They aren’t inherently bad, in fact, they are great in some specific ways (better fuel efficiency, smoother acceleration, reduced wear and tear on engine and so on. They work really well in tandem with hybrid cars and are great for small cars that primarily do daily commutes.
They are also a lot cheaper to put in new cars because they are relatively simple compared to a traditional automatic and turn something very expensive and hard to replace into something hypothetically cheap and easy to replace.
On the other hand- they aren’t very robust and do not hold up well in situations that produce high levels of mechanical stress - ie towing and aggressive driving.
Because they reduce production costs, and it’s tempting for manufacturers to use them inappropriately or put them in places where they aren’t easy to replace.
If I was buying a Corolla or equivalent I wouldn’t think twice about a CVT. But I wouldn’t want one in a truck, and putting CVTs in a hard to reach location and/or selling a bunch of cars with cvts to people with bad credit seems like a bad strategy.
The sad thing is that they aren’t *terrible* cars, notorious CVT issues notwithstanding. Going all-in on subprime and focusing on short-term profitability made them toxic to higher value customers.
So then what happens? We spend a few years to find out they are protected but not bound?
Seriously, in situations like this people have many options when it comes time to seek justice. Why on earth would they choose the law?
I didn’t. That’s one of the shocking realities of brand loyalty. Loyalty is very durable and brand loyal people are, by and large, willing to put up with injury. Isn’t that weird? And yet it plays out that way over and over, at individual and population level scales.
You can hurt them, over and over, and then the sun shines, and people forget.
Their economic status quo has been getting worse for five decades- that’s how brand loyalty works. It’s an elasticity killer. That’s literally how you measure the value of the brand: how much more loyal customers are willing to pay, just for the brand.
There are only a couple of things that can damage brand loyalty: insult, indifference, and incoherence.
What’s happening to the Republican Party right now is all three- they keep saying “we’re winning,” when they are losing, and they are speaking to their least loyal (ie most persuadable)customers in a way that ignores their concerns and tells them explicitly that their values don’t matter.
Democrats do that constantly of course, but at the moment, they aren’t in charge so they don’t have to defend themselves.
Yeah, but Harris really doesn’t have it. Not like Clinton or Bush II or Obama or Trump, anyway. Trump is horrible but he’s got authentic swag. That’s why he got along so well with Mamdani. Game recognizes game.
I think you and I see the behaviors of the voting public differently. You’re describing voters as semi-rational actors making a direct connection between the tangible impact of policy and the messaging around it. I don’t think that’s how this works right now.
I see the voting public as a market where about 85% of the buyers have near-total brand loyalty, and the ability to take and hold share among the remaining 15% is a function of wholistic marketing execution and discipline that is maintained through consistency across all four Ps: relevant Product, at the right Price, with the right Promotion, for the right People. A fractured party is going to struggle with any of that.
No. Young adult women win. That is the singular lesson of revolutions in western societies since the Renaissance: whoever has the preponderance of young women behind them will win. It’s not always for good- the grass roots of the Nazi movement, for example, was powered in many ways by the mothers of young children. But in a revolutionary moment a majority of young adult women will coalesce around the eventual winners. And that’s not what is happening here.
So what we are looking at right now is just a chaotic interim step. Towards what, I have no idea.