I had a loan like this one. Probably a plus loan. For a while the rates for plus loans eclipsed 8% and plus loans accrue interest while you are in school. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can take on 4 years of interest before you even start paying. Turns a $20k loan into a $30k loan before you even graduate. Plus loans recapitalize interest whenever they come out of deferral so you actually pay interest on the interest as well. So by the time you pay the loan off that is then $41k in total payments for what was originally a 20k loan
Do this 4 times for each year of undergrad and you’ll have 164000 in total loan payments over your lifetime.
Plus loans are a government backed scam to fuck over poor kids who can’t front the cash for what the federal aid program covers. My base grants were only ~40k over 4 years and my federal unsubsidized and subsidized loans only were ~24k over 4 years.
Meanwhile the prestigious university I was accepted to charged 24k per semester. So I had 64k of aid and low interest loans to pay a tuition of 192k. After my work study added an additional 20k/yr I was still short 48k and poof there the plus loans were to “help” me.
Waymo doesn’t give a shit if their cars are ugly and can cover them in dozens upon dozens of cameras and sensors. They’re not selling them to consumers who care about looks, they are renting them to riders who don’t want to die on the short trip. They also only operate in a small region of the country with limited weather conditions and frequently stop service when weather is bad.
Tesla is run by an idiot who insists that a pair of cameras and a single lidar sensor that they keep deciding to disable can somehow magically always work in all weather and lighting conditions and is selling to consumers who don’t want an ugly car and expect to be able to operate their purchase at all times
Different constraints leads to different levels of success