9 stories
Sandy Munro pegged the redundant buttons on the 2022 Bolt EV at $15 a car. At Ford, adding a single part number reportedly runs $75,000. Ferrari's CEO has said touchscreen buttons cost about half what physical ones do.
The thread's rebuttal: good touchscreen software is anything but cheap.
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The allegory: an oven startup mis-bakes a third of the time, so instead of fixing the core it promises impossible features to close a 500-unit order, drowns engineering in feature creep, burns out its founding engineer, and repeats the cycle with a cheaper replacement. The moral is misaligned incentives — 'the commission is paid at signing.'
The thread's twist is that the same sequence of events, told with more luck or capital, is the Tesla playbook — failure and success are the identical story seen from different ends.
Over 80% of Slate's 200-plus accessories cost under $500, and the spec sheet skips paint, a center touchscreen, and even a stated range. Thread sleuths found it: 205 miles on a roughly 63 kWh pack.
An owner-to-be configured a 'hatchback' with ordinary options — speakers, wheels, spare carrier — and watched the sticker climb to $35,000, close to EV sedans with nicer interiors.
No charges yet; the driver was uninjured-ish, cooperative, not intoxicated, and reportedly failed to keep a single lane. Tesla's own site says the feature 'requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous'.
The line that stuck: naming a product 'Full Self-Driving (Supervised)' is like selling 'Healthy Dog Food (Rat poison)'.
The specs are blunt: 1,000-volt systems, 10–70% in about five minutes even at −20°C, against Tesla's 500 kW ceiling. BYD already built 5,700 of these stations in China in roughly a year.
The reassuring answer, from people who know batteries: heat is the enemy, not speed, and BYD dips its cells in phase-changing coolant. The worried answer: flash charging is 3x faster than the fast-charging we've actually studied.
Adaptive driving beams are legal in Europe and were stalled in the US, so American beams are blunter — and an F-150's headlights sit at a Corolla driver's eye level, a geometry problem no aiming solves.
The thread spread the blame: LED retrofits in old housings, Tesla cars shipped misaligned from the factory, and the contrarian theory that the worse night driving feels, the more people want self-driving.
The playbook is borrowed from Tesla's Fremont tent and xAI's off-grid turbines: speed over permanence, against a $145B capex backdrop.
An engineer remembered Microsoft trialing tent data centers nearly 20 years ago — so the 'radical' move is really a rediscovered one.
The forecast needs a 79% EBITDA margin at $3.4T — versus Aramco's 55% and software's 45% — which would make SpaceX roughly 6% of US GDP.
The thread split: one camp said the same 'highly unlikely' was said of early Tesla; the other replied that the most extreme Tesla predictions never came true either.
Owners who bought Full Self-Driving as far back as 2016 found their original purchase agreements rewritten to include the word 'supervised' — and in some cases the originals gone from their accounts entirely. The thread's verdict is short and unanimous: that's not how contracts work.
