Chery QQ Ice Cream goes on sale in China – a modern electric car for $4,600
Even before having been involved in a car accident two years ago, I have always been annoyed with the car industry, and looked on incredulously at the kind of racket that people are suckered into dealing with.  Buying a car is like being forced to consume a lifestyle brand, being the result of what amounts to light collusion from automakers to offer nothing else.  Since the accident, forced to have dealt with a process that I had been able to avoid up to that point by sticking with my past purchase and staving off the temptation for anything newer and shinier (which wasn&#x27;t really very tempting at all, given the status quo in the car industry), I have become only more convinced of the need for a reliable $5000 &quot;Costco car&quot;.  It&#x27;s a special source of despair knowing that low-income people get ensnared under the current regime that ends with them thinking that the the best option is to pour so much money into $10–20–30k cars that end up being junk, or else risk gambling on something in a lower price range.<p>Musk professes to have a mission of weaning it off its addiction to fossil fuels, but at Tesla&#x27;s luxury car prices for what are luxury products, it&#x27;s not going to make much of a dent, at least not very quickly.  The availability of a no-frills EV with reasonable (i.e. next to zero recurring) maintenance costs would almost certainly contribute more to humanity than all the work so far that&#x27;s gone into SpaceX and Tesla combined.