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the wind blows at night

saw one of the new "mustangs" yesterday

not only wasn't a mustang

was ugly no matter the name plate

Ford's really done a terrible job with branding lately.  The danger of using a premier mark in order to produce a halo effect, is of course the dilution or degradation of the core brand.

By calling their new weird electrical thing a "Mustang" even with the sub-designation of "Mach E" they are creating brand confusion and the results are harmful to their main mark, the Mustang.

And then the release of the Bronco "Sport" ahead of the full-sized Bronco, has done quite a bit of damage to the premier mark that is the Bronco.  They generated so much excitement about re-releasing a full-sized Bronco, but then when the little Bronco Sport hit the market a year earlier than its big brother, lots of people were confused and assumed they'd just ditched the plans on the full sized Bronco and settled for another Ford Escape type vehicle with different branding.

That's the type of brand confusion that can last for decades, just as the Land Rover/Range Rover branding gaffe has, here in the USA.

GM and Honda to develop affordable electric vehicles that cost less than $30,000 (cnbc.com)

The profits to be had are in trucks and SUVs and vans, I think, not small cars, but OK I guess.

The Jeep is our main in-city driving vehicle.  It's narrow, pretty short for being a 4-door, tight turning radius, easy to park in tight spaces, and it can even pop curbs and maneuver over and around other types of urban obstacles when necessary. 

The F150 supercrew cab, on the other hand, is strictly for the suburbs and country driving.

Japan’s heavyweight motorcycle manufacturers known as the Big Four have unveiled a new electric motorbike battery swapping program called Gachaco. But what Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki haven’t come right out and said is that instead of the highly anticipated innovative new motorcycle battery standard, it’s looking a lot like a blue version of Gogoro.

The Big Four have supposedly been working on this big roll out for quite some time; we first heard about their ambitions for a swappable electric motorcycle battery standard all the way back in 2019.

You know, in the before times.

Back then, it sounded like they were developing something large enough to power mid-size electric motorcycles and that could be standardized across manufacturers. It appears the latter part might have been right, but the “motorcycle” part of electric motorcycle batteries seems to have been more or less replaced with “scooter” in this case.

That’s because the swappable battery standard that the Big Four have landed on isn’t very large at all, and instead looks like a blue filter applied to Gogoro’s 1.7 kWh swappable electric scooter batteries. Multiple batteries can of course be used together to power a single vehicle, offering more capacity and thus longer range. That’s exactly what Honda already does with its swappable batteries in its PCX electric scooter.

And in the three years that the four major motorcycle manufacturers have been working on the project, it seems like they haven’t as much developed a new battery standard as they have simply defaulted to using Honda’s PCX batteries that were unveiled in 2018.


https://electrek.co/2022/04/08/honda-yamaha-suzuki-and-kawasaki-roll-out-swappable-electric-motorcycle-batteries-but-its-really-just-a-gogoro-competitor/

Auto executives say more than half of U.S. car sales will be EVs by 2030, KPMG survey shows (cnbc.com)

This sounds possible to me, about what I was guessing, maybe a bit optimistic.  But that means 9 million or so EVs going into the market, which is not many as compared to how many are on the roads now.  Maybe by 2040, we'd see half the vehicles on the road being EVs.  Maybe.

Our car is four years old, low mileage, I have no notion of trading for anything else.  It should last 10 at least.  Maybe by 2030 I MIGHT consider an EV?

Half of sales by 2030