I would be really interested in understanding the breakdown in F150's as sold by model number.
For a lot of truck owners, there's going to be some resistance because they love having a v8 engine etc. I don't see those people moving over quickly (although they might be swayed by the acceleration/speed). But if you're using one as a tradesperson, this seems like an absolute no-brainer. You're not driving enormous distances regularly and if you're able to run your entire job site for free, as well as have lower servicing costs... why wouldn't you?
Many new trucks have used turbo V6s instead of V8s for awhile now. There’s definitely some buyers who just want the sound of a V8 or don’t quite trust the reliability of a twin turbo BUT I think more people would be open to electric than you would think, even in people primarily just using them for transportation
I know a few people who tow big trailers, and they buy the V8 because once you hook up a real load the turbo kicks in and you are burning just as much gas. They figure that larger engine without a turbo is probably going to last a lot longer. Those who use the truck for a mix, sometimes with the trailer, sometimes with small loads opt for the turbo v6 and like it just fine, but they all agree if towing is the real goal get the v8. (or better yet get a diesel, and a bigger truck)
I don't know a single person who enjoys going to a gas station. Paying $40 a week just to hear some loud noise is an incredibly lame proposition, and only makes sense if you drive your truck for fun instead of utility. Most people buy a car for work, so avoiding the pump is a huge bonus.
I'm sure gas guzzler enthusiasts will continue to exist, but the financials don't make sense; it would be far cheaper for them to daily drive an EV and keep the old guzzler for fun days. They'd save on gas and maintenance by not driving an ICE all the time, and they still get to use it whenever they have free time.
In conclusion, my argument is that Ford/whoever will still eventually capture these enthusiasts, because they can still keep their old trucks but will always eventually need a new one.
I bought my truck used and somehow missed that it had the extended range tank, which is 36 gallons. I was so confused when I filled it up for the first time and it just kept going and going...
I don’t mind it. I drive a v8 Mercedes and love the sound etc... but at the same time, I’ve moved to NYC so the odds that I even keep a car aren’t particularly high.
I keep my vehicles a long time. I wouldn’t buy a turbo. When they fail, and they will, it’s super expensive. V8s have been around for a century, and they are very reliable.
I had the same thought but I ultimately had to choose between an F150 Lariat w/ EcoBoost or a near base model Tundra in the same condition for $8k more. So I decided to take a gamble on the turbos.
You'd be surprised at how far tradesmen need to drive sometimes. Jobsites are all over the place, and not everyone lives in the same place. So the jobsite might only be 45 minutes from the builder, but it's 75 minutes away from the trimmer. That's the situation for me, and it's not uncommon to travel that far to a job.
This is also predicated on the idea that every part of Tesla's operations are substantially better than existing automakers.
Do people really believe that Tesla is literally run 10x better than Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW or Honda? I don't think so.
Then there's the nightmare of trying to appeal to two wildly different consumer groups.
At the low end: does Tesla have a meaningful reliability advantage versus Honda and Toyota? From what I have seen, it appears not. This matters less when you're dealing with premium buyers, but will not work with the mass market. Fans will put up with hassle (I own an AMG... I'm more than aware of the extra expense I am constantly paying for - and that's a trade-off I'm happy to make in return for a powerful v8).
Secondly from a clout point of view: why would anyone buy a Tesla over a comparatively priced Audi, Porsche, Mercedes or BMW. The people who talk about their Model 3 with a burning passion aren't trading in a 911, or an E Class or a Q7. They're excited to upgrade from a 2015 Camry. Massive expectation gap.
Plus, all of these companies are valued far more realistically. Tesla being worth more than every other automaker or whatever gives them very little room to breathe. If Tesla is ever valued as the hardware manufacturer with relatively low margins (when compared to say a tech stock like Facebook or Salesforce).. is the day that we will see an enormous valuation haircut.
I wonder if it's as simple as the market confusing all new technology companies with software companies, which have incredible distributional advantages and the ability to grow revenues from optimizations.
The company valuation of BMW and VW isn’t the problem- it’s a problem for Tesla. There aren’t enough nerds in the world to justify it’s insane stock price.
The problem with buying cashflow through ETF investment is you have to make so much money to get to any real level of cashflow.
Buying $30k of index funds will set you back ~$50k pre tax, which is 25% of our doctors income. If you subscribe to the 4% rule, you've "bought" a perpetual cashflow of $1200 annually.
To get a passive income of $200k annually, you need $5m in index funds which is going to take either ~30 years with compounding interest at 10% (assuming you are investing a continuous $30k after tax) every year.
Realistically, to make any sort of actual money (I'm defining this as $200k + annually in passive/semi-passive income), you need an ownership stake in a business or in another asset (likely property).
The vending machine example is stupid for a doctor to do, because it's the sort of opportunity that rewards someone with a lot of hustle and low opportunity cost - good luck competing with an entrepreneurial college student who has a lot more free time. Same thing with the website.
You identified that you need a lot of money or a lot of time, but ignored for most people it's a combination of these two. It wont be $30,000 once, it will be more like $5-10,000 per year and the money out will be a combination of the higher investment spread over many years plus the compounding interest.
The most money is to be made by selling assets to a greater fool (or sage?) in the biggest asset bubble of humanity. Anyone throwing rocks at Dogecoin for being a bubble is living in overpriced glass houses.
I’m not saying there will be a crash. It will be interesting to see how this money experiment turns out.
We've replaced secretaries with software, and now we have people making $150k+ a year busy working on things that they should be paying someone $40k a year to handle.
And the same happened to everyone else too, just with smaller dollar amounts.
During my high school and early university years, I was in love with the concept of being able to run errands over the Internet. Why go to the bank when I can order a transfer on-line? Why make orders over the phone when I can choose what I want on a webpage with few clicks? Why ask anyone to do anything, when I could just click or type my way through?
As an adult with a bit more years behind me, I now feel the exact opposite way. Why on Earth am I doing these errands, when I could ask or pay someone else to do them? Why do I waste my time clicking on this bloated, user-hostile page full of upselling garbage, when I could just phone the company and tell them what I need? Alas, companies jumped at the opportunity to outsource the effort to customers, so increasingly I can't phone anyone. Self-service becomes the only option.
I suppose the shift in perspective comes from the fact that back then, I had no money and a lot of time; these days, I have some disposable income, but very little time to spare.
To me, the web page nearly is always faster than asking a human. Even setting aside the phone trees designed to slow me down, I'm more comfortable with the bloated, user-hostile page than trying to understand a human voice through a 4000 Hz telephone channel. I like not having to try to explain to them what I want. With the web I can do it whenever I want, at my own pace.
It feels like a voice call is an admission of failure: sometimes of their web interface design, sometimes of my ability to read. If I am calling on the phone it's only because I want to talk to a human being, and I want that disgusting process over with as soon as possible.
There is never anything I want from the phone tree except a human operator. If you could automate my request then you should have done it over the far clearer interface of the web page. Maybe there are some people who have a phone but not a computer, but I am not one of them. I'm only talking to you because the easier (for me) ways have failed.
> There is never anything I want from the phone tree except a human operator. If you could automate my request then you should have done it over the far clearer interface of the web page.
This. It's particularly infuriating that now many phone trees don't even have a built-in "I want to talk to a human, now" option. Hitting "0" used to be a fairly common way to do that, but doesn't appear to be any more. Often I have to wade through three or four levels of phone menus just to get to something that will take me to a human.
I absolutely agree, and I also hate the automated chat systems which are even _worse_ than calling on the phone. It's trying to get the 'call tree' scripts out to chat. When if I'm online, a program script should be able to cover 80% of the issues, and the other 20% need a human touch for collecting the correct data or providing features missing; often intentionally from the website.
The local power company does this very well for reporting outages, and takes data that's hard to fit through a human that can recognize what the data means and get it to the correct departments and people.
Cable is the WORST in that respect. With zero transparency on what the root cause or investigation status. Also, insufficient and critically lacking detail (Is it JUST me, or is it my block, or is it the whole neighborhood or city, etc).
My favorite is when companies (looking at you, UPS) provide a phone menu with a very narrow list of choices, and if none of them matches what you want, you're just out of luck. There's no "other" option.
(In reality, you lie to get through to a human, but come on.)
Also, the difference between talking to somebody reading a script in Bangalore and someone on the inside who actually knows what they are doing (if you can manage to convince someone to connect you to the latter) is crazy. The drones handling customer support info often have essentially zero information on top of what's given to the customer.
One time UPS lost my package (bona fide lost in a warehouse, maybe stolen or something) and the phone CS drones assured me that it was on the way, just running late, was on the truck now, etc. etc.
I managed to berate them into connecting me with a US-based operator who, after asking how the hell I actually got her number, gave me the real tracking info, which is completely hidden from consumers and made it very clear that my package was gone.
The idea was that all the jobs of someone handling errands for you were automated away and it became a self service thing. Yes, sometimes it is easier to buy something online, no doubt about that but when problems creep in it takes too much of our precious time and from our mental context dealing with things that would be dealt with if those jobs existed.
If those jobs existed in higher numbers you could just call a number and a human responds and assists on the other end of the line.
Phoning for anything is my favorite thing. Absolutely I want to talk to customer service. No I don’t want this automated (especially when I’m trying to get myself a slightly better deal). And I hate phone trees with a passion, just get me the operator now.
Phoning is my least favorite thing (well, except for in-person visits), but I also want a human on the other end of the line when I call. If I'm calling, it means I couldn't get the website to do the right thing for me.
Same with self checkout at the grocery store: I know a lot of people like it, but whenever I do it I’m thinking “this is someone else’s job! Why the hell am I having to do it now? ?”
Around here we have two self-service checkout systems: one is as described, where you have to take each item individually out of your card and present it to a scanner. I detest those, as it makes me feel like a fool fumbling around with the scanners while the cashiers are 10x faster than I am.
The other one is where you pick up a handheld scanner at the store entrance, and you build up your item list while you're in the store loading your cart. Those ones I like, as they feel much faster and much more reliable to me. Moreover, I can look at the display of the scanner to see if I have all the items I came for, I don't have to search the cart.
Tangent about self checkout -- the versions I've found in supermarkets are uniformly terrible. But Home Depot, has a version I don't detest, for two reasons.
1. You get a hand-held scanner (at the checkout register, not walking around the store) instead of having to run everything over the counter.
2. You don't have to put the items on a certain platform (scale) after you scan; you can stick them back on your cart.
3. Although there is a webcam mounted (boo!), there is no screen showing yourself.
They're really three variations on the same reason: it doesn't treat me like a thief who's going to shoplift at the first opportunity.
I don't really mind doing self-checkout, as I'm nearly as fast at it as the cashiers (unless I have a lot of produce), and it lets me bag my food in exactly the order I want (bag for the fridge, bag for the pantry, etc). But the anti-theft measures (especially when the thing scans wrong and seizes up instead of letting me abort and try again) make it an absolute train wreck, and so I petty much only do self-checkout when I have under 5 items or the line is incredibly shorter.
2 employees assisting with 6-12 self-checkout stations is still a net-win for the employer if the objective is cutting "overhead" of personnel. It's only a problem if the self-checkout system is flawed in a way that requires frequent and lengthy intervention by the employees, versus the occasional ID check for alcohol purchases and item check for something not scanning correctly.
For me checkout with a cashier doesn't feel like less work though. I bring them my bag, take out each item, they scan them, and then I put them back in my bag. All they're doing is swiping! (Growing up we had disposable bags and human baggers, so maybe it saved a tiny bit more time.)
I buy a lot of fresh produce, which is way faster with a good cashier who knows all of the codes. I also tend to buy multiples of an item, which is also way faster when the cashier can swipe one and then hit 6x or whatevs.
And that's assuming the self-checkout system is working perfectly, which is rare. They often have some janky anti-theft sensors that freak out if you remove a bag or item from the bagging area. Self-checkout is fine or maybe even better if you have a few items, but for a cart full of groceries, it is inarguably way slower than a decent human cashier.
Good lord, you do all that with cashier? I load the stuff onto the belt (or don't even do that now thanks to COVID), and get a cart full of bagged groceries on the other side.
Have you noticed that change with COVID? Some places now seem to want you to be further away (sometimes with plexiglass) so some places do more bagging (actually putting the bags in your cart and pushing you a completed cart.) There are some places that seem to have gone the other way and gotten rid of the bagger so you can do your own bagging and placing 6 ft away from the cashier. But pre-COVID it seemed like most places had bags that you pick up at and put in the cart yourself.
Not really COVID related where I live. More or less the smaller the shop, the larger the chance they will bag your groceries. Large ones always have a conveyor belt from which they slide items on the other side where you can pick it up and bag yourself. I think the change mostly came when it has become illegal to give away bags. Since now you have to pay for them, a lot of people bring their own.
It's easier to prove that one "saved" the company money by removing a support position than to evaluate the amount of money wasted yearly by engineers having to buy paperclips and figuring out how to expense them in the horrible expensing software.
I never thought open offices were about cost savings, I always thought it was about someone reading that we spend too much time isolated and need more interaction or some such BS.
Open offices, especially with flexible seating, are a huge cost saving on real-estate. You need much less floor space, and much less interior walls.
I think at my company, we are sticking with it despite arguments against, because it is just cheaper.
The advent of more people working from home is going to mkae this even more attractive probably. :(
yes and there is also often departmental budget arb going on here
Devs in engineering org now have to spend more time on self-service portals & chasing tickets because the manager of the infrastructure org laid off a bunch of sysadmins.
I once worked at a bank where even replacing a physical disk in a US datacenter involved a ticketing system which dispatched tickets to India.
The remote guys would then, presumably, raise some sort of internal ticket so the guy physically in US could you know.. replace a bad disk.
Turnaround on bad disk swaps went from hours to weeks. As the hardware aged, we started to have enough disk failures pile up on RAID arrays that data losses occurred.
Systems are better too though. When I was an intern all meeting scheduling was done on some convoluted mainframe system. Most of my co-workers had forgot their login to the system, they either grabbed a room that was empty and left if someone showed up, or they had the secretary schedule it (these were computer programmers Sun workstations on their desk, not computer haters who refused to learn). One day we rolled out a new system that was easy to use and suddenly all meetings got scheduled by whoever wanted to have one (then that got replaced by exchange/outlook which we could figure out but wasn't anywhere near as easy).
So some of the savings is good. It is faster for me to schedule a meeting in outlook (not the same company) than to find a secretary to schedule my meetings. However the secretary might be worth going back to just because they always knew important gossip that was worth knowing.
Your example definitely is something that should have been automated and not good use of an administrative assistant's time, but humans are good at navigating unclear processes and organizations.
For example, in one of my internships, it turns out that someone mistyped my address so my paychecks were sent to the wrong building; after a few weeks of that not getting resolved through HR, the administrative assistant took it upon herself to fix it and figured out whom to go yell at to get it resolved within a few days.
They're also good for things where having specialized knowledge of a process that's not done often can be done by someone who does it more often.
For example, when it comes to corporate travel, our company has a self service portal, and every time I need to book business travel I have waste an hour to figure out the right combination of flights and hotels to use, and another hour after returning to enter all of the expenses in the expensing system; I'd much rather send an email like "need to go to office X between Y and Z, no red eye flights" and "here's the receipts from our last trip, we took client W for a business dinner on May nth" and have it all happen.
Someone who does it several times per week would be much more efficient at doing it than me doing it a few times per year. But maybe in a few years we'll get some AI assistant that figures out that I like seat 3A, departures that are not too early, and figures out how to determine the expense types from various receipts.
For expense types I'm told it used to be eaiser. Then some scammers figured out they could send invoices and they would be paid now everyone needs to waste time tracking little expenses because if you don't even more money is wasted.
So there is a trade off which means some of the tedious jobs can't be automated. Though i agree I shouldn't have to separate my hotel room from meals at the hotel.
I’m saying those programmers should have secretaries to help them with all of the admin etc. They shouldn’t be booking their own flights, or making dinner reservations, or running expenses (or a lot of other manual work)
Circa 2000 (and continuing through the 00s) there was a massive cutback in administrative personnel. By the time I got there (circa 2010) there were essentially no administrative support personnel except for those at the very top. During the 10s they realized that they were spending around $10k/year/person on travel related stuffs not because it was necessary, but because of the time lost to deal with the software that was supposed to remove the need for the full-time administrative staff.
By the end of the 10s, they'd restored the administrative teams and were spending much less per year on "overhead" (non-billable hour) even if you counted the admin teams as only overhead. Down from around $10 million to less than $1 million by just having a dedicated team that dealt with travel and finance stuffs.
The problem was that most people only traveled once a year, at best, and so they had no real experience with the unintuitive software. The average traveler was spending a week extra per trip, which was not billed to customers, dealing with reservations (1-2 days total pre-trip) and finances (2-3 days total post-trip).
Mythical Man Month describes secretaries in a software context. What spoke to me about it was none of things, but instead: scheduling meetings, taking and distributing agendas and notes for those meetings, being the curator and librarian of project documentation. Just because these things are digital now, doesn’t mean any of the engineers on the team will step up to do them consistently or well. Many projects could run more smoothly with someone in that role.
Every minute an engineer spends doing those things is a minute they aren't coding, debugging, or architecting. So what happens? We have to hire another engineer to pick up the slack. When we could hire an administrator for much less to handle those things.
I continue to be amused that the many of the activities and artifacts promotion committees want to see when they consider engineers for the highest levels, are exactly this kind of "admin" work.
Software can only replace some roles that administrative staff filled. Most often, like in the case of email and word processors, it distributes the work and eats up everyone's time by moving it from specialists to non-specialists.
The optimum should be, of course, software empowering the specialists, so they can do more with less, providing better service to more people. But hey, a specialist costs $X in salary; a specialist + software that empowers them cost $X + $Y for the expensive license. Meanwhile, a SaaS that allows everyone to do the task lets us save $X on the specialist, and costs peanuts... plus a good fraction of everyone's salary, but nobody notices that.
The secretaries were specialists: in language. How much better would my posts be if someone who was good at writing and so would correct my grammar (grammar checkers are horrible - or were last time I tried, mostly I don't even look anymore). Often what I saw should be worded a little differently. Spell check doesn't notice when I spelled a different word than what I wanted.
I'm a faster typist than I am at talking, so I don't need a typist. I could really use someone to proofread for me. We have lost both.
Chilling and true.