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Comment by lawlessone | Hacker News Reader

Conspiracy theories have completely turned on their heads in recent years.

If you went back 10-15 years everyone was talking about how electric cars are being suppressed.

Now similar people are talking about how electric cars part of some vast conspiracy to limit travel.. oddly most of the people posting this kind of stuff don't really travel at all.

Another is UFOs, conspiracy theorists used to mostly say they are real. Now you are as likely to find conspiracy theories that say UFOs are a conspiracy to unify humanity against an outside threat.

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It's unlikely to be the same people subscribing to both of those theories. And furthermore, many of the people who were saying that oil and car companies conspired to suppress electric cars probably still believe that. Quite frankly, GM's insistence that all EV1s be destroyed or permanently deactivated without lessees being given the option to buy their car stank to high heaven. Maybe it wasn't a nefarious conspiracy, but I can totally understand why reasonable people concluded it was.

It's popular to dismiss conspiracy theorists as reactionaries (re: lazide's comment), but here you have a case where the people who allege a conspiracy occurred were looking forward to something new and were allegedly stymied by a reactionary conspiracy.

>It's unlikely to be the same people subscribing to both of those theories.

You are mostly correct here with this, but I definitely know of the odd exceptions turned anti-green the moment green became fashionable. Perma contrarians that can't accept that anything from government could ever be done for a good reason.

In the case of the EV1 the conspiracy wasn't to get you to keep buying gas, it was to get you to keep paying for repairs. Tesla squared this circle by abusing copyright, patent, and trademark law to ban third-party repair so they could make the repair experience worse[0] and upsell you on new vehicles.

The thing about swivel-eyed loons[1] is that they can be right for the wrong reasons. You can reasonably suspect a conspiracy exists without necessarily knowing who the conspirators are.

[0] e.g. by locking out more intricate repairs that require more labor training cost but are way cheaper to do, thus shifting more repair costs onto the owner of the vehicle

[1] in the sense Cory Doctorow uses the term

> In the case of the EV1 the conspiracy [...] was to get you to keep paying for repairs.

Can you expand on that? GM claims they took those cars back because they didn't sell well and so GM couldn't/wouldn't commit to providing spare parts and repairs into the future. Lessees countered by offering to release GM from such obligations and handle the repairs themselves but GM refused that offer. But why? It's not as though they might have set a dangerous precedent by allowing EV1 lessees-turned-owners to repair their own cars, since buying out car leases and third party repairs were already normal aspects of the car industry. GM were fine with this generally but in this specific case they refused to allow it.

To me it seems like some GM executives hated having been required by California into making the EV1 in the first place and wanted to destroy all of the cars for some feeling of satisfaction and finality. Pure spite in other words. Maaybe GM were egged on by oil companies who wanted to crush the spirits of people who thought electric cars were viable, but the oil company angle doesn't really seem necessary to explain what happened, unless you believe GM wouldn't make a decision like this out of pure spite.

Not exacly spite, but I think it would do just fine with GM not wanting to have living daily reminders of EV feasibility rolling on the streets.

Both of those things can be true.

The Illuminati deep state WAS suppressing electric cars until their puppet Elon agreed to normalize the extremely connected and remotely controllable car.

This way, the bioweapon defense mode built into the Tesla can be remotely inverted to invite bioweapon agents into the car remotely incapacitating the ones who know too much.

/s, maybe.

Connected car features were becoming common independently of Tesla and EVs. They're a function of the year the car was built, not the drivetrain.

They’re generally reactionary related to the current state of the world (even the gov’t funded actual conspiracies!) so it would make sense if you look at it that way.

It’s rarely going to be something completely unrelated to what is in the news or on people’s minds.

What? 15 years ago was peak 9/11 / Holocaust denying era lol

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