CAFE Standard is History - Will the PowerBoost be cancelled

[MLH]

Can you predict the future?

Sure Democrats.
I’m not a Democrat or Republican but I will predict this. I’ve been around the block for almost 80 years.

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[Chris GTO TT]

Think about that for a minute. The guy came to this country from Africa with nothing and became the richest man in the world. He has the most successful electric car company with technology 10 years ahead of every other electric car company making an electric car right now. He owns and participates in SpaceX which is the most successful privately owned space rocket company in the world.

Lets summarize his engineering impressive achievements from #1 through #10, judged by technical difficulty, scale of impact, real-world results, and how directly his engineering leadership drove the outcome.

1. Reusable orbital-class rocket (Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy) – SpaceX.
- First stage landing and re-flight (2015–present)
- Over 400 successful booster landings, ~350 re-flown boosters
- Cut launch cost from ~$400M (legacy expendable) to ~$30–40M internal cost for Falcon 9
- Enabled Starlink constellation and made SpaceX the world’s most active launch provider by far.

2. Mass production of long-range, affordable electric vehicles (Model 3 / Model Y) – Tesla.
- Model 3/Y became the best-selling premium sedan and best-selling vehicle (any powertrain) globally in 2023–2025
- 4680 structural battery pack + gigacasting reduced manufacturing cost and complexity
- Over 7 million cumulative Model 3/Y produced by late 2025.

3. Starlink global satellite internet constellation – SpaceX.
- ~7,000+ LEO satellites launched (largest constellation ever)
- Laser inter-satellite links (v2) achieving ~100 Gbps per satellite
- Serving >5 million customers, profitable, and providing broadband in remote/antartic/arctic regions and Ukraine battlefield.

4. Full re-usability architecture with rapid turnaround (Starship system).
- First full-stack orbital test flight success (IFT-4, June 2024)
- First booster catch with “chopstick” arms (IFT-5, October 2024; IFT-6, November 2025)
- On track for <24-hour re-flight cadence; projected cost <$10M per 150-ton-to-orbit launch.

5. Autopilot / Full Self-Driving hardware-software stack (Tesla).
- First production car with custom neural-net chip (HW3 2019 → HW4 2023 → AI5 2025)
- Trained on >50 billion real-world miles; end-to-end neural networks (v12–v13)
- Robotaxi unveiling (October 2024) and unsupervised FSD rollout in multiple U.S. states and China by 2025.

6. Vertical integration of battery supply chain (Tesla).
- Co-developed 2170 and 4680 cells with Panasonic and CATL
- Built multiple multi-GWh battery factories (Nevada, Texas, Shanghai, Berlin)
- Drove lithium-ion pack cost from ~$350/kWh (2014) to ~$80–90/kWh (2025).

7. The Boring Company’s Vegas Loop (practical urban tunneling).
- Demonstrated 2–3× faster tunneling than traditional methods with Prufrock-3
- 5+ miles of operational tunnels under Las Vegas with 70+ stations by 2025.

8. Hyperloop concept → catalyst for high-speed transport.
- 2013 white paper directly led to Virgin Hyperloop, Hardt, Swisspod, etc.
- While Elon never built it himself, the open-source concept accelerated the entire industry.

9. high-bandwidth brain-machine interface.
- First fully wireless, 1,024+ channel human implants (2024–2025n).
- Demonstrated cursor control, gaming, and speech decoding in multiple patients.

10. PayPal (X.com) early online banking & payment system.
- While not “hard” engineering by today’s standards, merging X.com with Confinity and scaling PayPal to millions of users in 1999–2001 was a major software-engineering success at the time.

Clear top tier (undisputed world-firsts)
1. Reusable orbital rockets
2. Mass-market long-range EVs
3. Starlink constellation

Everything else is impressive, but those three fundamentally changed their industries and would not have happened (or would have taken decades longer) without Elon’s direct, hands-on engineering leadership.

So I’m sorry to pick on the internet guy who thinks Elon has poor engineering skills but I guess anyone with a half decent brain already knows these things and I don’t really need to list them and therefore call you out, but just in case some lame brain is fooled by your short sighted statement then they are listed above.

Think about this for a minute Elon Musk is an illegal immigrant who used his daddy's Emerald Mine money to invent in a bunch of companies, and signed contracts in those companies so he could legally claim he invented all those things. He didn't invent or even come up with the ideas for any of those things. He's not an engineer he's a showman and promoter.

 

[JCsTruck]

Appreciate your passion, but let's stick to facts. Doing a deep dive into your answers and here they are addressed as a quick debunk for each one:

1. Illegal immigrant': Elon was born in South Africa but immigrated legally to Canada (via his Canadian mom) at 17 in 1989, then to the US on a student visa in 1992 for UPenn. He got his green card via H-1B (for 'exceptional ability') and naturalized as a US citizen in 2002. No 'illegal' anything—it's been a 'gray area' he openly discussed, but fully above board. (Source: Walter Isaacson's 2023 bio; Politifact/CNN fact-checks.)

2. Daddy's emerald mine money: Total myth. His dad Errol traded in emeralds (bought a stake in a Zambian deal once, never owned a mine), but it wasn't some apartheid fortune. Elon arrived in Canada with $2,000 from his mom and $2,000 from his dad, lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and worked odd jobs. The family wasn't wealthy; Elon's been funding his dad for 20+ years. He even offered 1M Dogecoin for proof of the 'mine' myth. (Sources: Isaacson bio; Snopes/Business Insider fact-checks; Maye Musk's own statements.)

3. 'Signed contracts to claim he invented things': Laughable. Elon co-founded Zip2 (sold for $307M, his share funded X.com/PayPal) and was the lead engineer on the founding teams of SpaceX and Tesla. He dives into the weeds—sleeps on factory floors, rewrites code, designs hardware. No shady contracts; that's just how startups work with equity.

4. Didn't invent or come up with ideas': He didn't 'invent' the wheel, but he built the first reusable orbital rocket (Falcon 9), scaled mass-market EVs (Model 3/Y), and launched Starlink (7K+ satellites). Those weren't off-the-shelf ideas—he iterated them from scratch against all odds.

5. Not an engineer, just a showman': BS degrees in physics (BA) and economics (BS) from UPenn; dropped Stanford PhD in applied physics after 2 days to start Zip2. He's chief engineer at SpaceX/Tesla, holds honorary engineering doctorates (Yale, IEEE), and leads teams that solve real physics/engineering problems daily. Showmen don't land rockets or build Gigafactories.

Fact, Elon's a self-made immigrant success story who bootstrapped from nothing.

🫵

 

[FirstTimeFord]

Appreciate your passion, but let's stick to facts. Doing a deep dive into your answers and here they are addressed as a quick debunk for each one:

1. Illegal immigrant': Elon was born in South Africa but immigrated legally to Canada (via his Canadian mom) at 17 in 1989, then to the US on a student visa in 1992 for UPenn. He got his green card via H-1B (for 'exceptional ability') and naturalized as a US citizen in 2002. No 'illegal' anything—it's been a 'gray area' he openly discussed, but fully above board. (Source: Walter Isaacson's 2023 bio; Politifact/CNN fact-checks.)

2. Daddy's emerald mine money: Total myth. His dad Errol traded in emeralds (bought a stake in a Zambian deal once, never owned a mine), but it wasn't some apartheid fortune. Elon arrived in Canada with $2,000 from his mom and $2,000 from his dad, lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and worked odd jobs. The family wasn't wealthy; Elon's been funding his dad for 20+ years. He even offered 1M Dogecoin for proof of the 'mine' myth. (Sources: Isaacson bio; Snopes/Business Insider fact-checks; Maye Musk's own statements.)

3. 'Signed contracts to claim he invented things': Laughable. Elon co-founded Zip2 (sold for $307M, his share funded X.com/PayPal) and was the lead engineer on the founding teams of SpaceX and Tesla. He dives into the weeds—sleeps on factory floors, rewrites code, designs hardware. No shady contracts; that's just how startups work with equity.

4. Didn't invent or come up with ideas': He didn't 'invent' the wheel, but he built the first reusable orbital rocket (Falcon 9), scaled mass-market EVs (Model 3/Y), and launched Starlink (7K+ satellites). Those weren't off-the-shelf ideas—he iterated them from scratch against all odds.

5. Not an engineer, just a showman': BS degrees in physics (BA) and economics (BS) from UPenn; dropped Stanford PhD in applied physics after 2 days to start Zip2. He's chief engineer at SpaceX/Tesla, holds honorary engineering doctorates (Yale, IEEE), and leads teams that solve real physics/engineering problems daily. Showmen don't land rockets or build Gigafactories.

Fact, Elon's a self-made immigrant success story who bootstrapped from nothing.

🫵

 

[MuellerNautique]

From the data I know customer use of ADAS is polled fairly low across all OEs. A few drivers use lane centering/adaptive cruise a LOT, but most hardly if ever use it. I don't know what would force that to change.

I use both ACC and Lane Centering constantly. Here in Texas most of our roads are built to interstate standards and generally have consistent markings, so those features are quite reliable. I drive over 100miles a day for work and 99% of it with adaptive cruise enabled and my longest commute stretches are BlueCruise enabled. I’m 25 years old and my job requires a truck, so I’m pretty much the target demographic for those features from Ford. I always say the truck drives better than I do.

My girlfriend (younger than me) cannot fathom I spent this much on a truck to not actually “drive it” and I have several clients in the 50-60+ age range who are like “I turn all of that crap off” and so there’s certainly a very specific demographic that likes these features. My father is 57 and likes adaptive cruise, but doesn’t keep those other features on. My mom doesn’t like any of them. All very interesting.

 

[XLT22]

As expected this is going in front of a Federal judge next week. So we'll see if a preliminary injunction is issued or not. This is why automakers aren't going to jump at a change they all know is on shaky ground.

As if a great cosmic irony came down, the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case decided recently that reverted the previous Chevron decision may be a thorn in the side of these new standards. I've skimmed over the filing and it looks like the questions being brought up invoke deference. Specifically NHTSA should be entitled to no deference in their attempt to retroactively amend the standards. Because of the longstanding nature of the previous standards, at issue is whether what has been proposed even qualifies as an amendment.

Additionally, the governing statutes granting NHTSA this authority only allow standards to be set for not less than 1 and no more than 5 years. By attempting to retroactively set a new standard from 2022-2031, they're in clear violation of the plain language of the statue. Again, the agency is no longer granted deference post Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and the plain language of the statute is to apply. Which means on the surface the new standard is going to face an uphill battle. There are several other major issues I won't spend the time to highlight but deal with EVs and baseline calculations. NHTSA will have to explain why they've done a complete 180 on their legal interpretation that's been unchanged since the first Trump administration.

 

[Zippy]

California has their own standards. Who thinks they will abandoned them because Trump signed an executive order. Not going to happen.

Passed by Congress not executive order!

 

[Zippy]

All this California hate is always amusing to me.

If they were their own country, they have the 4th largest economy in the world, are net payer to the Fed Treasury (as opposed to many others) and have been in that class, for 10s of yrs. at least.

Must be doing something right.

A lot of things, actually.

The 4th largest economy as a state is over a Trillion dollars ind debt.

Must be doing something wrong.

A lot of things actually.

 

[Davexxxx]

The 4th largest economy as a state is over a Trillion dollars ind debt.

Must be doing something wrong.

A lot of things actually.

Debt without the context of GDP, is meaningless propaganda.

S&P rates their debt at AA-, Moodys at Aa2 and Fitch at AA.

 

[Zippy]

Debt without the context of GDP, is meaningless propaganda.

S&P rates their debt at AA-, Moodys at Aa2 and Fitch at AA.

The 4th largest economy in the world is meaningless propaganda.

 

[turbopilot]

The 4th largest economy in the world is meaningless propaganda.

California is in deep trouble. Their tax base is fleeing the state, particularly the really deep pockets who pay most of the tax. This is not sustainable.

I would like to see the same chart about migration for those who pay little or no tax.

 

[Zippy]

Don’t worry CAFE stands will be back in 3 years if they go away now.

California has their own standards. Who thinks they will abandoned them because Trump signed an executive order. Not going to happen.

All evidence to the contrary

 

[tomcaudell]

It’s my understanding that Government agencies can’t impose fees of fines now so if a new administration comes in Cafe standards will only be guidelines. Congress would have to pass laws to include fines. The power boost is one line I wish they would expand on as well. But it isn’t for everyone. For now a 5.0 works well for me.

 

[tomcaudell]

California is in deep trouble. Their tax base is fleeing the state, particularly the really deep pockets who pay most of the tax. This is not sustainable.

I would like to see the same chart about migration for those who pay little or no tax.

When I turn 62 “next year” I’ll be in that exit number from Ca. Insurance rates and taxes on everything are not sustainable after you retire. Besides it would be nice to live somewhere where you don’t have to wait 6 months to see a specialist.

 

[gadiedrick]

US auto sales YTD are about 9.5% EV, and about 13% hybrid. For F150s, Lightning sales are about 3% and Powerboost about 8%. I'd say hybrid is here to stay. That being said, Stop/Start should be removed entirely from all ICE engines IMO. A terrible idea from the START, FULL STOP!

AMEN !!!!!! on remove'n the stop/start on ICE but let me have the AUTO HOLD. That is such a convenient feature to have when drive'n in city traffic & deal'n with stop light after stop light.

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