Ok you have a point. There are always some niche applications where the general rules fall short. I’m thinking of folks who own a giant truck to tow a giant camper once or twice a year. The number of people towing antique tractors is small, campers not so much. And yes, there’s definitely more to life than money.
That’s a pretty reasonable price. You can’t just look for a big number and conclude anything based on that. Sometime things cost money. You have to compare it to comparable third party products.
You’re not just talking a few panels here.
I agree. Besides the spying, the big issue I have with infotainment systems is, let’s call it, lifespan incompatibility.
Cars routinely last decades. Ideally, they would last forever. Once you strip away the bells and whistles, a car is a simple utilitarian object meant to accomplish a universally necessary task - the movement of people and cargo from one place to another. People dealt with the transport problem a thousand years ago, and they’ll be dealing with it a thousand years from now. There will always be need for a box on wheels that can move large amounts of things around quickly. Critically, a car can be a reasonably independent device - it doesn’t need to interface with some outside network in order to function. Yes, modern vehicles do often phone home, but that isn’t necessary to fulfill the vehicle’s core function. There are people living in 2026 still driving around Ford Model T’s. Sure, cars need roads and gasoline or electricity, but the same electricity can charge an EV from today or an EV from a century ago. When the Saturn car company went under, its passing didn’t brick all the Saturns on the roads.
Consumer electronics are the opposite. They’re built knowing that they’ll be obsolete relics in just a few years. The tech moves quickly and people want the newest features. People who change their phones even just every 5 years are considered frugal. Devices like smart phones also exist deeply embedded in vast tech ecosystems. My phone needs to be able to work with countless other sites, services, and apps. As their protocols and languages change, the phone must keep up. If my phone can’t talk to all the computers in the cloud, it can’t do its most basic functions. A 20 year old phone would be pretty useless in 2026. I would doubt you could even get a carrier to sell you a plan for it.
Consumer electronics and cars are fundamentally different types of objects. Assuming it was properly preserved, a person from 2126 could get real every day utility out of a car from 2026. But a 2026 phone, even if it was miraculously functional, would be a paperweight, of no use to them at all beyond a historical artifact. Cars fulfill a universal and timeless need. They should be designed to be bullet proof. Phones are born with their days numbered. Consumer electronics are meant to be a thing of the moment, constantly evolving, constantly changing. There’s no need to build in extreme durability. (I would prefer phones that can be repaired, but I’m not going to use even a highly repairable phone for 30 years.)
And this is the problem with permanently embedding consumer electronics into cars. They fundamentally exist on different time horizons. Inevitably the infotainment part of the car ends up a junk relic while the car part of the car still has years of good life left in it.
Then in the meantime, after you’ve tore everything down and while you’re building your utopia from scratch, everyone starves to death.
Ok, so if you only pull a trailer once or twice a year, why do you own a trailer? It’s back to the same problem. What’s the point of owning something you’re only going to use extremely rarely? Cars are ultimately depreciating assets. They’re not like owning stock in a company or even real estate. Every penny invested in a vehicle is ultimately money thrown on a bonfire. The wise way to own a car is to figure out your 95% of use cases and buy based on that. Then just rent specialized vehicles for the rare oddballs.
We have a newish Corolla and and old mid-2000s Ford Ranger. Between the two vehicles we have 99% of our use cases covered. We can move most furniture and shop and garden materials with the truck. We can use the sedan for commuting and road trips. But there are doubtless uses that our setup won’t cover, and that’s OK. If I need to move a household full of stuff, or if I desire to pull a giant trailer, or go offroading, then I’ll need to rent something else.
In the end, we’re going to have to fight a planetary-scale civil war after the elites in every country develop complete AI psychosis.
The Slate is a truck, a real truck. The Ford is a penis extender. The Ford is over 2’ longer than the Slate.
Only a fool purchases a vehicle for 100% of use cases. That’s how you end up buying twice as much car as you actually need, “just in case.”
A wise person figures out what vehicle will meet 95% of their needs and then simply rents a vehicle specifically designed to do that job. Do you need to haul a giant camper twice a year? Just a rent a pickup truck capable of towing it.
Buying a thing only saves money if the alternative is REGULARLY renting that thing.
Maybe if you don’t know how to rent a car…
To be fair, you really shouldn’t be driving a pickup truck long distances anyway. They’re for hauling loads around town. If you need to move something across the country, a pickup truck is a poor tool for it anyway.
The livestock can ride in the bed.
If they enshittify in the future, then you can just not buy one of the enshittified trucks. The old ones will still be out there, rolling around fine, without any internet connection that the company could use to remotely sabotage them.
Perhaps some sort of people’s station wagon.
Or just a people’s wagon.
Or why be so formal, why “people,” instead of the more casual and fun “folks.”
The folk’s wagon, if you will.
There is not an auto manufacturer on this Earth that isn’t heavily subsidized by its government. The same industry, skills, and infrastructure that make it possible to build consumer vehicles also allow you to build military vehicles. In wartime, a government can come to an auto manufacturer and tell them, “you’re done making consumer pickups. You’re making army trucks now!” And domestic industry cannot be blockaded or embargoed.
And that’s not an industry you can just spin up overnight. If your country doesn’t have an auto industry, and you would like one? Even if you have an unlimited budget, it would still take you decades to get to the point of competitiveness. Countries have a lot of incentive to subsidize their domestic auto producers as a means of ensuring the country retains the ability to make its own military vehicles.
How could such a bed be useful? They’re incredibly useful!
They’re useful to load things quickly. Awkward objects can be placed in the beds without having to carefully maneuver around a vehicle interior and all its obstructions. I do a lot of woodworking. Before we got a pickup, I would transport 2x4s and other lumber inside a Toyota Corolla. I’ve discovered it is actually possible to fit several dozen 8 foot long 2x4s inside a Corolla. But the pickup truck is such a better tool for the job. Plus you’re not moving a full sized sheet of plywood in a sedan.
They’re useful fit to large objects that would never fit inside a vehicle. If properly strapped down, a pickup can transport an object much taller than the roof of the truck.
They’re useful to move really dirty things you wouldn’t want in your car interior. Imagine you want to fill some garden beds with mulch or compost from a garden supplier. You could get it in small bags, but that would be expensive. It’s cheaper to buy in bulk. You could have them deliver it, but that would be more expensive still. If you need to move soil, compost, rock, or anything else dirty in bulk, a pickup is the way to do it. You can have the garden center fill your truck bed with a back hoe. Just dump it right into the bed. Then shovel it out when you get home. To clean out the bed, all you have to do is hose it off.
Now, this is pickups in general. We have a mid-2000s Ford Ranger, which is much smaller than the trucks all the big American manufacturers are selling today. A small pickup is a great utility tool. A giant one is a pointless penis extender.
I’m sure Bezos is broadly invested across the entire market. If you’re buying anything from any publicly traded company, you’re giving Bezos some money.
Have you ever bought a car stereo? Those numbers sound completely reasonable in comparison to third-party vehicle mods. It doesn’t sound at all like they’re nickle-and-diming people.
Perhaps a better comparison is that the mainstream automakers are forcing vast feature bundles on everyone. You aren’t given the choice to buy a paired-down automobile. It simply has to come with a spyware infotainment system glued into the dashboard.
Honestly, it would be a lot better if vehicles came in fairly and cheap forms. Then you can take them to any third party mechanic to add whatever additional upgrades you want.
On Amazon, covers like that without solar panels retail from $300-$1200. Assuming good build quality, that isn’t unreasonable. When you seamlessly integrate $200 worth of solar panels into a cover that would otherwise cost $1000, a final price point of $2300 seems pretty reasonable.
Sure, you can just bolt some panels from ali baba to a roof rack you make out of tubing from home depot if you want. But what you’re paying for is the quality, fit, and finish. OEM vs aftermarket.