Not manufacturers, dealers. A legally required middleman in most of the US. They’ll take your $10k car for $7k and try to resell it for $12k. Even if it gets negotiated to a fair price, they still get the opportunity to upsell used car buyers into extended warranties and maintenance plans.

Tesla is a little different in that they do not have dealers, so they instead do no-negotiatiation sales on their used cars. It’s good for them because they can do the same buy low sell high deal. But when the model is not selling, they’ll have to buy it and sit on that asset for months or dump it at auction.

While the Texas Plate ‘HAIT 88’ seems like it’s fake, I feel that is implied by driving a Cyber Truck. He didn’t need to go through the trouble paying extra for that.

I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is… probably not. “The grid will collapse” has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, whether* its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it’s onto EVs being the grid destroyer.

The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn’t going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation’s hostility to solar.

Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that’s not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That’s another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.

Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.