You’d be hard pressed to find any new vehicle that hasn’t seen a significant price increase since that time.

It’s still a truck you can get for $26k-28k and is only about $3k more than the cheapest cars sold in America.

I think your sentiment is an understandable bit of cynicism around EVs, and one that US consumers have felt for a while. It seems like the whole concept of the EV is dead. Nobody wants it, carmakers are pulling back.

Meanwhile, EVs are exploding in popularity and value basically all the other markets outside of the United States.

In my opinion, the idea that a good and affordable EV product will not become mainstream is sticking around because American car buyers have been starved of new EV models due to a market of weak demand and revoked incentives. This is going to change soon, and this change will hit the consumer market relatively suddenly. A lot of the cost challenges with EVs have evaporated.

In other words, yeah, Ford is easily going to make a $30,000 EV pickup. I totally believe it.

Remember when Toyota said they’re done bothering with EVs? Then all of a sudden the 2026 bz refresh is a legit EV, and now the new Lexus ES is launching with the EV model being the highest performance and cheapest model.

The Rivian R2 is yet another huge deal about to launch on the premium side of the market. I’d have a hard time figuring out why what I would choose something like a gasoline BMW X3 over the R2 - they’re pretty much in the same price range.

In other words, the era of EVs costing $10-20k more than an equivalent gasoline car is abruptly ending.

The issue is that Slate has completely underestimated customer preference for four door vehicles.

Two door vehicle variants have absolutely died off in the market and I’d say with good reason.

Find a two door Jeep Wrangler. You’ll find 20-30 four door jeeps before you find a two door.

Can you even imagine in 2026 the idea of an Accord Coupe, a Camry Solara, Volkswagen Eos/Cabriolet, Ford Explorer/Bronco 2-door, Civic Coupe, Ford ZX2, Chevy Cavalier 2-door, the list just goes on and on.

Back in the day chopping off two doors was a semi-legitimate way to get a barebones base model or I guess look cooler or something. Honestly, I don’t understand how the practicality trade-off ever made sense.

Maybe in the days before heavily automated assembly lines, two door vehicles were legitimately cheaper to make?

Zoning laws, noise ordinances, toxic waste disposal, food safety standards, etc.

I can't run a frozen lasagna factory from my house. It's illegal. I don't have political approval.

If the people do not approve of data centers, they don't get built. Simple as that. Businesses do not have an inherent right to exist. Businesses are granted their existence and places of operation by the state and local municipalities that license them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Some highlights are:

- Energy use per capita has been declining since 2000

- Overall energy use has been basically flat since 2000

- Essentially, coal is being replaced by gas, almost 1:1. Lump both together and their relative share of the market is pretty stable.

- Solar went from 0.3 to 2.8% in the last 10 years, wind from 0.3% to 4.2% in the last 20 years. 7% wind/solar isn't world-leading but getting from basically 0 to 7% in 20 years is significant movement.

In the US, everyone that has access to electricity has had it for decades.

In China, the first year where 100% of the population has had access to electricity is 2013, according to the World Bank.

China is also putting its middle class into automobiles almost a century later than the US did, and they’re almost entirely skipping internal combustion. The US has basically no urgency to replace internal combustion as they have a well-established supply of oil.

If you are using an AI system to read your codebase from your local folder and make changes, whether or not you have a VM running or not is inconsequential. The Claude extension and/or CLI doesn’t need a VM to send code back to the mothership, you’re already running an executable program and granting it directory access.

Whether you trust a company as a vendor is typically based on their privacy policy, EULA, and your contract with them (if applicable). Those are the bits that have legal enforceability.

SpaceX doesn’t really have those advantages from day one.

Tesla may be overvalued but I think the stock would have been negatively impacted if they spent the two years losing money.

It seems like the VM is a core part of how you use the application.

Heck, nobody seems to care that Toyota engines/transmissions sound like a vacuum cleaner and have pretty mediocre NVH on models like the Corolla, but they buy those products for reliability and efficiency.

The hyperscreen from a physical hardware perspective looks strangely dated to me as well, depending on the specific car model.

Chinese EVs are leading and that doesn’t necessarily mean being the best, most advanced vehicles. They are leading in value/pricing, and in many regions they are leading in sales.

BYD sells almost double the EV volume of Tesla globally as of December 2025. They are objectively leading in that respect.

I think the parent comment of yours made a good point (or at least adjacent to a good point) about China’s ability to enter the market: they can’t compete with 100 years of internal combustion engine development along with the vast parts supplier network of the West, but they can compete on battery chemistry, battery supply, motors, and the more vertically integrated EV space where automakers don’t need to depend on a huge network of parts suppliers like they did in the past.

I also think that a lot of pushback to the innovation that China is delivering is criticism that is stuck in the past. If you buy a Xiaomi car, it integrates perfectly with all your Xiaomi consumer devices. You can control your rice cooker or robot vacuum from your car’s integrated infotainment system. This type of approach was exactly what Apple was going to deliver before they abandoned their automotive project.

Or, you can buy a Mercedes and you’ll get a car with more precise handling and perfectly tuned driving characteristics. The infotainment system looks like Windows Vista.

Which side of the aisle do you think most consumers care about? I think most people buy into Xiaomi’s approach.

The idea that we can manage heat in a data center scale in low earth orbit is pretty much impossible.

Look into the physics of the problem and how heat transfer works in the vacuum of space.

But then I go back to my original question where I ponder whether that vision results in a gigantic company.

I look at some of the contracts I found some news articles about: Space Force has a $437 million (not billion) contract with ViaSat and SES, the Pentagon is said to be spending $13 billion on LEO satellite programs.

And we can’t forget that SpaceX doesn’t actually make any of the robots. They only make the communications stack.

AT&T has a market capitalization of about $150 billion, for comparison.

Let’s say a rural town has lost population in the last 20 years, and most of the population that left is educated.

Now they need a teacher, which requires a bachelors or even masters degree.

The rural town’s unemployment rate is 10% but there are no qualified teachers who are unemployed.

So now we want to move someone in from a nearby urban center that has a big market of educated people. But the unemployment rate in that big urban area is 3%, and the area is wealthier with a higher salary rate for jobs across the income spectrum.

Let’s say my local teacher salary is $50,000, the big city teacher salary is $90,000, and the big city high school diploma career salary is $50,000.

I have to find someone who is a qualified teacher who isn’t already a teacher and isn’t already working someone where else that’s still paying better than my local area. Plus, that person has family, friends, and prefers the big city with all its amenities and infrastructure. I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move because I’m already employed and happy.

In contrast, someone in a foreign country is potentially getting a huge upgrade to move to the US or another developed wealthy country and is way more motivated to make that leap.

I imagine these programs exist because the cost benefit just makes sense. Not only do you solve the imbalance faster, easier, cheaper, but now the wider country has gained educated population which is generally an economic benefit.

Certainly there are flaws in the system that need to be fixed. I don’t mean to advocate for it necessarily, just explain why I think it exists.

I would also point out that it’s not necessarily the case that the local labor market is being undercut (see the geographic example I gave above), it’s being expanded, and that includes adding someone who is paying taxes, buying stuff from local businesses, etc, which they do even before they become citizens.

And, of course, Apple’s best moat is the App Store.

The other competitors have their coding and productivity software, all the stuff they built around their models.

Apple doesn’t really have much of that and I think this is essentially their only hope to gain some B2B revenue from AI.

In other words, we can just assume this concept is possible and makes sense some level of financial sense for military, government, and high sensitivity use cases.

Well, find me a military contractor worth $1.5 trillion. Lockheed Martin is worth 1/10th of that.

Put Lockheed Martin and AT&T together and you’ve got about 1/5 of a SpaceX IPO target valuation.

Even if we make this assumption that the technology is marketable and has merit, it’s not like every company or government agency is going to want to switch to this technology. There are already a number of alternatives that can mitigate many to all of the risks that it solves.

The cost and complexity right now to deploy global services and their disaster recovery replicas to multiple distant data centers in the terrestrial world is already extremely low. Often, these features are offered as an off-the-shelf service.

California could sink into the ocean and my users wouldn’t even see a blip of downtime. Unless they live in California.

Heck, build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want. That would be cheaper than launching them into space. They might even be easier to defend than satellites and space DCs because a foreign adversary can’t just launch a missile up in the sky to get to it.

Going back to not really suspending disbelief as much, I also think performance and latency is going to be an insurmountable problem. Right now as we speak Starlink residential service is about 10x slower than my home fiber connection at the same price. How is this technology going to compete with data center level infrastructure even in an optimistic scenario?

I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM and they’ll give that thing a 15 gigabit connection.

You could either be 100% right, or this could be another exercise in failed human hubris.

I.e., Elon and the financial architects behind this IPO are assuming that it will work just like Tesla.

However, in the back of my mind I have to wonder if Elon has spent too much social capital for this kind of cult of meme stock strategy to work again.

This plan has potential to backfire since this unique IPO scheme became a big news story. The microscope is on the company more than it was for Tesla.

Of course, now that I think about it, it’s a bit of a silly statement for me to say “industry leading” in the context of a duopoly.

It’s great that he cites a lot of sources but some of them aren’t great, like the Microsoft story about canceling their Claude spend. I think that particular story isn’t much of an indicator of anything, and it might not even be true.

But the financial part…this guy isn’t the only person out there sounding the alarm about the math not mathing.