Very nice design.

An interesting note here is that the article mentions the resemblance to the eVX concept from Suzuki, which suggests this is one of the original cars Toyota said they’d be working on all the way back in 2019. At the time they also mentioned they’d be working on the model with Daihatsu, which suggests this could be a global model.

Regardless, even with the buybacks, their share price is still lower than when the strikes began.

This is key — GM would want to do a buyback if they think the stock is undervalued, which if they have a plan to deal with the additional costs, it is.

You’re right, what was I thinking? GM never makes mistakes.

And tellingly, Barra also managed to slip in some praise for the company’s internal combustion engine vehicles, which continue to generate profits for the company at a time when costs are rising across the board. “Our strong ICE business that frankly has gotten stronger, and we still believe there’s growth there,” Barra said.

Sigh. If only GM had actually stuck with the Voltec hybrid powertrain and pushed it forward. 🤦‍♂️

Schaefer’s actually talking about the Volkswagen brand, which is even worse, at around 3% — Audi and Porsche are doing fine, but they’re being dragged down by Volkswagen. A bigger problem for Volkswagen right now is they invested wildly into EVs, and are now having trouble justifying those expenses while their AV and SDV efforts flounder. Not long ago the committed figure was a staggering $193B for all three, which means they have a lot of cars to sell.

That doesn’t say anything about the workers not having jobs.

It’s horrible, isn’t it?

“Let’s make sure that we’re only able to choose names that end in -ick!”

The r/cars thread on the very same news has such a drastic difference in response.

I don’t think you’ve quite realized just how small the Twingo is — it’s a city car, the smallest class of car even available. It’s two segments down from the Civic or Corolla, it doesn’t even remotely compare to those nameplates.

The only remaining same-class car at all in North America is the Mitsubishi Mirage, a vehicle which starts at $17k CAD, or thirteen thousand dollars cheaper. Yes, the Mirage is a shitty car, but I really want to illustrate how far away from reality you are here.

This is all covered in the article itself:

The specialists use sand casting in a process called rapid prototyping to help validate Tesla’s designs and engineering specifications for its giant molds quickly and cheaply.

According to all four sources, TEI began helping Tesla around 2017 to develop the Model Y and is considered in the industry to be one of the world’s top sand casting specialists.

Since then, TEI has been involved in gigacasting mold prototyping for Tesla’s Model 3, Cybertruck and its heavy-duty Semi truck, according to two of the sources.

TEI’s been doing the low-volume rapid prototyping required before you move to high pressure dies. You don’t go straight from CAD to volume production — you need low-volume mules, and you use sand casting (cheaper, faster to iterate) to make that happen.

The company said it and its manufacturing partner, Magna International
, built 4,725 Oceans in the third quarter and delivered 1,097 to customers.

Hopefully most of these are just waiting at a port somewhere, but… not great, is it?