Featured Gov. Greg Abbott signs electric vehicle fee into law

how often do you have to renew?

 

Pandering to the base in a state with a huge EV plant. And the amounts don't make economic sense. 20k miles a year at 20 MPG yields $200 gas tax at 20 cents/gal. I doubt most even Texans drive that much. So why the $400 except to help the dealers in ICE cars lobby.

Tell me again why Elon choose Texas? Its so his business model friendly.

 

because he agrees politically with abbott, and everything is cheaper than california

 

Every time you get in the car or the car won't start... Or at least that's what the Texas oil baron's are hoping for...

 

Why Tesla Is Moving to Texas – Texas Monthly

"It’s also true that California companies have been flocking to Texas. The state’s low taxes, relatively affordable housing, tort reform climate, and ease of building have all contributed to the draw. Between January 2018 and June 2021, several dozen corporate headquarters relocated from the Golden State to the Lone Star State, spanning the alphabet from software company Aatonomy to the firm Zoho. Other notable arrivals: Silicon Valley heavyweight Oracle and Pabst Brewing"

 

and he can migrate back and forth from tesla to space x

 

Hey, they already have the follow-on act ready.

They want to eliminate the annual safety inspections but keep charging the fees.

And I'll bet dollars to donuts that the fee needs to go up, 'to cover enforcement' or something.

 

California also didn't give Musk exceptions to COVID restrictions.

 

yearly. we pay less for anual inspections than cars with engines because we just have a safety inspection. I think this will raise my registration fee a little less than $150 (I think its around $80 now but that includes local fees).

THere are 2 billionaire car dealers that have contributed greatly to this. So yes it is the ice dealership lobby to put this in.

Even with the registration increase a tesla has much lower fees than california, and electricity is less expensive here and easy to add renewably. Tesla kept its california plant. Toyota did not like it in california. Abbot hates austin and the plants in austin, still I doubt with the federal tax credits the higher registration fees. The dealer lobby has it so if someone in austin buys a tesla, they have to truck it out of state then bring it back to sell it.

 

Sounds a lot like the Wright Amendment.

 

Not entirely true that Toyota didn't like California.

I had the pleasure of working at the Fremont California Plant as an advisor from the Toyota Kentucky plant.
A bit of a history lesson - the Fremont plant was a joint venture between GM and Toyota as Toyota intervened to save GM's bacon and keep the Plant open. To do this Toyota had to win concessions from GM to help change the Culture and Morale of this terribly run UAW Plant. Toyota was successful and changed the entire Culture and Morale of the Plant and made it profitably and produced quality cars.
The Plants new positive culture and concessions to make it operate sensibly and profitably were an embarrassment to the UAW and eventually GM. GM withdrew from the joint agreement and left its UAW members high and dry. Toyota again intervened and actually kept the Plant operational for quite some time making a profit and producing great cars. Eventually it did close with Toyota offering the California employees opportunities to transfer elsewhere and keep their jobs. I enjoyed working there but the Union influence and Morale were indeed deplorable. Toyota did a great job of rectifying this but in an occupational climate like California there is only so much you can do. The Californians I had the pleasure to work with were just great and wonderful people.

Toyota's payoff for this was a real-life introduction to the American Automotive Manufacturing Workplace and lessons learned there could be applied to their new American Plants to avoid the nightmare pitfalls of the Big 3 and UAW workplace dysfunction.

To tie this in with the rest of the thread Toyota also now has its US Headquarters and a very large Manufacturing Plant in Texas.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

GM had gone into bankruptcy, and cancelled Pontiac. The Vibe was the only model of theirs being being built at the factory. This lead to them leaving the joint venture. Toyota announced they were going to close the plant a couple months after GM ended the partnership.
GM ends 25-yr-old joint venture with Toyota to build cars, trucks at Calif. plant - Los Angeles Times
Toyota closing Fremont Nummi plant

 

Tesla Fremont Factory Tells a Tale of Changing Fortunes – Autowise

"But Fremont Assembly was a turbulent place. GM was departmentalized between design and manufacturing, with scant communication between the two. Plant supervisors put quantity before quality and developed an antagonistic relationship with workers. By the early 1980s, some Fremont employees were drunk or stoned on the job, while absenteeism was rampant.

“It was considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States,” recalled Bruce Lee, who ran United Auto Workers’ western region at the time, speaking on This American Life in 2015. “They spent more time on grievances … than they did on producing cars.”"

"Unsurprisingly, General Motors closed Fremont Assembly in 1982. But the plant survived after Toyota came on board in a joint venture with GM to refurbish and radically reform it as New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) in 1984.

For GM, NUMMI was a crucial opportunity to gain access to quality small cars and to absorb the vaunted and super-lean Toyota Production System and Toyota Way manufacturing and management philosophies. For Toyota, NUMMI was its first manufacturing foothold in North America and enabled it to avoid tariffs on imported vehicles. Ironically, considering the notoriously dysfunctional labor relations at Fremont Assembly, Toyota also thought that GM could help it navigate a unionized American workforce.



Toyota’s reforms were as much about people and practices as about technology and techniques. Eighty-five percent of NUMMI’s initial workforce were former Fremont Assembly workers. But Toyota insisted on wide-ranging changes, including abandoning the plant’s traditional seniority rules. They flew in 30 senior staff from Japan, including one of the company’s founding families."

Why would you quote Wiki when you have someone giving you a first hand experience- what a strange response and abstract reaction!

No wonder people are deciding to leave the forum.

 

Seems like a sad tale. Unions are crucially important to a well-balanced economy, IMO. But when they go bad, it's worse than not having one at all.

 

Toyota USA headquarters moved from California to Texas.

Bob Wilson

 

Small point, but I think you mean "Wikipedia" here. "Wiki" is generic. There are thousands of wikis. PriusChat has one. Many organizations of any size will have a bunch. Software projects often have wikis. Every project on GitHub gets a wiki (not every project will use its wiki for anything).

Out of the thousands of wikis in the world, the one that is Wikipedia has a name, which is Wikipedia.

 

Never visited a plant in that region, but I've posted before about what it was like in Michigan in the late '80s / early '90s when my job took me into car plants. Compared to the other car makers whose plants I set foot in, GM always seemed to have a knack for rotten labor/management relations, and you could feel the ugliness on walking into the plant, like it was something in the air. Didn't seem specific to any one GM plant (but I'm sure some could be worse than others).

 

Sure is entertaining watching the moral integrity/future prosperity of Florida & Texas & Montana circling the drain and bringing about their own hateful demise on a daily basis in the news. It won't be much longer before these loser states are symbols of how many decades your economy & leadership can be set back when you get taken over by one-trick pony politicians who's only solution to every problem is to get people to hate each other more.

Meanwhile, you still can't by a Tesla in Texas: https://texasview.org/why-you-cant-buy-a-tesla-in-texas/

 

What you quoted was mostly in the link I posted. I should have been clearer, but was responded to this, "...GM withdrew from the joint agreement and left its UAW members high and dry. Toyota again intervened and actually kept the Plant operational for quite some time making a profit and producing great cars..." I don't count announcing the plan to close the plant a couple months, then to run it for maybe a year, after GM called it quits, 'quite some time'.

Since GM did try to implement what they learned from Toyota in US plants, and did so in their Brazil ones. I don't think they saw it as an embarrassment. As I stated, their leaving the venture was precipitated by the fact they were going into bankruptcy, and had already closed Pontiac. They likely weren't in a position to launch a new rebadged Toyota model to make up for the loss of the Vibe.

I'll shorten Wikipedia to The Wiki. Likely picked it up from elsewhere; maybe TV Tropes. Which is a wiki of, well, tropes.
Tropes - TV Tropes