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Forget the vehicle side, although I could say something about general unappealing design for my taste and the high price. As long as I do not have a charging solution at home because I live in an apartment and the workplace having just 1~2 spots for charging which is not viable, it seems I cannot jump to EV's even if the price and everything is right. I will certainly consider a FHEV or a very efficient ICE though.

Love how it started and got resolved. On an unrelated note, the pre-collision assist cannot be disabled except for the commercial trucks or so.

It requires communication, collaboration, and likely spending a bit more than you would like which are all.. uh, not easy.

It never helped that the Co-pilot wasn't coined until 2018 when the features like LKAS, BLIS, AEB, etc. were already there for years. There were just as vague names like 'Luxury Driver Assist Package' and 'SE Technology Package' and I remember folks were saying introducing the Co-Pilot terminology will finally clean things up.. yeah. The engineers who are involved in ADAS are mostly working on the future tech and couldn't care less about the naming/bundling of the existing features introduced years ago, so it's actually best to find someone in the marketing side. There is a completely different internal naming & bundling sequence of the future ADAS package which a number of engineers would know, but by the time it gets translated to Co-Pilot whatever for the customer, the translation is critically lost. At this point I would recommend for those who look for the better value, go for the Lincolns, especially for Escape vs. Corsair. The amount of de-content is so much for the Escape to the point that it is not worth the $10k~$20k save when the car does feels no better than a cardboard box and a tin can, and personally, awful audio system compared to the yesteryears.

Believe me, I was in one of the several hundred meetings to get to this point and the framing was truly cringeworthy -- 'finding ways to be cost-competitive while maintaining or improving customer experience', etc. If things were that easy and unnoticeable, then those are already done, and honestly the amount of time and effort to debate and design a new part that does less is probably equal value to just keeping the feature. You will see other deletions like global open & close feature where engineers spent the time to notice that people will use the global open, but not too much global close, so we will delete the global close. A similar conclusion was made for rear door handle that the usage isn't as much as the front, so it's out. Each vehicle/program team is basically a separate company, almost to the point there is no point of having a common platform because each vehicle team will excessively customize the design for their needs and make it unusable for other programs.

I had to generate this meme:

Kinda amazing how EVgo can somehow be worse than EA.

One thing I can respect about Tesla is their Supercharger network and may be well-prepared from competition despite some questionable vehicle attributes and quality. The Electrify America and Chargepoint chargers can be a pain in the butt to get started, certainly much more cumbersome than Supercharger's plug-and-go, and seems to have increasing number of stations that are broken with no particular motivation or incentive to repair them. For the Supercharger, since it is directly owned by Tesla, having broken stations are directly tied to their brand reputation which seems to be enough motivation for proper maintenance. The easy and most effective solution would be more competition similar to gas stations today (i.e. if one gas station has half of their broken gas pumps, then you go to another one), and another reason that electric vehicles still have some ways to go before becoming mainstream.

One could argue Ford is getting there for some vehicles..

Of course it would be too simple to have a single PHEV engine displacement offering. Sounds like the lower tax bracket might be just enough to offset the extra R&D cost, so yay?

Great in theory. Virtually impossible in reality, at least in the world of Ford. An example would be an engineer who didn't communicate with other fellow engineers and refused to account for the latest parameter changes for whatever future vehicle. A couple of years pass by and when the prototypes come in, the person realizes there are so many mismatches. The person will hustle up all the other folks, remind them they have an emergency, and make other people essentially fix up his mistake(s). Let's also say there was another engineer doing the same job for another vehicle, but that person was diligent and communicative and got through the entire product development without any major drama. In this case, it would only make sense to give the former engineer a 'C' grade or whatever form of accountability, but often times the reality is that person actually gets some award for taking actions to meet the target and the latter folks are more or less unrecognized -- It's a classic case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease and there is no God-like overseer to indicate that this person is the weak link of the team or whatever justice system.

Unfortunately that's business for you sometimes. I mean, considering there is a certain automaker that sells a so-called Full Self Driving feature when it's just a Level 2 driver assist, there are a lot of fingers to point out ranging from the automaker doing something unethical to the silly customers who don't look into any further, etc. People have died from overestimating the capability of the feature and the company is happy to state that it is just an assist and the driver should've been paying attention so they only have themselves to blame, and this is still happening.

There is a funny/maybe not funny story from the previous C1 platform as Focus/C-Max was the first application, and Ford decided to cut corners and make the HVAC system just enough for those two vehicles. When the Escape launched next year, the HVAC system didn't meet the performance requirement and had to design and engineer again which somewhat defies the point of having a global platform. Even for the current Mach-E, the so-called GE1 platform underneath is a modified C2 platform which doesn't sound ideal as it that didn't seem to have battery vehicles in mind, and it's quickly moving on to the larger GE2 platform for the next line of electric vehicles which puts the GE1 in a similar situation as CD6.

This costs money though. /s But yes, it could start with leadership who have an interest in long-term vision and fundamentally a culture problem.

You need someone to develop the next line of cars lol. The bad apples might be out, but when the folks who carried the team/workload are also out, then it becomes an awkward situation to say the least for those still remaining.