A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

Automotive industry is one of the biggest scams on planet earth. One of my favorite cases recently is how Suzuki Jimny is banned in Europe and US because of emission standards allegedly, so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km oh and surprise surprise Mercedes are going to release a smaller more affordable G-Class [1].

[1] - https://www.motortrend.com/news/2026-mercedes-benz-baby-g-wa...

Manufacturers must hit a level of CO2 emissions on average across their whole fleet. As such, Suzuki is choosing to discontinue the Jimny because of the tougher fleet average targets starting in 2025. Overall you’re right that it’s a bit of a fix; Mercedes ‘pools’ its emissions with other manufacturers/brands. It currently pools with Smart, but may also pool with Volvo/Polestar? [0] It’s such an obvious approach to ‘game’ the targets, it’s a wonder the EU didn’t see it coming when they introduced the scheme. [0] https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...

This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

Just like code, regulation isn't intrinsically valuable - it's a means to an end, and piling lots of poorly-written stuff on top of each other has disasterous consequences for society. We have to make sure that the code and law that we write is carefully thought out and crafted to achieve its desired effect with minimal complexity, and formally verify and test it when possible.

(an example of testing law may be to get a few clever people into a room and red-team possible exploits in the proposed bill or regulation)

> This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.

It seems that the goal is to pressure automakers to improve the efficiency across their entire line instead of simply banning low-efficiency models altogether.

If an automaker discontinues a low-efficient model in order to have access to a market, isn't this an example of regulation working well?

Did you read the parent comment?

> so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km

This is an example of a manufacturer discontinuing a more efficient vehicle while continuing to sell a larger vehicle that is significantly less efficient.

That's the opposite of what you want. So, no, this is not an example of regulation working well.

If we Zoom out and look at the net-net efficiency, is there a Steelman argument? I’m wondering if this is a locally based optimization that provides manufacturers with more flexibility to optimize across their fleet.

I don't quite understand. Even if the intent was to to provide manufacturers more flexibility, the fact that a much more efficient line was discontinued as a result of the regulations implies that the result was less efficiency.

Maybe I misunderstood. Could you explain your idea in more detail?