This.
It’s a stupid law, IMHO. I despite Muskrat, but i won’t weep if he wins this legal battle.
I think it took off in the 80s, too, when 2-car families became standard.
I remember the 70s, and very few married couples had 2 cars. My parents got a second in 1982 when they inherited one. In fact, most 2-car couples in the 1970s were the rural families where public transport didn’t go, and they owned a truck, plus a more economical car.
There was a family who lived down the street from my aunt & uncle in the 70s - 90s, and the dad owned a single car dealership for most of it. They were well off, and all their kids got a (used) car for their 16th birthday, but they lived in our neighborhood, and the kids went to public school with my cousins.
Around 1995, he owned more like 6 dealerships, and the last I lived in the city, he was still alive, and retired, with managers at each dealership, but he still went in once in a while to each one for a couple of hours.
By that time, there was barely a make of car for which he didn’t have a dealership.
All the kids went to college, 1 at least to grad school, and 1 to medical school. I very much doubt there was a student loan among them.
Although, I’m really not clear on how corporate ownership would destroy the “small” dealers, since there are anti-monopoly laws that prevent underselling at a loss specifically to drive someone out of business, aren’t there?
There are lots of businesses where owner-run and corporate-run exist side-by-side. The only thing that is different is the cost of the product. Does it matter that much?
Tesla wants to cut those guys out entirely. Tesla may or may not be good cars but buying one is easy as can be. No haggling, no extras, no EX/LX whatever versions of models. The price is the price*. How is a dealership owned by some asshole improving the experience? I wanted to do a trade in for my Honda and they offered a price. The salesperson said “let’s check CarMax” and they offered substantially more so I went there instead. Great experience.
*the price itself can fluctuate week to week and sometimes there are incentives based on Elmo’s whim.
Depends on which city you lived in and whether you were poor or middle class or rich.
In my corner of suburban SoCal, two-car households were commmonplace in the early 1960s. Unless you were dead broke.
I was kinda speaking generally.
I lived in Manhattan until I was 9, then I lived in Queens for several years, in a middle class neighborhood, where we had our own house, and a fairly big lawn. Between us and the people behind us, there was a pretty wide wooded strip with a creek running through it.
Still just one car.
My aunt and uncle had just one car as well, and they lived in a place where the public transportation was pretty awful. He rode a bike sometimes, and the kids took the school bus or rode bikes to school.
I know a lot of days, she dropped the younger kids at school, because it was on the way, and the older kids at their bus stop, then my uncle at his work along with his bicycle. Sometimes she dropped the older kids with their bikes.
The younger kids walked home, the older ones walked from the bus stop, or rode the whole way, and my uncle biked. My aunt had the car all day, but she had a lot of shlepping to do, and if a kid ever needed picked up, she needed the car.
They didn’t get a second car until their oldest was old enough for a license, and their second one would be in a couple of years.
Neither my parents nor my aunt and uncle were close to broke. They were wealthy enough for travel, enough for color TV, and in the case of my aunt & uncle, a VCR as soon as they were on the market. My cousins had Atari, and I was given one as a bat mitzvah gift by a relative.
Not rich either, very solid middle class.
You could watch consumerism rise just by watching how we lived, and even what my childhood was like compared to my cousins born in the 80s.
I’ve never driven a Tesla, but I have had to get in+out of the back seat of my boss’ Model 3. I am not a fan. I’m pocket sized (about 5’4"), but I managed to bang my head getting in and bang my knees getting out. The seat was OK once I got in there, but far from awesome.
In general, I would have rather ridden in the back seat of an 80s era US market Ford Escort. That wasn’t great, either, but it was better than getting in+out of that Tesla.
You know, i may have only ridden in the front passenger seat of Teslas. That’s fine. I’m not super picky about car interiors. I’m close to the average size of a US adult, so they basically all fit me.
When it’s dark outside, my Model 3 screen automatically goes black with light lettering/images. My 62-year old eyes can see outside fine and I’ve never even tried to adjust the screen brightness.
I wound up in the back seat of four different Teslas (think it was 3s and Y) and a Hyundai Ioniq of some type recently on vacation. From the back seat, I could tell I’d never want any of the models from either manufacturer, because while stuff like the cameras coming on for a turn signal and such looked cool, it was all stuff I’d want as an option on a in-dash display while looking at an actual proper dash cluster.
Not that I’m ever going to be able to buy a car again.
Non adjustable air vents? They can be directed up, down, left or right, and can be split so the air flows to either side of you.
I bet you’d think that until about the third day you were driving a new car and then you’d start wondering how you ever sat there staring at a useless RPM and speedometer for decades.
If so I didn’t realize, because you’d have to go into the screen to do it, and as a passenger that’s quite fraught. Adjusting a manual vent so it’s not blowing in your face shouldn’t require navigating into a menu in an unfamiliar interface and distracting the driver.
Can be done in our Model X. Just like a normal car.
While there are questionable choices in Teslas that I believe came from Elon (the short-lived steering yoke on the Model S, for example), there is ample justification for the center screen, like it or not. It fits the overall ethos of the car in several ways:
The outside of the car is stark. There are few of the silly body panel cuts and creases so popular in other brands. Also no visible vents and fake scoops that you’ll find on other cars. The door handles are simple and flush. The standard rims are simple and have minimal openings. The windshield is steeply raked, making ingress/egress awkward for some.
These are all aerodynamic features and they contribute to making the Model 3 one of the most aerodynamic cars on the market. Having a low drag coefficient is critical to EV range. Some of these features also cut costs.
The starkness of the 3’s exterior is carried into the interior. Other auto interiors are full of bullshit trim lines, creases, multiple texture changes, bezels separating instruments, extraneous trim pieces, faux carbon fiber panels. These add nothing to cars except cost, complexity, and weight. The 3’s center display avoids this.
Conventional instruments panels are among the most complex areas of a car. There’s a lot of parts inside the dashboard, much of it requiring wiring. It’s expensive to design, produce, and carry spares for. Repairs in this area are difficult and expensive. The 3’s center display avoids this.
Every few years the manufacturers replace the interior so hundreds of “new” parts have to be designed, tested and produced. The 3’s center display avoids this. Instrument improvements are done with software and downloaded for free.
Most models require 2 different dash designs, one for left side drive and another for right side drive. The 3’s center display minimizes this cost.
On many new cars, the instrument cluster is simply a screen placed in front of the driver, rather than the electro-mechanical gauges of old.
None of that prevents it from being a terrible design from a functional standpoint.
A one control per function design is almost always superior when it comes to usability on the fly. Throw the adjustable interior colored lights into a touchscreen four menus deep, sure. Leave anything that I need to adjust while moving to a single control that I can find by feel without triggering five other things while I find it. Anything else is a shitty design.
I had a car with a fancy dash with too much info on it for a few years. It took me a month to stop feeling like i was dangerously distracted while driving. And i was happy to return to a traditional instrument cluster with my current car.
I don’t like that the Tesla moves info around from time to time. I want to only need to learn to use a new car once
This is another on their list of horrendous designs. I know where all of the functions are in my car & they don’t change. The time to find out about a change is not when you’re driving as that’s a distraction looking for it while you’re driving. Realistically, how many people are going to read (or understand) release notes, if they are even published.
If they are published, when & where? Are they right (& are they big enough for people who otherwise use reading glasses to really read them?) on the screen or do you make consumers go somewhere else to look them up (yeah, like that’s gonna happen)
I don’t have a Tesla, but i assume the interface doesn’t literally change while you are driving. And i assume they alert you via your phone app. Maybe someone with a Tesla could comment?
I still don’t want the interface to change unless i really really hated something.