Honestly I shop around to an extent and look at reviews for the area. I have to fly to an airport near family and then drive another couple hundred to get to some family. I’ll admit there’s a gambit in quality of the cars, but I don’t have a preferred. And seems like because a brand in x is good doesn’t mean their station in y won’t suck. Hence just hope in reviews being a good indicator.

Your rental experience sounds worse than any I’ve ever had. I have to rent a few times a year.

Also generally I like the idea of renting and having the rental insurance on a long road trip so if something happens then my personal car isn’t totaled or put into a body shop somewhere far away. I’ve hit a deer hours away from home before on a road trip that was WAY worse. If it had been a rental I could have just walked away saying I have insurance so your problem, I need a new car. Where as it became an ordeal of the car being in the body shop 4 hrs away, still needing a rental to get home, since it was far away couldn’t check in on it and the repairs were bad, had to get a ride to get the car, ended up having to drop it off again somewhere local to fix the bad repair job, and get another rental.

I also had range anxiety for EVs on long trips and then I remembered that experience.

Voice controls are great, unless you have a strong accent it doesn’t understand, a speech impediment, or mute. Which are all things that normally wouldn’t disqualify you from driving a car. Which I feel like should disqualify them from the discussion of physical vs tablets myself.

Agreed. That’s why I really dislike the theory it’s some 4D chess. More prof of that is if he wanted it to burn he wouldn’t have renamed it his precious X.com. He wants to still show the world what PayPal would have been if they hadn’t removed him. The same reason he wanted to review all of the code and be in charge of development at X, he still is holding onto the image he’s a rockstar dev and everyone else just doesn’t know what they’re doing.

The sad fact is he may be intelligent in some stuff, but he also lucked out. And as you said he’s increasingly got surrounded by “yes men”, and let go of the people that had tried to mitigate some of tendencies. Not realizing they helped get him to where he was. Even in the original x.com days he had someone help manage and buffer him because he had the tendency to scare off investors.

Got to love that Earn Trust and Day 1 culture. Also it’s amazing how high up some of the decisions are being made without consulting even VPs. The RTO, layoffs, the recent Return to Team, and the shaming email were all done without some VPs knowledge. That seems like a good way to erode trust throughout the entire structure.

The problem is the us hasn’t had a formal declaration of war since WW2. Basically we’ve just had military engagements. Some haven’t even been authorized by congress.

Basically we’d need to fix that issue before worrying about the other suggestions. Else it’d just be military engagement not a war so don’t need to fallow them.

Not saying alternatives to steering are a bad thing, but there is also an issue of feedback and customer expectations. People like what they know/are used to. That’s why EVs had to add a lurch option and additional sounds. It throws people off mentally when part of the standard experience is missing.

Joysticks in theory would be an improvement, but let’s be honest you’d basically have to retrain people on how to drive it. Just a person gets additional training even to drive a forklift. And let’s be honest even if mandated not everyone would, and there would be wrecks. Not counting because of the learning curve it’d sell less, and it’d get bad press for every wreck.

I suspect the general consumer would be willing to hand control over fully, than have to spend extra to relearn how to drive their vehicle. We’ve been trained that self driving cars are the future for multiple decades now.