San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

Wish I felt like blowing $125K on a car. I really think electric cars are gonna be 'it' in 5 to 10 years. Now, to pick the winner in the ever growing field of competitors??

Tesla looks good, I like the idea but at $125k...no thanks, if I had that much money to spend on a car there are many other choices, sorry it is not ready for primetime. Gosh, for that I could get a Porsche 911 Turbo.

I am among the fans and those with a tesla on the wish list. I'm glad to see they are in production but they have problems with the coolant pump, the founder was ousted and there are rumors they are laying off half their 200 person workforce. To date they have only delivered 30 cars.

Why the hell has gm not bought them out to get the battery and engine technology. The chevy volt is the last chance to save the company, they talked with ford about a merger and now chrysler. If they cant put out a 100mpg equivalent car in the next two years they are toast and so is the uaw. Seriously, those clowns have got to get their sh%$ together and yesterday. I do not want something that looks like a chevy volt, it is doubtful my kid would drive that birthcontrolmobile. How hard can it be for one of the largest companies in the world to just tell all of the engineers that everyone is fired if they can't make a smoking hot, sexy, fast car that runs for pennies and also makes women want to take their clothes off. That is the mission and it needs to get done now. A few silicon valley guys almost pulled it off with a tiny staff and no automotive experience. Enough with trying to match toyota, get off your a$$ and go kick theirs. For pete's sake will apple or microsoft just buy them so we can have an icar.

Gm already makes the highest owner satisfaction, owner loyalty vehicle in the world, the corvette. Stick some batteries in that puppy and start selling them already.

In other news, Tesla has reportedly just laid off 100 people, or half of their staff.

$125,000 electric cars are not such a hot sell in a recession.

I'm not done with my rant, my apologies to all, but if I have earned any tokens in my time on the boards, I want to use some here.

Why are we bailing out stupid banks when after all is said and done we are left with stupid banks. Allowing them to fail would have only resulted in smart banks owning stupid banks and smart banks making money again.

Why are we not sppending that money on making oil obsolete. It stops the transfer of wealth out of this nation, solves the greehouse thing, saves the world, wipes out the financing for terrorists and allows us to put thousands of dollars in every home, year after year, far better than any stimulus package.

The entire Appolo mission series including the saturn rockets over the 13 years only cost 135 billion in today's dollars. Hell we pissed that much away this month saving an insurance company. Putting a man on the moon was far greater a technological acheivement than figuring out how to run vehicles for free.
I want one thing from my government, free propulsion, that's it, first person to advocate that gets my vote for life.

Save the economy, save the planet, protect national security, vanquish enemies without a lost life, all that can be yours if you can make the paint on my car generate power to run it, or something similar, so lets stop worrying about gay marriage, abortion, saving investment banks or any of the other crap we are distracted by and solve this problem that will solve the rest.

Thank you for your time, I'm going to break open my cabernet and calm myself down.

Ha,ha. Birthcontrolmobile cracked me up.

tg, man. That's a good rant. That's my rant too. Holy shit is that my rant. I get sick of hearing myself. [insert joke here] Add up all the money we've spent on Iraq, bailouts, etc. All the time we've wasted on distractions and meaningless issues. We're suckers.

9/11 should have been a holy wake-up call for all of us, opportunity to chart a clear course. Instead, we went to the mall and went shopping. Gotta keep the economy going. Buy a big truck too, so our imports of foreign oil go up another 25%. It's just insane.

I'm so tired of retards running this country. I want Osama dead. I want an electric car. I want CNG and solar and wind and nuclear and drill if you have to, but stop sending our money to Saudi Arabia so they can stab us in the back. Ten years from now, everybody should be driving electric. Everything else is bullshit.

Yes, I was pretty disappointed when I saw the production Volt too...they should have stayed spot-on to the show car like they've done w/the Camaro.

However, at least even the production Volt looks a boatload better than this:

http://jalopnik.com/5064250/this-is-the-...

Temeculaguy wrote : "Gm already makes the highest owner satisfaction, owner loyalty vehicle in the world, the corvette. Stick some batteries in that puppy and start selling them already."

Unfortunately Corvette owners are all drinking the same Kool-aid. They are in denial. Their beloved vette is NOT a well made car......period.

I have owned several over the years and every damn one of them didn't compare in build quality to the stuff being made in Japan and/or Europe.

My wife currently has GM's flagship, the XLR which is made on a Corvette chassis at the vette factory in Bowling Green KY. What a piece of CRAP that car is! GM outta be ashamed of themselves and deserve to go BK in my opinion.

Murf2222

TG,

You are not going to share the Cabernet? I got my rant against GM as well. I jest with some coworkers that GM should stop making all card except the Corvette. What, the Corvette isn't make a profit? Then why the heck do you freaking execs waste all that R&D on a losing proposition? Machismo. Why cant they mass produce a Corvette look alike for 20K with batteries??

PS
I didnt get an intership at Saturn a long time ago, but its all good cause I'd still be in MI.

I posted this a few days ago...

Watch it...

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/06/17/video...

My favorite part was at 2:10-2:25....

LOL....$100k car build quality.

"i like to run my hand over the seams, if it looks pretty good, its on its way."

Versus...

http://www.autoblog.com/photos/audi-r8-f...

Hmmm...

equalizer, the cab is always flowing at case de TG, there's never a door charge.

I didn't say that i liked vettes, just that it has a cult like following and it makes business sense to electrify them, even make a cheaper version of them. FLU loves his Audi's, I didn't need to even hit the link and could tell you what car I'd be looking at.

Personally, this economic downturn is the perfect time to upgrade my sled. Especially the weekend pleasure vehicle. I've been shopping pleasure vehicles and there are some real bargains out there for unreliable gas guzzlers. 3-7 year old Jaguar XK convertibles and Porsche 911's have tanked harder than fannie mae stock.

They haven't. The cheapest '05 in SoCal on Autotrader is 48k...

with porsche you have to back further than 3 years, jags start falling at 3 years, but considering the 911 starts at 80-100k, and 2001's and 2000's are in the 20's. Lots of 2001, even 2000 have low miles, I'll go older on the porsche. I should have said 5-10 years old but I found jags at 2005 below 30k, even from dealers. http://www.autotrader.com/fyc/vdp.jsp?ct...

and

http://www.autotrader.com/fyc/vdp.jsp?ct...

these are both ragtops and from dealers, with a little work or for a hard top from a private seller and a little negotiation, 25k is a real possibility.

whichever one, 20-30k for a 80-100k sled is a deal if it for my weekend car.

the greatest ad for the jaguar, at one minute and 13 seconds the jaguar ad starts, it's hilarious.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ArDB7AJA...

Ok I don't know about 00-01's. I can tell you that average asking prices for 04 911's on autotrader fell around 15%, and prices for 05's fell 10% since January. Not a huge drop and not out of line with normal depreciation.

'02 911 vert had the invoice of 67k. 45% of initial retail for a 6-year-old car, 90k miles on the odometer, and insanely expensive maintenance & repairs? Hardly a super deal. Even Accords don't hold their value so well.

Not to mention that you can get a slightly used STi, which is as good a car and half the headache for half the price.

Am I that predictable? :) Actually, if I had my way, there would be 4 cars in my stable in the following order

1) Tesla Roadster
2) R8 V10 Diesel
3) Skyline GTR (excuse me, I meant Nissan GTR)
4) Corvette ZR1 (because every good asian boy has at least 1 american muscle car to whip out all the other wannabe riceboys in civics on the track).

Funny that had I invested in any 1-4 above, it would have yield much better returns than my current 401k and retirement accounts :) Oh well.

Porsche might be holding better value, but BMW apparently isn't, due to the issue wrto BMW financing.

BTW, I thought Porsche was going hostile to take of VAG.

The thing that got me sort of warming up to the vette, is that even new, the rebates on it were getting pretty ridiculous for the Z06...Unfortunately, I don't think the ZR1 qualifies for that special pricing. It's in it's own special pricing league.

I've owned cars from and belonged to a number of sports car clubs - cars made in US, UK, Italy and Japan - over the years and I can tell you that members of each brand are ga-ga over their rides. And they deserve to be, they are all very fun and pretty darn reliable when compared to average cars of even 20 years ago.

As for resale, I doubt many of the aforementioned owners paid two seconds of attention to that when buying - the purchase was emotional not logical. But a car that is fairly consistently on the best resale list:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/auto...

FLU, I like your 4 car price-not-an-issue stable. Not exactly mine, but 3 out of 4 could potentially end up in my garage. I saw my first R8 parked directly in front of the Four Seasons in Paris this summer and it called out to me...good thing I don't know how to hot-wire cars or I might have heard that dual-toned police siren approaching from behind as I zinged down tiny alleys.