Spying: Excuse Me, But Does That F-150 Have A Diesel?

Ford (and everyone else) went into EV's because they saw Tesla's $1.5 trillion market cap, and the investors were like "what the hell Jim, why does Ford have a $50 billion market cap while this start up that sells 1 million cars a year is worth 30 times more?  We want return on our investment!" Ford could see F150 sales double and my guess is their market cap would move from $53 billion to $55 billion.  If you aren't on the cutting edge of technology it will be too easy for others to just eliminate you.  Ford gave up on sedans because they couldn't compete with the Asians, gave up on the Ecosport, the Escape ended production this month also, because they admit they can't compete in those segments. Ford is going to be pickups, commercial vans, and Bronco.  Would be really easy to the Chinese to copy pickups and vans and come in at a much lower price and wipe out those pick up and van sales.  

This is really annoying. I noticed yesterday that traffic on the site was exponentially high.  Turns out we were getting crawled by apparently all of China. I had to use Cloudfare to block the entire country because there was no pattern of repeats in the IP addresses.  You can see where I installed the rule. That's 80k hits in about 18 hours. Before discovering this, we were getting 500k hits per day, super high for this site.  There are still some getting through from Hong Kong, but not nearly the same volume.  Def something going on as the other countries surrounding China are also hitting.  

It's probably a bit late, but there is a $0.99 plug-in on the Windows Store from Microsoft that lets your computer read HEIC files and do any conversions locally on your computer. I bought it a few years back to avoid that kind of hassle.  Once you have that, I have used Irfanview for 25 years to do batch photo conversions and with the Windows plug-in, should be able to convert HEIC files to jpeg for you.  

Sadly the Ford CEO clearly made his feeling known when on national TV he told Trump that Biden Forced them to build EVs that the world does not need. Idiot!!! I agree that Ford is making ANOTHER MISTAKE in axing the EV only Lighting, they clearly have not been in vesting in battery technology as Mercedes, Kia, Hyundai, Genesis and more have all been investing in battery technology such as Factorial Solid State tech and Mercedes just finished initial testing of the 110 kW battery pack that gave them 745 mile range. Solid-state EV battery maker is going public after a 745+ mile test Mercedes Needed A Solid-State Battery To Match Lucid’s EV Range Record | Carscoops I reported about the startup back in 2023 as the potential is huge and real. Next year, Mercedes is supposed to bring out their first solid state EV and the other companies that invested will follow within 12 to 18 months. Mercedes was the first investor with Kia, Hyundai, Genesis and others following.

Random thought ... to vent: I was accidentally lax with a phone camera setting and then I happened to see that a big chunk of photos were in heic files.  I have had to copy them from my laptop back to my phone, where I have the feature to save them as jpeg files. It's super boring, but I'm almost done with it.