automobiles rank as the most popular luxury asset younger members of the world’s ultra-rich aspire to own personally besides real estate, according to Knight Frank’s 2025 Wealth Report. That puts cars ahead of demand for private jets, wine and art collections and superyachts.
This type of loan is, obviously, a lot different than the type of car-backed loans most people are familiar with, known as title loans. While these mega car collection-backed loans provide favorable terms and rates to their borrowers, title loans are often predatory in nature, trapping borrowers in a cycle of debt with massively high interest rates and fees. Title loans are usually tied to just one vehicle, and typically have far shorter terms (15 to 30 days, according to Experian). Title loans are so predatory, they’re actually banned in nearly half of U.S. states.
“Hi, yes, I’d like to take a loan out against my collection, which includes a 1959 Goggomobile Dart Roadster.” – Whoever currently owns this car, probably. Source: Mecum Auctions
As an enthusiast who likes to see cars being driven, this is particularly sad to me. Sure, there are a handful of ultra-rare, 1-of-1 museum-piece vehicles that should probably stay off public roads. But the vast majority of “collector” cars deserve time on the street, not stashed away in a climate-controlled building at the back of some dude’s Hamptons estate. Taking out loans on these collections will, presumably, further discourage their owners from driving the cars in their collections, lest they risk their leveraged investment plunging in value thanks to a few extra miles on the odometer.
It’s in these moments that I wonder what I’d do if I were one of these rich people. Would I use my collection of old BMWs and weird French cars as collateral for my next big real estate acquisition? Or would I stick to my guns? Alas, I am not wealthy and likely never will be. It’s a whole different world out there. And now loans backed by your dream cars are helping fuel it.
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