This is a bit dramatic. There are plenty of sanely sized cars available, and its not like everyone yearns for them but is forced into a suburban. Last time I checked you could still buy a corolla, an H-RV, a leaf, crosstrek, civic, Prius, several minis, a Mazda 3, BMW 1, etc. If people literally just bought rav4s instead of giant SUVs the average vehicle size would be significantly smaller, even though the rest of world thinks those are huge too.
People that finance literally will pay less each month for the car. I don’t understand the semantics game here to avoid calling this a “discount”. If you pay less each month it’s ok to call it a discount. I’d argue neither scenario justifies a news story, but the Tesla demand cliff is trendy (justifiably so of course, fuck Nazis) so here we are.
You’re just playing semantics. Lots of customers finance cars. Before the “discount” they had to pay $X/month, now they pay $(X-discount)/month. They literally pay less each month because of the discounted, subsidized rates. It’s a discount for folks that finance through Tesla. I’m not sure why you think you’re the only person that understands the simple concept of interest here. You’ve just decided that the definition of discount only applies to MSRP arbitrarily. Is a point of sale tax credit not a discount either?
This is not the whole story because not every heating day is equally cold. I have a high end cold climate heat pump in Colorado (which works great btw). I use about 1/3 of my total annual heating energy in January, despite heating for >6 months of the year. I’ll use 10% of my annual energy budget for a long weekend if its -10F, and that’s all heat pump (I don’t even have backup strip heat). It would be 20% if i was using electric resistnace for those 4 days. Electric resistance is really not great, so folks really should get the best heat pumps they can that cover the coldest normal days. It’s fine to install strips as a true backup but you’re going to have some very high bills and high carbon if you’re using it 20-30 days/year. If its hydro/nuclear power you’ll still come ahead on carbon but that’s not the case everywhere.