A survey found that EV drivers don’t listen to radio much; they only listen to podcasts. Meaningless bit of data, but got me thinking about a somewhat more relevant parallel.
EV = Elon Vehicle. (True in US, not elsewhere). Elon was the Gaian Apostle To The Gearheads. Tesla was an acceptable way to do 0-60 in 3 seconds while clicking your Gaian rosary beads. When Elon switched labels the cultists got disgusted and many of them sold the beads.
The other carmakers tried to pile on without understanding the cult. They offered their own EVs which didn’t sell nearly as well as Teslas. After a while they realized the mistake and gave up.
Elon is a sadistic troll above all. He knows that the other companies will follow his lead into perdition.
= = = = =
A similar cult happened in the 1950s. VW drivers were Gaian cultists. I know because I was a fervent member. We didn’t care that VWs were crappy deathtraps that self-defeated every single advantage of their radical design. We didn’t care that other cars (eg Renault and Rambler) were much better examples of compact economical car design.
This cult led to a much better controlled experiment because only one company was bamboozled.
GM tried to answer VW, copying the radical design and adding a few new disadvantages.
Ford and Chrysler weren’t fooled. They answered Rambler, not VW. They responded to the broad customer desire for smaller and more practical vehicles. Most people didn’t want a tiny car with a brittle engine and a squashable body. They just wanted to roll back the wild excesses of size and styling during the 1950s. Ford won because the Falcon was the LEAST RADICAL of all. (Valiant was the best of the bunch in technical terms but its styling was weird and alien.)
New thought: Was there a troll for VW? Probably not. Max Hoffman was the original importer, but he wasn’t charismatic like Elon. For sure the high-status hippies were leading the charge. Trust-fund leftists, closely tied to CIA, provided the shining example for the rest of us.
= = = = = REPRINT from 2014:
Back in my hippieshit years I thought I was cool. Of course I wasn’t, but I kept trying. And one aspect of coolness was mocking squares, which included mocking Ramblers. Cool people drove VWs and Saabs. Squares drove Ramblers.
Well, those square Ramblers were actually a whole lot greener than our cool VWs. Consider a Gremlin. Same size as a bug. Same gas mileage as a bug. Consumed less oil than a bug. Consumed less metal than a bug, because the Gremlin’s belt-and-suspenders engine lasted 3 times as long before overhaul. Drastically safer than a bug. If you die in a crash, you won’t continue being cool.
Wanna get political? OK. Gremlin traced its heritage to Charles Nash, a poor orphan who escaped from slavery and later started his own company to escape Wall Street trickery. VW traced its heritage to Hitler.
So why did we mock Gremlins? Because we were idiots.
= = = = = END REPRINT.
The question is still itchy. Those trust-fund hippies were pushing Socialism, not Fascism. Many of them were Jewish with fresh memories of German atrocities. Why not coolify the Moskvitch or Skoda? Russia was trying hard to export the Moskvitch.
