Elon Musk is an Unelected King

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The New Fiat 500free

It must be nice to live in a civilized state that cares about things like green energy and electric vehicle adoption. I do not live in one of those states. But if I did live in one like Colorado, I’d be heading down to the Fiat dealership that is offering FREE leases on brand-new Fiat 500e electric coupes.

That’s right, the lease is free. David Gluckman for Car and Driver recently told his tale of leasing a new Fiat 500e for nothing down and nothing a month. There are some costs surrounding paying taxes, licensing, and insurance, but the actual 10,000 miles a year lease cost him nothing out of pocket.

There’s the $7,500 federal incentive, which on a lease applies to everything, and $5,000 from the state of Colorado. The state even throws in an extra $600 if you aren’t buying it outright for cash. Plus, if the car is less than $35,000 it gets an additional $2,500. The 500e slips right in under that price in base form.

Some dealer couponage helped with taxes, and all-in he’s paying less than $50 a month for the next 27 months on a brand-new, real, with wheels and everything, car. What a world.

Excuse the language, but this is how this shit is supposed to work. Once you get people into affordable EVs, they’ll realize how much (or how little) they drive every day, and get used to plugging in a car. So when they replace that car in a few years, they won’t be shopping entirely on maximum range or the biggest battery, but rather on efficiency and budget. Which means they’ll buy another EV. This is an excellent “butts in seats” promotion, and kudos to the dealership doing it to put in the legwork to find a bunch of cars so they’d have them to sell at this price.

It’s absolutely madness we’re about to head into a new administration that is going to strip these incentives away from people who are looking for, or need, a new car. Cheap cars just don’t exist anymore, and the price of used cars also continues to rise. Instead of deporting citizens or trying to annex Canada, let’s actually work to help people and better the lives of Americans.

Also, I need to move to Colorado.

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How Elon Will Yield His Power

We all know that Elon Musk is working closely with Donald Trump ahead of Trump’s return to office on January 20th as the 47th President of the United States. I’ve talked about the effects of this on the automotive industry at length on these pages, but with so much happening that discussion will likely continue as a staple of this and many other automotive publications.