Leaderboard

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.

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.

Sure has been a while. We're about to head into our 25th year!

Today - depending on the time zone - marks 20 YEARS that I have been on C&G. It seems to have gone in chapters: First 3 years: Needed a new car, the LaCrosse was being released, and I was weighing the options, including test driving. Some of you will remember one ghastly initial design for the LaCrosse the Bob Lutz threw the book at the design staff for. Next 15 years: Owning the car, reporting on it, and driving other cars while on vacation, not to mention a lot of fighting with ocnblu ... which was hard to avoid! Last 2 years: NO car ... living on 2 continents ... (I would have never imagined this) ... renting cars as needed. There's a lot more to this decision than deciding between a LaCrosse, a Grand Prix, and a Monte Carlo.

Yeah, I don't love the idea of axing the full BEV Lightning. I thoroughly believe it will only be temporarily anyway but still feels wrong to get rid of it now. I understand the whole "extended range" thing is a steppingstone into a full BEV... but it feels unnecessary. Just make an EV with the proper technology to get 300 miles for the small battery and 400-450 miles with a larger battery. Be it battery chemistry (or all of the technology that goes into various things such as the elements and solid-state technology), battery size and/or aerodynamics, but that's what needs to take a leap forward. Maybe more importantly, price. They need to keep prices in check. Only so many people can afford near-100k vehicles regardless of how good the vehicle is.

So the Lightning was too expensive and the solution is to add an ICE motor and more complexity on top of that. Can't wait to see the $99,995 F-150 XLT EREV.

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.

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.