Buy it and I'll come collect it.

Come and have pint with Me and totally-a-scouser MaliA when you do

I live in Cheshire

This thing is cute as all get-out:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/5/18251 ... -show-2019

It's lost a few of the more outré features from the concept car, like the massive suicide doors. But it's still really cool and this is apparently very close to what's going to be sold.

Would you want one over a Tesla 3 though?

Nissan's whole app connected car thing is an unholy mess so far, though. There's Nissan Connect, You+Nissan and something called Carwings which seems to be what the car thinks that it's called. I have created accounts or attempted to on all of them and still have literally no idea what is supposed to do what and I haven't yet successfully got to the point where I can talk to the car with their app. And I'm supposedly an IT person. Just waiting on their technical support to get back to me.

Would you want one over a Tesla 3 though?

I wouldn’t buy a Tesla even if they were reasonably priced.

Don't you have a VW?

Don't you have a VW?

They don't seem to be very well put together.

Nothing majorly wrong that's visible, but if all these snags can be identified on a brand new one, how crappy are they in other areas?

Todd Maron, Tesla’s general counsel, said in defense of Musk that “there’s a lot of people outside Tesla who will sort of sugarcoat what they actually think of your performance, or of an issue, because they don’t really want to have the hard conversation.” Musk, however, “is someone who, I think, puts a lot of effort into forcing himself to be fully honest, and when he genuinely thinks someone has failed at something, he will let you know that he thinks you have failed at that and that the company requires that you do better so that we can achieve our mission and succeed.” (A month after I spoke to Maron, Tesla made the announcement that he would be leaving in January, one in a string of recent executive departures, which includes the company’s chief information officer, chief people officer, chief accounting officer, and vice presidents of manufacturing, worldwide finance, and engineering.)

One person who tried to share concerns with Musk himself was his personal assistant. She approached him one day in private, according to people who later heard about the conversation. Executives are struggling, she told Musk. (In an email, she objected to any suggestion of tension with Musk and declined interview requests.)

Colleagues say the assistant was a gentle, calming presence in Musk’s life. It was her job to give him feedback, even if it was sometimes hard to hear. She was beloved by other executives, who often asked her to help them gauge Musk’s moods.

A few months later, she left the company.

By early February 2018, top executives were leaving. [President of Sales] McNeill told Musk he was quitting, and would go on to become the chief operating officer at Lyft. This was a huge loss—with the possibility of inflaming anxieties among employees and stockholders—and so there were discussions about how to handle disclosing the departure. But after the news leaked, Musk announced the exit as almost an afterthought during a conference call with Wall Street analysts. “Actually, one thing we forgot to mention is Jon McNeill, who is heading up our sales and service group, is departing the company.” Musk said. “Going forward, I will be having the sales and service report directly to me.”

A few months later, [senior vice president of engineering] Doug Field indicated he wanted to take a leave of absence, which one person described to The Wall Street Journal as a “six-week sabbatical.” Field never returned to Tesla; instead he took a job back at Apple. All told, more than 36 Tesla vice presidents or higher-ranking staffers had left the company in the previous two years. Some of them weren’t replaced. Soon, according to various sources, there were 19 people directly reporting to Musk and another 11 executives who did not have superiors. (Tesla disputes those numbers.) Musk had enormous oversight responsibilities, particularly as he was running other companies at the same time. “It felt like the adults were leaving the building,” one senior finance person told me. “There was really no one left who could push back on Elon anymore.”

Skoda, but yeah. Why?

They've probably killed tens of thousands of people by cheating the emissions tests for a start.

Plus last time I checked Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft hadn’t built a cult of personality around a complete arsehole.

Asshole CEO < causing physical harm?!

I see you’re ignoring all the GreatContent^TM DocG is posting.

Plus all car manufacturers are quite probably cheating emissions tests. VW got caught. I try to do my bit by only driving around 4,000 miles a year.

[
Actually I'll probably read it, but the formatting is fucking horrific so maybe not.

Driving a second-hand Skoda doesn’t make me a VW supporter, jeez.

Musk is a very high profile figure in the tech world, it can be very difficult to separate the man from his company. Plus the working conditions sound terrible. I couldn’t in good conscience by one of those cars even if I could afford to.

Yeah seen a couple recently, look nice.

Think I'd rather have the new MX-5 though, shape wise.

I think they've stopped selling them here because any right-thinking individual would just get an MX-5 instead.

I am currently sat in a Marston's pub in Blackburn while my local* GT-Four specialist looks over the Celica to try and work out the source of, and the fix for, a power steering fluid leak that has appeared in the past few months.

* local in this case being 112 miles away.