I want to see a small rustproof electric pickup or SUV. Maybe like a mini cybertruck, or maybe a bit more conventional like an old Toyota or Datsun but stainless steel, or maybe like the VW bus. Obviously in this category it’s more acceptable to be utilitarian and leave out any semblance of luxury features or excessively-fancy electronics. Anybody who does this right could have a #1 hit for a few years, in most countries.

But I suspect some regulations are in the way. They were put in place by automotive lobbyists, after all.

I hope my i3 will eventually be seen as accidentally good and repairable (despite coming from a company that mostly went bad). Time will tell. It seems to me the basic design is relatively reasonable, but it might turn out to have an achilles heel.

American hackers can still build or at least mod their own cars, moreso in some states than others. Europeans, not so much, as far as I can tell.

Although, I am told dealerships make little money on the sale of a car. It’s the maintenance and repairs that they really make money on. So replace that cabin air filter! Car is now off warranty? The repair will be $5,000 maybe buy a new car…

Obviously, Century couldn’t compete with Toyota, even brand new Century was few years behind anything Toyota or Mazda offered/sold already, but GM took all the 1981 bailout moneys nonetheless, and went on to focus on something else. Century was a good, solid car, (more-or-less) easy to fix and maintain, just it wasn’t as flashy as Riviera, and sure offered less luxuries than Park Avenue, but it was good car overall.

(though, I’d have to point out the meager backseat space, which came as a compromise; also rather unimpressive engine that worked okay for most purposes, but struggled with, say, mountain driving – New Hampshire driving proved to be a bit of a challenge, and overall handling had its quirks).

But it was good low-cost sedan. I also owned Pontiac Bonneville, and it was far better deal, built like a tank, good well-made car that made it through 1990s “corporate restructuring” mostly unscathed, profit-making brand that was destroyed in the 2000s, mostly due inept management.

There’s a degree of irony in that I’ve 20-ish hours later shattered the screen of my Apple silicone case-encased iPhone for the first time in ten years.

Oh, well. Unlike my VAG cars, it works in spite of the damage and, the repair, while manufacturer / partner-tethered, will cost less a percentage of the purchase price as compare to all but the most trivial software-locked auto repairs.

As we inevitably prepare for Apple-bashing a post or two downstream, remind me of the automotive Android equivalent… or is there even such a thing now that Google is going all-in on it’s “signed by Play Store or it won’t run” strategy?

Actually, the conscious experience of you is only 2-3 minutes old. Everything beyond that fades and is either forgotten, or archived away as a distorted memory with almost all of the details lost.

You cannot walk to the end of your street and back. The you that returns is not the same one that left. Can you tell me, what were your thoughts 30 seconds ago? They’re no longer there.

Every momentary instance of you exists simultaneously across a multitude of dimensional planes.

Of which there is no evidence, and never can be, because such “other dimensions” would be inaccessible. Whether such things exist or not makes no observable difference to the world we live in, which means they might as well not exist.

That took a long time for me to understand, but in Europe the flip-up-rear window was never popular, so I imagined a rear window in a rear hatch.